A Life Rewired — The Final Post (A Cheerful, Rambling Curtain Call)

If 2025 has taught us anything, it’s that the universe has a dark and often twisted sense of humour. Every time we tried to do something sensible the world leaned in, winked wickedly and said, “I don’t think so”.

This was the year where the heatwave records were raised - again; where the global economy had a nervous breakdown; and where wars continue to kick off with the same predictability as a Christmas Monopoly full-scale domestic incident.

Thankfully, social media didn’t let us down. It became even more unbearable, which is exactly the sort of consistency you can set your watch by.

In other words: a perfectly normal year in the modern age.

It was also the year humanity proved, once again, that we are spectacular at worrying about the wrong things.

We worried about global conspiracies, yet we keep trusting the same buffoons who swore Brexit would be glorious — the sort of claim normally made by a man whose brain is rented out to village idiots for training purposes.

We worried about the doom of civilisation, then spent October arguing whether mince pies should be allowed on shelves before Halloween. (A debate, I might add, more vicious than most elections.)

And yet — in the middle of the drama, the weather tantrums, the political slapstick, and the endless scroll of “Breaking News” that rarely broke anything — life carried on. Humanity did what humanity always does: panicked, adapted, and put the kettle on.

And somewhere in there, A Life Rewired kept bumbling along — tapping out essays, stories, travel oddities, and the occasional philosophical detour that I swear made sense when I started typing.

This little corner of the internet became, unintentionally, a diary of wandering thoughts: pieces about travel, fitness, absurd conversations with strangers, cinematic views from windswept cliffs, and the deeply heroic act of trying to improve one’s life while regularly losing the battle with our own sanity.

I formed the basis for many of these posts perched in airports, others while trying to remember if I’d turned the oven off, and one or two after promising myself I’d “just jot down a quick idea” at midnight. (A lie I intend to continue telling myself for years.)

But the magic — the real magic — came from you.
Some of you wrote to say a blog got you through a rough day whilst others said a post made you laugh inappropriately in a meeting. And some of you simply read in silence, which is still the greatest compliment a writer can receive in a world where silence is in such short supply.

To every single person who reached out, shared a post, recommended it to a friend, or simply showed up to read my ramblings… thank you. You turned what could have been a one-man monologue into a small, kind, ridiculous conversation.

Now, as the year closes, so does this chapter. This will be the last full A Life Rewired post. Not because I’ve run out of words — if anything, I’m in danger of causing a national shortage — but because all things deserve an ending before they turn into a burden or a dusty, echoing hallway of old drafts and yes, I still have a handful of drafts that will now no longer see the light of day.

The website will stay alive for a little while longer. Think of it like a pub that’s stopped serving but hasn’t yet turned the lights off: you’re welcome to wander in, reminisce, and reread anything that once made you laugh, think, or sigh heavily at our collective questionable life choices. I won’t keep it forever though.

If these pieces have been entertaining and helpful in equal measure — or even entertaining despite my attempts to be helpful — then I consider the journey to have been a small triumph.

Why close now? A few reasons, none of them grand. The world has shifted; work and life pulled in different directions; frankly, I want to finish the writing project I’ve been pushing myself for the past three years. But mostly I want to leave while the thing still feels like it belongs to a living person rather than a maintenance contract. The internet is generous but insistent; closing A Life Rewired properly feels like a tidy act of courtesy to the readers and to the work itself.

So, what do I want you to take from all of this? Three tiny things. One: keep being curious. Curiosity is cheap and yields wonderful returns. Two: be kind to your future self — make small decisions now that future-you will thank you for. And three: laugh a lot; it’s hard to feel triumphant about a life that takes itself too seriously.

And so, here we are at the last section of the last blog.
A moment of stillness before the curtain drops.

Thank you for walking through 2025 with me.
Thank you for reading these inane ramblings and treating them like something worth your time.
Thank you for letting A Life Rewired be, for a little while, part of your world.

May you all enjoy a healthy and happy Christmas and New Year and that 2026 treats you all better than 2025 ever could.

And may you always find a reason — however small, however odd — to keep rewiring your life in the best possible direction.

With humour, gratitude, and a slightly emotional coffee in hand,
Barry — A Life Rewired

A World Worth Meeting: Why Curiosity Beats Fear

There was a time — and it doesn’t feel that long ago — when travelling somewhere new felt like unwrapping a present. You never knew what you’d get. Sometimes it was breathtaking scenery. Sometimes it was food that tasted like someone had boiled a sock. Sometimes it was a taxi driver who insisted you needed to visit his cousin’s shop “just for looking,” and before you knew it you were buying something that you neither needed nor would fit in your luggage but would look good on your coffee table.

But always — always — it was an adventure.

And the best part? The people.
Not “people” as a slogan. Not “the public” as politicians like to say when they’ve never actually met one. I mean real people — the ones you bump into on trains and in markets. The ones who laugh at your pronunciation and then secretly admire your courage for trying.

Travelling taught me something simple and quietly powerful:

The world is full of people who are just like us.

It didn’t matter where I went — Taiwan, Italy, Spain, America, back to Scotland to argue over how rain should be categorised — people were people. They wanted the same things I did: a decent meal, a life that didn’t feel like a permanent struggle, a bit of dignity, and maybe a lottery win if the universe was feeling generous.

But it feels like we’ve forgotten all that.

Somewhere along the line — while we were busy working, worrying about bills, shouting at slow broadband, and waiting for politicians to do something other than argue on TV — a new theory arrived:

“The world is full of enemies and getting worse by the minute.”

Which is odd, because I’ve met the world.
It’s lovely, you must keep your wits about you yes, but lovely.

Now, fear didn’t just wander in on its own.
It was invited.
And not by us — we were too busy living our lives.

No, fear was ushered in by people with a business plan and it works like this:

1. Take a population that’s fed up.
   Towns left behind, industries changing or dying, wages not keeping up, communities exhausted.

2. Identify their frustrations.
   This bit is easy: just walk through any British high street and count the number of “closing down” signs.

3. Tell them who to blame.
   Pick a target. Don’t worry if it makes sense — fear isn’t fussy.

4. Offer yourself as the solution.
   With flags. And shouting. And promises so big they could only ever be printed on banners.

It’s not a new trick.
It’s the oldest one there is.
It worked for demagogues in the 1930s, it worked for Trump, it worked for Reform for a while — and it works now because people are not stupid… they’re angry, tired, and feeling ignored.

And honestly? I don’t blame them.

If you’ve ever nodded along to Farage because at least, he sounds like he understands you, or if you once cheered when Trump said something outrageous just because it shook the room — you’re not an extremist. You’re not a monster.

You’re human.

You’re someone who’s been promised for 20 years that things would get better… and watched them get worse.

You’ve been told “global Britain” would be thriving while your town centre hasn’t seen a fresh coat of paint since Woolworths ran a two for one deal.

You’ve been lectured by people who have never set foot in your postcode.

And you’ve watched government after government throw your concerns in the “too difficult” drawer.

Fear filled that gap because nothing else was being offered.

But here’s the part the fear merchants hope you never discover:

The world is not actually terrifying.
It’s just noisy.

And much of that noise is deliberate.

When you travel — properly travel — you learn that foreign cultures are not threats. They’re just other versions of the same human mess we’re all trying to navigate.

You meet families who want their kids to be safe.
You meet shopkeepers who work themselves into the ground.
You meet taxi drivers who have strong opinions about football, even if they only know two English words, “Liverpool” and “no”.
You meet people who offer you tea when they have nothing else.

Nobody tells you in these moments:
“You should be scared of these people.”
Because it makes no sense.

You’re too busy laughing with them.

Fear hates first-hand experience, it feeds on ignorance

Fear thrives when you stay home.
Fear thrives when you only know the world through headlines.
Fear thrives when people scream at each other on social media.

But take a step outside — even just one step — and you see how flimsy it all is.

While waiting to climb Kilimanjaro, our mountain leader and guide — a quietly authoritative fellow called Bruce (George really but I never understood why the two names?) — pulled me away from the group and, to my alarm, drove us away from everyone. For what seemed an eternity but was only probably 10 minutes - we drove.

My inner dramatist immediately drafted the story where I’d wandered into a cautionary travel essay. Instead, Bruce introduced me to his family, poured us steaming cups of tea, and announced, with the blandest confidence, that he would look after our group just as well as his family.

There I was, a stranger in a jacket that thought it was a sleeping bag, anxiously calculating escape routes — and instead I left with warm hugs, laughter, and the comforting knowledge that the person with the rope and the map had a heart the size of the mountain itself.

They were poor.
But they were kind.
They shared their time and trust with a total stranger.

On a business trip to Moscow, I learned that corridor mileage is the most alarming unit of measure. My hosts whisked me away through a labyrinth of doors and passageways — the kind of place that, in a film, would end with an ominous spotlight and an accordion playing.

My mind supplied a sequence about nail-pulling and interrogations so convincingly that I apologised to my shoes. Then, with the same casual deflation of a soufflé, we entered a modest office where stern faces turned into smiles and the “questioning” was an enthusiastic, slightly baffling conversation about offshore pipelay techniques over strong coffee.

It turned out the only thing they wanted to extract from me was engineering know-how — and possibly the secret recipe for British sarcasm.

That’s humanity.
Not the headlines.
Not the fear.

And absolutely nothing like the bogeymen we’re told to be terrified of.

The great thing about Brits is that we can laugh at absolutely anything — ourselves most of all.

We joke about rain.
We joke about queues.
We joke about sport — just don’t mention the cricket.

We are a sarcastic, warm, welcoming nation.

And humour is our greatest defence against anyone trying to turn us against each other.

It’s very hard to fear someone once you’ve shared a laugh.

So what do we do?

Not “revolution.”
Not “take up arms.”
Not “shout louder than the other side.”

Just this:

Stay curious.
Ask questions.
Meet people.
Challenge easy answers.
Don’t buy fear when you can buy a plane ticket.
Or even just a coffee with someone you disagree with.

Because here's the truth:

People who are scared are easier to control.
People who are curious are harder to fool.

Travel makes you curious.
Stories make you curious.
Friendship makes you curious.

Curiosity breaks the machine.

And here’s the hopeful part — the bit we all need

Despite everything — the noise, the anger, the shouting, the division — there is still a world out there full of good people waiting to meet you.

A world full of humour and kindness and odd little moments that change how you see everything.

A world where strangers become friends, and differences become interesting instead of frightening.

A world that reminds you — gently but firmly — that you are being lied to by people who profit from your fear.

A world worth defending.

A world worth seeing.

A world worth meeting.

So take the step.
Take the trip.
Take the chance.

Because once you’ve looked someone in the eye over a drink and a conversation — no politician, no party, no fear merchant on earth can convince you that they’re your enemy.

At the end of all this worrying and discovering that most people don’t, in fact, want to kidnap you for your fingernails, you realise our real treasure isn’t flags or borders or whatever slogans get sprayed onto buses. It’s our values — the simple, stubborn human ones we keep dragging with us no matter where we go. Kindness. Curiosity. Fairness.

The willingness to share a cup of tea on the side of a mountain or a strong coffee in a concrete maze. These are the things that tie us together, even when a few loud voices try to convince us the world is full of enemies. It isn’t. It’s full of people who, just like us, want to get through the day with a bit of dignity and maybe a laugh.

And that’s the bit worth protecting, nurturing, and passing on — because once you strip away the noise, that’s the stuff that keeps the lights on for humanity.

And that, my friend, is how hope wins.

“Spamageddon — or How I Learned to Stop Hanging Up and Start Performing” (A Love Letter to the Unsung Heroes of Pointless Conversations)

There comes a point in adult life when you realise that you are, in fact, on more international watchlists than Osama bin Laden’s dentist.

And there was a time — a simpler, more civilised era — when a ringing phone brought excitement. It might have been a friend. A job offer. A relative calling to tell you they’d finally learned how to program the VCR. But now, in our advanced age of digital despair, when the phone rings, the collective mood is one of suspicion, fatigue, and mild existential dread.

Because we all know who it is.

It’s not Mum. It’s not the doctor. It’s Dave from the Refund Department of Microsoft Technical Windows Amazon HMRC Broadband Solar Savings Ltd. And he’s calling because there has been some “suspicious activity” on your account.

He doesn’t specify which account. You’re meant to panic and fill in the blanks yourself. “Oh my God,” you think, “which account? The one I use for groceries, or the one I use to fund my secret llama farm in Surrey?”

I used to hang up. I used to say “no, thank you” in the tone of a man who still believed in civility. But then I hit fifty, discovered that hair grows faster in the ears than on the head, and realised that life is too short not to weaponise your madness.

So now, I play.

When they call, I answer with the enthusiasm of a man auditioning for Britain’s Got Tinnitus. I make up syndromes on the spot. “Ah yes,” I say, “thank you for calling, I’ve been expecting you. I’ve just been diagnosed with IHS — Itchy Hair Syndrome. Terrible thing. The follicles think they’re in a perpetual state of mild confusion, do you know that IHS affects one in every one household, and that there is no known cure? What department did you say you were from again? Medical research? Excellent, perhaps you can help me.”

There’s usually a pause then, a tiny electronic sigh as the scammer recalibrates their life choices. Sometimes they hang up. Sometimes they stay, out of morbid curiosity.

My finest hour came when a man claiming to be from “the Internet Security Team” told me that my computer had been compromised. I gasped, told him I was shocked, and then whispered, “Between you and me, it’s been very emotional for both of us.” He didn’t hang up, bless him. He wanted to know what I meant.

“Well,” I said, “the computer and I have been through a lot together. Long nights. Updates that went nowhere. You can’t just say it’s been compromised and expect me not to feel something.”

By the time I’d reached the part where the computer had left me for an iPad, he was gone.

But the best — the pièce de résistance — was the day I put one on hold. “Please hold,” I said in my most officious tone, “while I transfer you to the Suspicious Minds Department.” And then, with all the subtlety of a karaoke drunk uncle at a wedding, I began:

🎵 We’re caught in a trap… 🎵

I went full Elvis. Off-key. Overly dramatic. I threw in background harmonies that didn’t exist. I was halfway through the bridge when I realised my wife was standing watching, frozen between amusement and alarm.

The scammer? Stayed for the entire song. Didn’t say a word. Then, softly, “Sir, do you want to fix your account?”

“No,” I said, “I want to fix your soul.”

Click. Gone.

The joy, of course, isn’t just in the mischief. It’s in reclaiming your peace of mind — or at least, replacing mild annoyance with roaring laughter. Every time I serenade a scammer or discuss the fictional side effects of “Chronic Moist Sock Disorder,” I’m taking back a little control in an uncontrollable world.

And the best part? Everyone in earshot wins. Family, colleagues, neighbours — they’ve all learned that when my phone rings, it might not be a conversation. It might be performance art. My friend once spat coffee across the table when he heard me explaining to “Officer Steve from Interpol” that my alibi was airtight because I was busy knitting emotional support jumpers for goblins in Liechtenstein.

Sometimes I go the long route. When they ask how I’m doing, I tell them. In great detail. “Well, Raj, funny you should ask mate. The left knee’s playing up, the cat’s been passive-aggressive since Thursday, and I think my fridge is haunted. But apart from that, tremendous. How’s your mother?”

You’d be amazed how quickly they find another number to dial.

I’ve even started keeping score:

·       1 point for a hang-up in under 10 seconds (cowards).

·       3 points for staying through a song.

·       10 points if they apologise to me.

·       Bonus round: If they call back, I pretend to be my own receptionist. “Ah, you’ve reached Barry’s Personal Affairs Department — he’s currently in a meeting with a man about a haunted yoghurt. Can I take a message?”

Look, life is exhausting. Bills, bad news, traffic, the fact that Lurpak now costs more than gold. You can’t control much, but you can control how you deal with nonsense. These calls are a chance to turn the mundane into the magnificent. To rewrite the script.

Because deep down, the spammer and I are both performing. He’s pretending to be from the Microsoft Customer Services, and I’m pretending to be sane. It’s a level playing field, really.

And maybe that’s the point. A Life Rewired isn’t about perfection — it’s about seeing how far you can bend the absurdity of the world before it snaps. It’s about taking the small irritations that peck at your peace whilst turning them into theatre.

So, when the next call comes in, and the robot voice solemnly tells you your “National Insurance number has been suspended,” don’t hang up. Clear your throat. Channel your inner Elvis, or your inner Shakespearean madman, and deliver the performance of your life.

Because if you can make a scammer question their own life choices, my friend, you’ve truly rewired your day.

The Myth of the Sorted Adult

I used to believe that one day, way into the future, adulthood would simply arrive. Not like a birthday or a bank statement, but as an awakening — that moment when you’d step out of the shower and, instead of wondering where all the clean towels went, you’d suddenly know how mortgages worked, how to poach an egg properly, and how to stay calm when someone mentions “pension consolidation.” We imagine adulthood as a sort of calm plateau reached after years of climbing — a stage in life when everything finally stops wobbling.

I kept waiting for that day. It never came.

Because, as it turns out, the “sorted adult” — that mythical creature who glides through life with spreadsheets balanced, emotions catalogued, and a wardrobe arranged by season — doesn’t actually exist. They are as real as the Loch Ness Monster, except with poor posture and a direct debit for everything.

Every adult I’ve ever met, when gently prodded, eventually admits to some form of chaos. Some are quietly panicking about taxes. Others have entire drawers — plural — that exist solely to store miscellaneous cables. One friend of mine, who exudes an aura of managerial competence so strong it could lead a small nation, recently confessed that she once used a hairdryer to defrost a frozen chicken.

We are all, every single last one of us, improvising with the enthusiasm of a small child playing the violin for the very first time. They make it up as they go, hoping no one notices when they play the wrong note.

And yet, there’s something strangely comforting about this. The myth of the sorted adult suggests there’s a finish line — a final, polished version of ourselves that’s always just a few “life hacks” away. But the truth is gentler, and far more forgiving: nobody knows what they’re doing. Everyone’s learning, guessing, pretending, and trying again. Even the people who appear unflappably competent — your boss, your doctor, your friend with the colour-coded kitchen — have moments when they stare into the fridge and wonder why they came into the kitchen in the first place.

When I was younger, I thought adults had a secret manual — a thick, leather-bound tome with chapters like How to Understand Your Boiler and How to Answer the Door to Jehovah’s Witnesses. I now know that the manual doesn’t exist. What does exist is a collective conspiracy to look like we know what we’re doing while quietly Googling things like “what is APR” and “is it possible to microwave rice twice without dying.”

Some mornings, I wake up feeling like a responsible, functioning human being — I drink water, pay bills on time, even floss. Then other mornings, I find myself eating leftover pizza for breakfast and using my car keys to open a parcel because I’ve somehow lost all the scissors in the house. Both versions, I’ve learned, are equally valid.

The myth of the sorted adult thrives because we mistake other people’s highlight reels for their final film. We see the calm, filtered exterior and not the frantic rehearsal that happened just out of frame. Nobody posts photos of themselves at 2 a.m., scrubbing a casserole dish and questioning every decision that led to this point.

And yet — there’s something liberating in that. Once you realise that everyone is winging it, the pressure lifts. Life becomes less a performance and more a series of experiments with occasional successes. You stop comparing your behind-the-scenes to everyone else’s edited trailer. You start to find humour in the absurdity of it all — in the endless loop of “getting your life together,” only to watch it unravel again like badly wound Christmas lights.

I once spent half a day assembling a wardrobe from Argos that looked so simple in the manual it might as well have been designed for toddlers. Four hours later, the wardrobe was standing — technically — but with a suspicious lean, like it had recently survived a minor earthquake. I remember sitting on the floor, surrounded by leftover screws that definitely should have gone somewhere, and thinking, “Yes, this feels about right. This is adulthood.”

Because adulthood, it turns out, isn’t about mastery — it’s about persistence. It’s about knowing the Wi-Fi password, losing it, and then pretending you didn’t need the internet anyway. It’s about keeping a straight face while your washing machine makes noises that sound like a dying walrus. It’s about showing up, even when your socks don’t match and your grand plan for the week has already dissolved by Tuesday.

The “sorted” adult is a mirage — a distant figure who seems to glide effortlessly across the sands of competence while the rest of us trudge behind, dropping things. But the real adults, the ones I admire most, are those who’ve made peace with the chaos. They laugh at it. They work with it. They keep the wobble but find the rhythm.

If you ever feel like you’re the only one still trying to figure it all out — congratulations, you’re part of the majority. None of us are sorted. We’re all improvising, half-awake, and occasionally brilliant. Life isn’t a blueprint; it’s a rehearsal that somehow got indefinitely extended.

And maybe that’s the point. The myth says adulthood is about control. The truth says it’s about grace — about learning to laugh, to adapt, and to carry on playing your part even when the scenery falls over mid-scene.

So here’s to the gloriously unsorted — the ones who can’t fold fitted sheets, who sometimes cry in supermarkets, who make lists only to lose them, and who are doing their best anyway. You’re not behind; you’re human. And somewhere in the great, uncoordinated jumble of existence, we’re all just trying to stay roughly in tune.

So perhaps A Life Rewired is really about that — the great unwiring of the myth. The acceptance that life doesn’t come with neat compartments or tidy lessons, just moments of mild triumph scattered between bouts of confusion. Every journey I’ve taken, every project I’ve fumbled through, every new place I’ve landed in, has revealed the same truth: nobody truly knows what they’re doing, but most people are doing it anyway — and that’s what makes them remarkable.

Travel has a funny way of reminding you of this. In one country, you’ll watch someone fix an engine with a spoon and a smile, while back home you can’t even get the printer to cooperate without emotional support. It’s all relative. The further you go, the more you realise that “sorted” is just another word for “faking it gracefully.”

And that’s the heart of it — the rewiring. Learning that being human is not about perfection, but participation. To wake up, to try again, to laugh at the mess and move forward. Because in the end, life isn’t waiting for us to be sorted — it’s happening right now, gloriously, absurdly, and usually wearing odd socks.

The Very Important, Slightly Pathetic Art of Having a Life Rewired(Or: How to Avoid Doomscrolling by Reading Someone Else’s Existential Crisis Instead)

It all started with an innocent question from a friend.

“What exactly is A Life Rewired for?” they asked, with the same suspicion you might reserve for someone who claims to enjoy decaf coffee.

And that, is where it all unravelled. Because how do you explain that this blog is both a heartfelt experiment in self-improvement and a socially acceptable way of wasting time that doesn’t involve rage-commenting under a post about upside down Union Flag’s under the guise of patriotism?

So, I did what any sane person would do: I made something up.

I said, “It’s a blog that helps people reconnect with life, humour, and themselves.”

Which sounds noble until you realise it’s just me trying to save a few souls (me included) from the industrial-grade sewage pipe of modern distraction that is social media.

A Life Rewired, in essence, is your emergency exit from the algorithm. A digital decoy. A mischievous little patch of internet that distracts you from your distractions — like handing a toddler a shiny spoon while quietly removing the steak knife.

Let’s be honest: the average person’s thumb now has more mileage than a 1998 Toyota Corolla.

We scroll while eating. We scroll while walking. We scroll in bed, in meetings, and on the toilet — which, statistically, is the closest modern society comes to communal meditation.

We are all, at this point, one minor firmware update away from evolving an opposable USB-C port.

But we don’t stop. Because scrolling offers that sweet, sweet dopamine drizzle — like a slot machine, but instead of coins, you win photos of strangers’ brunches and videos of otters doing surprisingly emotional things.

The algorithm, of course, knows this. It has learned your weaknesses. It knows exactly when to send you a video of a dog wearing socks just to stop you from closing the app.

And so we stay there, paralysed in a hypnotic trance, hoping that this next swipe will finally reveal the meaning of life, or at least a relatable meme.

Spoiler: it never does.

That’s where A Life Rewired steps in.

A Life Rewired is not a productivity blog. If anything, it’s the anti-productivity blog — a sanctuary for those who have realised that “crushing it” is just burnout with better lighting.

It’s a corner of the internet that says, “You don’t need to optimise your morning routine. You just need to stop doomscrolling and laugh at yourself for a bit.”

It’s the digital equivalent of that friend who shows up uninvited with biscuits and gossip and somehow makes you feel both seen and slightly scolded.

Reading it doesn’t fix your life. It just pauses the chaos long enough for you to realise that your chaos is, in fact, hilariously universal.

You are not the only one who’s accidentally replied “Love you too” to a work email. You are not alone in pretending to read “important articles” when you’re Googling “Can you microwave a croissant?” You are part of a vast, chaotic, tea-drinking tribe of people trying very hard to hold it all together while forgetting where they put their glasses (which are, invariably, on their head).

That’s what A Life Rewired is for.

It’s eight minutes of comic therapy disguised as literature. A half-serious, half-sarcastic intervention for the perpetually distracted.

Think of it as your brain’s designated driver — the one that looks you in the eye and says, “Mate, put the phone down. You’ve liked the same reel three times.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking.
“But Barry, surely reading a blog is also screen time?”

Correct. You’ve spotted the paradox.

However — and this is where the intellectual acrobatics come in — reading this kind of nonsense is good screen time.

It’s like comparing a salad to a kebab. Technically they both involve chewing, but one will let you see your toes again by Christmas.

A Life Rewired doesn’t trap you in an algorithm. It just gives you a brief layover in wit before you re-enter the chaos slightly more self-aware — like Odysseus, if he’d taken a gap year and started a Substack.

Our unofficial motto is:

“You can’t delete social media, but you can at least make it jealous.”

Somewhere between the endless productivity hacks and the influencer morning routines (you know the ones — filmed at 5:45 a.m. by someone who’s probably already on their third smoothie and fourth divorce), we forgot how to simply notice life.

A Life Rewired is here to bring that back.

It’s about noticing the ridiculous little details — the way your kettle sounds like it’s trying to contact the afterlife, or how every Team’s meeting begins with that one person who still hasn’t forgets the unmute button consistently since 2020.

It’s a celebration of imperfection. Because frankly, nobody normal has their life together — we’re all just running elaborate cover stories.

One of life’s great myths is that everyone else is sorted.
They’re not. They’re watching YouTube for advice on “how to fold a fitted sheet” at midnight and calling it self-care.

Laughter, it turns out, is an underrated act of rebellion.

It’s how we short-circuit the nonsense. It’s how we momentarily rise above the noise of people yelling into their digital voids about how to be better humans while quietly losing the will to live.

When you laugh at the absurdity of it all — at yourself, your routines, your bad habits, your tragically misspelled text messages — you reclaim a little piece of your sanity.

A Life Rewired wants you to do exactly that.

It’s a warm handshake and a raised eyebrow in the middle of the modern circus. It’s a reminder that humour and humanity are, in fact, the same thing — both beautifully unfiltered and mildly inappropriate at times.

So, the next time someone asks you what A Life Rewired is for, tell them this:

It’s for everyone who’s ever tried to meditate but fell asleep.
It’s for those who think “digital detox” sounds like something your phone does automatically while you’re watching Strictly Come Dancing.
It’s for anyone who’s read six self-help books and still can’t find their charger.

It’s not about fixing yourself. It’s about laughing yourself back into perspective.

Because sometimes the only thing standing between you and a breakdown is a perfectly timed joke about how completely unqualified we all are to be adults.

If you’ve made it this far — congratulations. You’ve just gone ten full minutes without checking your notifications.

That’s more mindfulness than a thousand guided breathing apps combined.

So close this tab. Stretch. Make a cup of tea. Go outside and stare at something that isn’t backlit.

You’ve just successfully dodged the algorithm for a few glorious moments.

And that, my friend, is what A Life Rewired is for.

When the Two Minutes Leave Room: Remembrance, Small Rituals and the Strange Comfort of Ordinary Things

Remembrance marks a special time in the British calendar and psyche — less a festival than a household turning itself, briefly, toward a single point frozen in time. It arrives each year like an old friend who brings both comfort and complication: the poppies, the drums, the endless slow march of words that feel both necessary and inadequate in equal measure.

If one is fortunate enough to be in a place where memory has gathered rituals — wreaths, silence, bugles — then those small, repeated motions perform a soft miracle. They turn private ache into public architecture. They teach us how to collectively remember.

I have always liked the idea that a country can be humble at scale. Remembrance is the clearest example I know. There is nothing showy about it: people in overcoats, cleaned medals, a handful of damp bouquets, sometimes a schoolchild who has been given the honour of laying a wreath.

The dignity of it astonishes me. It’s made not of triumphant banners but of small, exact things — a two-minute silence observed in kitchens and at bus stops as readily as at cenotaphs; the way someone unconsciously holds themselves a little taller, a little straighter. The ritual is a grammar lesson in how to be human together.

When I think about remembrance, it’s never the battles that stay with me. I don’t picture the smoke or the strategy maps — those belong to history books and late-night documentaries narrated in baritone. What lingers instead are the quieter scenes that followed: the letters that arrived months too late, the children left trying to remember and rationalise beyond their young years, the small jokes told to stop the silence from swallowing everyone whole. That, to me, is the real landscape of remembrance — not marked by monuments, but by the stubborn business of carrying on.

There’s something beautifully unheroic about that kind of endurance. The neighbour who checks in on the widow down the street, the mother who still sets an extra place at the table because it feels wrong not to. Nobody films that, and nobody needs to. It’s not ceremony, it’s survival — the quiet, unfussy way that people patch up the edges of their world when history has torn a hole straight through it.

And maybe that’s what remembrance is about. Not just the act of pausing once a year, but the habit of noticing — of remembering the cost that ordinary people quietly paid so life could begin again. The brass bands and poppies are fine symbols, but they’re not the whole story. The real remembrance happens in kitchens, in gardens, in the long, slow return to laughter. It’s what tells us that, however much the world falls apart, compassion — that small, persistent flicker — will always be the thing that holds it together.

The British way of marking these moments — the red poppy’s humble insistence, the encounter between a bugler’s note and a winter street — teaches a valuable lesson about scale. Not every test of moral courage needs an anthem.

Sometimes courage is staying in the queue and letting the person in front go first or admitting you don’t know how to ask for help. Remembrance, properly practised, asks of us humility and attention. It asks us to notice.

In the weeks before Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day, memory often mixes with spectacle. There are television programmes that try to summarise everything into an hour, and parades that proceed with bright, military precision. Both have their place.

But the most authentic moments are quieter: the veteran at the local community centre who has proudly polished both medals and shoes alike, the child who plants a paper poppy and lingers to ask what it means. These micro-encounters carry more truth than any parade. They are where history touches skin.

Remembrance is not meant to be an exercise in nostalgia. The danger of the season is that we can allow the past to calcify into an unarguable sculpture. The dead were complicated people. They were cowardly and brave, kind and cruel, joyous and desperate.

To place them on a plinth risk lying to them. What remembrance asks, I believe, is that we honour sacrifice while refusing to romanticise senselessness. We can remember the bravery and still work ceaselessly to prevent the need for it.

There’s an odd, practical comfort in repeating rituals. We humans are ritual-prone creatures: our brains like the economy of habit. Standing in silence with others for two minutes is a communal exhale.

You feel a recalibration around that lapse of sound: footsteps soften, a bus idles with its engine ticking, a dog-owner halts and the dog tilts its head as if to ask why the world has suddenly paused. It is in that tiny pause that gratitude is given breath. It is an act of attention that says, We will not let these stories dissolve, we will remember them.

I sometimes think of remembrance as a form of civic housekeeping. You do it not because it tidies away the past, but because it stops the dust of old grief from settling into everything that follows.

The act of remembering is what keeps history from rewriting itself while our backs are turned. It reminds us that the past isn’t finished with us; it waits at the edge of things, ready to influence the choices we make and the people we become.

Remembrance, then, is less about nostalgia and more about maintenance — an ongoing effort to keep empathy in working order. And, like all good housekeeping, it’s often messy, occasionally awkward, and never quite finished, but strangely, that’s what makes it human.

Perhaps this is why we are drawn to symbols — small, tangible things that gather memory and meaning in one place. The poppy, at its heart, is a simple thing — a small red flower that bloomed out of the mud of Flanders and somehow came to hold the weight of an entire nation’s grief. It isn’t grand or triumphant, just quietly enduring.

There is, too, something faintly comic — and not in a good way — about watching political parties attempt to plant their own flag in the poppy field.

The poppy was never designed to be anyone’s logo. It belongs to everyone who has ever paused in that shared November silence, from the schoolchild with the paper cross to the pensioner with medals polished by memory. Yet every year, some party, or another tries to claim it as a banner of their particular virtue, waving it about as if remembrance were a private club with membership cards.

It’s a kind of moral land-grab dressed in patriotic tweed. The truth, of course, is simpler and kinder: the poppy is not yours or mine or theirs — it’s ours, and its power lies precisely in that shared ownership. Once you turn it into a badge of political identity, you’ve already forgotten what it stands for.

If you’re reading this and feel a little unsure what to do this Remembrance season, start small. Visit a local memorial. If funerals or formal events feel too raw, go to the green and stand at the edge of the crowd.

Wear a poppy if it suits you — and if it doesn’t, carry a quiet thought. Listen to the stories that appear unexpectedly: the barista who once served tea to soldiers, the passerby who keeps a ledger of names. Make room for awkwardness. People will fumble their words. That’s all right. Remembering is not a test of eloquence; it is a willingness.

Hope is stitched through all of this, rather like a stubborn thread. Remembrance is not only about loss; it’s about the ways in which communities repair themselves afterward. It’s about the school planting veterans’ stories in the minds of nine-year-olds who will, perhaps, be better neighbours for it.

It’s about the small acts of kindness that multiply quietly after the bugle falls silent. Remembering well can be an engine for better things: compassion, clearer political choices, a cooler head when the world is hot with rhetoric.

Finally: try to bring a little humour. I don’t mean mockery — of course not — but the recognition that laughter and grief are not enemies. They are siblings.

Many of those who served had a cracking wit, which is another reason remembrance should be lived among ordinary people rather than only in glass-fronted museums. The laughter keeps the dead human-sized, which is the greatest honour.

So this year, when Remembrance Sunday comes around (and when Armistice Day marks November 11th), let us gather in whatever small way we can. Let us observe two minutes, or a moment, with attention and with gentleness.

Let us tell the stories, correct the dates if we must, share the teacups and the silences. And then — having performed our small, decent duties — let us go home and live in a manner that would have made those we remember not merely proud but reassured: that their memory had been well kept, and not for pageantry but for the quiet business of being human together.

Tea, Time, and Tiny Rebellions — The Courage of Slowing Down

There’s a particular kind of courage that never makes it into the history books. It doesn’t charge across battlefields, doesn’t plant flags, doesn’t even post on social media. It’s the courage of saying, “No, I don’t think I will check my emails just yet.” The quiet defiance of putting the kettle on instead.

Somewhere between the industrial revolution and the smartphone notification, we decided that the highest human virtue was productivity. Busyness became the new faith — complete with its own rituals and sins. To be idle is heretical; to take a long lunch, almost criminal. And yet, there’s something faintly ridiculous about the modern spectacle of a species that once built cathedrals is now proudly colour-coding an online calendar.

Tea, that most British of antidotes, remains one of our last surviving acts of rebellion. The world can rage, meetings can spiral, inboxes can overflow — but for those five sacred minutes, we become monks of the mundane. There is ceremony in the stirring, transcendence in the steam. Even the humble biscuit dunk becomes a statement of intent: I will not be rushed.

Some days, the tyranny of “busy” isn’t some abstract concept you read about in a self-help book. No, it arrives as a peculiar, creeping fog of expectation: questions popping up before you’ve even formulated the answer, requests that arrive with the urgency of a fire alarm yet somehow carry the delicacy of a sledgehammer.

By five o’clock, your brain feels like an overstuffed filing cabinet, drawers jammed with half-answered emails and thoughts you can no longer summon, and there’s that peculiar dread that settles in the pit of your stomach — the Monday dread, a familiar shadow stretching across the weekend, like it’s already planning its welcome-back party.

It’s a subtle, almost absurd burnout: not from doing too little, nor from doing one thing badly, but from doing too much in the half-seconds the world assumes you have, all before anyone has even noticed you exist. And yet, somehow, the world expects you to arrive fresh and alert tomorrow, as if five o’clock were merely a suggestion rather than a declaration of surrender.

And yet, even amid the endless questions, the pre-emptive requests, the Monday dread that lingers like a mischievous ghost, there is a quiet reassurance to be found. Not a sudden solution, not a miraculous inbox-free day — but a reminder that, like hope itself, surviving the firestorm is a maintenance job.

You learn, slowly, that taking even a single, deliberate pause — a deep breath, a glance out of the window, a proper cup of tea — is enough to reset the compass. It doesn’t fix everything, of course; nothing ever does. But it does make the day navigable, and that is a kind of victory worth acknowledging.

It’s funny how often mindfulness is sold back to us, wrapped in app subscriptions and bamboo fonts, when all we really needed was the same teapot our grandparents used. They, after all, lived through things far more demanding than a slow Wi-Fi signal. Their calm wasn’t branded as “wellness” — it was just common sense and a sturdy chair by the window.

I sometimes think slowing down isn’t about laziness but recovery — a pit stop for the mind. Every time we pause long enough to breathe, to laugh, or to let our thoughts wander somewhere entirely unprofitable, we are repairing something the modern world quietly breaks.

And humour, in its own way, is part of that resistance. A well-timed joke can puncture the balloon of self-importance that “busy culture” thrives on. It’s the wink across the table, the knowing shrug that says, Yes, life is absurd — and that’s precisely why it’s beautiful.

So perhaps what we need isn’t more time management, but time respect. To treat our hours not as resources to be mined but as companions to be cherished. To allow the day to unfold at its own pace, like a good story — not something to be hacked through, but something to be savoured, one page, one sip, one smile at a time.

Because in the end, the rebellion we most need might be the gentlest one of all:
To put the world on hold for the length of a cup of tea.

Last time, in The Maintenance of Hope, we talked about keeping the engine of optimism alive — how hope isn’t a mood, but a maintenance job. This, perhaps, is part of the same work: learning when to ease off the throttle. Hope, after all, isn’t sustained by motion alone. It needs stillness too — those small, quiet interludes where we refill the tank and remember who we are when no one’s demanding anything of us.

If hope was the spark, then slowing down is the breath between fires. Together, they make the journey endurable — and, with luck, rather enjoyable too.

The Maintenance of Hope: On Rust, Routine, and the Fine Art of Not Giving Up

Hope, if we’re being honest, isn’t the sleek sports car people believe it to be. It’s not the gleaming red convertible gliding effortlessly down the coastal road of life. No, hope is a rusty old banger with one headlight gone, spurious leaks and a suspicious rattle you can’t quite locate — but you keep it because it’s yours, and because somehow, against the odds, it keeps on going.

Hope, in other words, requires constant maintenance and periodic cajoling.

I used to think of hope as a thing you either had or didn’t have. The kind of inner sunshine that came pre-installed in the naturally optimistic, while the rest of us just stared out from under a leaking umbrella. But the longer I’ve been around, the more I’ve realised that hope isn’t a feeling at all — it’s a kind of upkeep. It’s something you do, not something you wait to feel.

Like checking your oil levels, it’s a small, unglamorous task that keeps everything else from grinding to a complete and sudden halt.

There are days when hope purrs along quite happily — when the weather is fair, the coffee strong, and the world seems vaguely aligned in your favour. You might even forget you’re maintaining anything at all. Then there are the other days: the mornings when your metaphorical battery is as flat as week old roadkill, and you find yourself rummaging through the emotional boot of your life for the jumper cables.

That’s when you need the strangest and often most random things to get going again. A scrap of music that seems to remember you better than you remember yourself. A daft joke shared by a friend. A text from someone who doesn’t need anything from you except your company. These are your cables — the connectors that spark life back into the flat battery of your mind.

And then there’s the news cycle and social media — that great, squeaky conveyor belt that insists on delivering catastrophe in high definition every fifteen minutes.

They are like road salt for the old hatchback of hope: corrosive, ubiquitous, and very good at finding the tiniest chip in the paint and turning it into a problem that feels terminal. Scroll for long enough and you start to believe that the whole engine has seized when really someone down the lane has simply dropped a spanner.

Algorithms amplify outrage because outrage pays the toll, and what we get in return is a steady drip of performative optimism — neatly packaged affirmations that are more about looking resilient than being so. The result is a strange economy where hope is both overexposed and starved: every crisis is spotlighted until our muscle memory for small, private repairs gradually declines.

Treat your notifications like salt: useful in tiny doses, lethal in a blizzard. Turn the radio down. Close the feed. Go outside and do something ridiculous and ordinary — laugh, boil an egg, call someone from your phonebook at random and have a real human to human conversation — and somewhere in that quiet, unpaid maintenance, real hope will find a socket and the engine will cough back to life.

Sometimes, the act of maintaining hope looks and feels vaguely absurd. You might find yourself casually laughing at an old sitcom in the middle of an existential crisis or whistling while your world slowly falls apart. That’s not denial — that’s mechanics. You’re keeping your machine running. You’re refusing to let despair take the wheel.

Hope, at its heart, is a form of stubbornness dressed as optimism. It’s saying, I’ll try again tomorrow, even when today has been an unmitigated disaster. It’s picking the elements from your tool box — a song, a friend, a walk, a cup of coffee — and tinkering with your mood until the engine coughs back to life.

And sometimes, maintenance isn’t about fixing anything. It’s about acknowledging that, for now, the car’s in the garage. That you can’t drive it today, but you’ll come back tomorrow with fresh hands and better light.

I’ve met people who run entirely on borrowed hope — the kind they get from others. You see it in the way they light up when someone believes in them. That’s fine too. Hope is communal property, really. We lend it out and borrow it back, like sugar or jumper leads. The trick is to keep it circulating. The moment it’s hoarded, it rusts.

There’s a phrase I once heard — “Hope is not a strategy.” I think that’s wrong. It might not be a plan, but it’s the only strategy that keeps you moving when the map’s been lost to the wind.

If despair is entropy — the slow unravelling of purpose — then hope is maintenance. It’s WD-40 for the soul. It’s knowing that the squeak won’t fix itself, but also that the squeak isn’t fatal.

And maybe that’s the quiet miracle of it all: that the human heart, despite everything, keeps trying to turn over again each morning. Some days it starts with a roar, other days it sputters and stalls — but either way, it still tries.

So yes — hope needs servicing. It demands attention. It breaks down, sometimes spectacularly, on the side of life’s motorway. But if you treat it with patience, feed it laughter, and occasionally give it a jump-start of music or kindness, it’ll take you further than you’d ever expect.

Even if the engine light never quite goes out.

Scooters, Rain, and the Taste of Forever: Reflections on My Time in Taiwan

There are places that never leave you, no matter how far away your passport ends up — and Taiwan, for me, is one of those. It sits in my mind like the aftertaste of a perfectly brewed oolong: faint, floral, and impossible to forget.

I went there for work, the sort of trip that looks glamorous in hindsight but at the time mainly involves wondering what your body clock has done to deserve such punishment. Taiwan was a world away from the grey drizzle of Britain, and yet, on one of my trips, it rained. Tropical rain, though — the sort that doesn’t fall so much as descend in sheets, drenching everything in moments. The first few days of any visit to Taiwan was an exercise in surrender: to the heat, the pace, and the cheerful chaos of a place that seems to live entirely in the present tense.

The heat in Taiwan doesn’t just arrive — it occupies. It slides under your clothes, into your thoughts, and rearranges your priorities. You learned to walk slower, talk slower, even think slower. By 9 a.m. you’d be glistening like a well-basted roast, and yet, somehow, everyone else seemed immune — locals dressed impeccably, sipping hot tea as if to mock thermodynamics. I discovered that air-conditioning wasn’t a luxury but a moral necessity, and shade wasn’t something you found — it was something you negotiated. The sun there had personality: loud, unrepentant, and utterly unwilling to share the sky.

Taichung was my city of choice and was a symphony of contradictions. High-speed trains and street markets. Buddhist temples glowing quietly between 7-Elevens. The sort of traffic that suggests every moped rider has made a private deal with a higher power. There’s a rhythm to it all — fast, friendly, fearless — and after a while, you find yourself falling into step.

The food, of course, deserves its own chapter. There are smells in the night markets that can both enchant and terrify. I learned, eventually, that the courage to try without understanding what was being offered is the same courage that gets you through most of life: you hesitate, you question your judgment, and then you go for it. Sometimes, you regret it. Sometimes, you discover something entirely new about yourself — namely, that you have a fondness for almost anything accompanied by chili sauce at 11 p.m.

But beyond the culinary bravado and the bustle, what made Taiwan special were its people. The warmth was unrelenting — not just from the weather but from the kindness of the people. Taxi drivers who turned into impromptu tour guides, colleagues who quickly became friends inviting me to brunch, baristas who taught me how to pronounce “thank you” properly (“xièxiè” — though I never ever did manage to get the tone quite right).

There are any number of differences between Taiwan and Britain but one that takes some adjusting is the occasional earthquake. My first, it began as a shiver beneath the soles of my feet, a tremor so slight I thought it was a passing lorry. Then the world swayed. Not violently, just enough to remind you that solid ground isn’t a promise, it’s an arrangement. Drawers rattled, the curtains danced, and for a few surreal seconds I stood frozen, half in awe, half in disbelief. When it passed, the locals barely looked up — one man finished his coffee, another checked his watch. “Small one,” someone said with a smile. I, on the other hand, needed a sit-down and a quiet word with gravity. There’s nothing like the earth moving beneath you to make you realise how precariously calm our days usually are.

I worked hard there, we all did — long hours, intense projects, the kind that leave you hollowed out but proud. Yet, somehow, Taiwan made even that worthwhile. I remember walking through Taichung Central Park one afternoon, the distant Mu Shan peak casually inviting me to ‘give it a go’, groups of people performing the slow and graceful movement of collective afternoon Tai Chi. It felt like stepping into a dream directed by Hayao Miyazaki. The kind of beauty that humbles you. The kind that insists on being remembered.

Now, I don’t know when — or if — I’ll go back. Both I and the job have moved on; the world has too. But every now and then, I’ll hear the hiss of a scooter, smell sesame oil on the air, or catch sight of a beautifully written logograph — and I’m there again, lost in the sights and sounds, and intense heat of a Taiwan summer.

We think travel is about seeing the world, but really, it’s about seeing yourself differently — through the eyes of those who welcome you, the food that challenges you, and the landscapes that quietly ask you to pause.

If life ever hands you the chance to go somewhere you can’t pronounce, take it. Go far, eat bravely, talk to strangers. Because one day, you’ll find yourself sitting thousands of miles away, and a memory — of scooters, rain, and kindness — will tap gently on your shoulder, reminding you that you were once somewhere utterly, wonderfully alive.

Enduring the Joy: A Field Guide to Staying Upright When Life Swings Both Ways

Somewhere between the first sip of morning coffee and the inevitable email that ruins it, life presents us with a choice: enjoy, or endure. Sometimes both at once.

It’s taken me the better part of fifty years to realise that experiences fall broadly into two piles — the ones we enjoy, and the ones we endure. The first are the snapshots you stick to the fridge: sunsets, successes, and smiling people pretending not to be thinking about tax returns. The second are the ones that never make it into the album — the damp camping trips, the rejection letters, the moments where you wondered if anyone else on the planet was having quite as bad a Tuesday.

Yet curiously, both are vital. The enjoyable fills the cup. The endurable strengthens the grip. Without one, the other has no contrast, no meaning, no melody.

Let’s start with the easy ones — enjoyment, that fleeting sense that life and you are, momentarily, on the same team.

You’ll know it when it happens: a laugh that arrives from nowhere and leaves you bent double, a train journey where everything runs on time, or a day so absurdly perfect you suspect you might have wandered into someone else’s life by mistake.

Enjoyment is the applause between acts, the clean shirt before the coffee spill. It’s the space where we recharge, recalibrate, and briefly forget how ridiculous the world can be.

But enjoyment alone is like living on dessert — thrilling at first, then oddly unsatisfying. It doesn’t change us. It soothes, it sparkles, it reminds us of what’s possible — but rarely what’s required.

Endurance, by contrast, never feels noble while you’re doing it. It feels like waiting for a bus in the rain, only to realise the timetable was for last year. It’s the period of life when all your plans unravel into what polite people call “character development.”

We endure heartbreaks, health scares, hangovers, hard truths, and those moments where you think, “If this is a test, I’d like to speak to the invigilator.”

And yet — with enough distance — endurance becomes the raw material of every good story we tell ourselves. Ask anyone who’s travelled far enough through their own disasters and they’ll tell you: the worst of it taught them more than the best ever could.

The trick, is to survive long enough to find the humour in it.

Of course, the real genius of life lies in its refusal to stick to one lane. Joy and difficulty rarely take turns; they travel together, arm in arm, sniggering behind our backs.

Take travel, for example — the universal metaphor for enlightenment and lost luggage. You plan for serenity and find yourself wrestling with ticket machines that only speak Croatian. You endure the queue, the noise, the delay — and then, just as you’re ready to swear off humanity altogether, you step out of the airport into evening air so golden you forget why you were angry in the first place.

That’s the point. Endurance makes enjoyment visible. Without the grit, the pearl would just be a lump of sand.

What if we stopped treating endurance as an interruption and started seeing it as instruction?
What if the bad days are not detours, but training days? What if we actually chased the enduring difficulties, embraced them as if they were an old friend?

We’ve wired ourselves to chase the enjoyable — the new gadget, the next holiday, the fleeting dopamine of “likes” — and yet we ignore the strange satisfaction that comes from simply getting through. To endure something properly is to become fluent in yourself.

And when enjoyment does arrive, you recognise it more sharply because of what came before. The laughter is louder when it echoes off a wall you’ve already climbed.

There’s a quiet dignity in not giving up, even when you’d rather do anything else. Endurance doesn’t make headlines because it looks like nothing much — someone keeping promises, turning up, taking one more step. But it’s the glue that holds every bit of beauty together.

In time, we come to understand that enjoyment and endurance are not opposites but siblings — squabbling, inseparable, and both convinced they’re the favourite.

So yes, experiences can be enjoyed or endured. But either way, they’re worth it.

Enjoyment gives us wings; endurance teaches us how to land. Together they make us whole — wobbly, perhaps, but upright.

The best lives are not the easiest ones. They’re the ones where we keep showing up — smiling when we can, soldiering on when we can’t — and somehow finding beauty in the overlap.

Because when all is said and done, life doesn’t really ask for perfection.
It just asks us to stay in the game.

A Life Rewired: Cups of Tea & Crushing Self-DoubtSmall rituals, big courage—and why most of your limits are made-up

There are days when the kettle does more for my mental health than any book, podcast, or motivational quote ever could.

It starts with the simplest of sounds: the click of the switch, the hum of electricity, that faint burble as water begins to wake. There’s something quietly ceremonial about it. The small, steadfast promise that, no matter what the world’s doing outside, this small corner of reality still behaves itself. The kettle still boils, the coffee still brews, and, for a few short minutes, I can pretend to have everything under control.

Self-doubt, on the other hand, doesn’t have such manners. It doesn’t knock before entering. It slips in uninvited—usually right when you think you’re on top of things—and sets up camp like an uninvited guest. You can be working on a new idea, planning a trip, or even just scrolling through photos of someone else’s seemingly perfect life, and suddenly that familiar voice pipes up: “Who do you think you are?”

It’s astonishing how convincing that voice can be. It knows all your weak spots, your history, your missed chances. It’s been with you long enough to know which buttons to press and when to press them. Mine tends to arrive just as I’m starting to get comfortable with something. The moment I start to believe I might actually be capable of change or creativity or confidence, there it is—ready to remind me that I’m probably just lucky, or deluded, or both.

But here’s the thing I’ve learned—usually the hard way. Doubt isn’t a sign you’re failing. It’s a sign you’re moving.

You only start to feel self-doubt when you’re doing something that stretches the boundaries of who you think you are. No one feels imposter syndrome sitting on the sofa watching a documentary about other people taking risks. You feel it when you step out of the audience and onto the stage, metaphorically or otherwise. It’s the side effect of growth, not the enemy of it.

And so, I’ve started to make peace with it. When that voice appears, instead of fighting it, I put the kettle on. It sounds ridiculous, but it works. There’s something grounding about that ritual. It’s both an act of defiance and of comfort—an acknowledgment that while I might not control my circumstances, I can control the next small thing I do.

Maybe that’s the secret most of us miss. We tend to imagine courage as this grand, cinematic quality—heroic music, decisive actions, bold declarations. But real courage, the kind that actually gets you through life, is a much quieter thing. It’s showing up on the days you don’t feel like it. It’s making the call, sending the email, writing the sentence, or—yes—making a coffee.

I sometimes think that life is built on these micro-acts of faith. The little things we do that tell the universe, “I haven’t given up yet.”

When I was younger, I thought confidence was something you built first and used later, like saving money before a big trip. But it’s the other way round. You act first, wobbling and uncertain, and confidence catches up with you somewhere down the road. If you wait until you feel ready, you’ll wait forever.

The funny thing about self-doubt is that it rarely disappears—it just gets quieter the more you act. It’s still there, but it loses its authority. Like an old radio crackling in the background, you stop paying attention to it after a while. You realise that the limits it warns you about—the “you can’t” and the “you shouldn’t”—were never real walls, just painted scenery.

And once you’ve seen behind the curtain, you can’t unsee it.

It’s taken me years to understand that most of our limits are self-authored. We write them out of fear, dress them up as reason, and then forget that we’re the ones who wrote them. And yet, when we challenge them—when we test even one—the whole structure starts to wobble.

That’s where small rituals matter. They become anchors, not because they solve anything, but because they remind us who we are when everything else feels uncertain. The coffee, the walk, the few deep breaths before a meeting—tiny moments that whisper, “You’re still here. You’ve done hard things before. You’ll do them again.”

And maybe that’s what A Life Rewired really is about—not dramatic reinventions, but small rewrites. Changing the narrative in increments. Replacing “I can’t” with “Let’s see.” Turning “I’m not that kind of person” into “Maybe I could be.”

Because every rewired life starts with one rewired thought. And often, that thought arrives mid-sip, somewhere between doubt and determination.

So yes, I’ll keep making the coffee. I’ll keep doubting myself now and then, too. Because if you’re never in doubt, you’re probably not aiming high enough.

The trick isn’t to banish the doubt. It’s to make peace with it, pour another cup, and carry on anyway.

Every cup of coffee, every quiet pause, every small moment of self-kindness—that’s where rewiring happens. You don’t need to go to the Himalayas to rediscover yourself (though it would make for excellent photos). You can start right where you are: in your kitchen, on a damp British morning, with steam rising from your mug and your reflection in the window reminding you that courage doesn’t always roar.

Sometimes, it just waits for the kettle to click.

“Words on the Loose: Why Freedom of Speech is Like Letting Your Dog Off the Lead in a Busy Park”

Freedom of speech has become one of those phrases people like to wave about as if it’s a platinum membership card that entitles them to priority service at the bar of truth. What it really is, of course, is a battered old bus pass that everyone has, and everyone insists on using at the same time, leading to an almighty jam. You’ve seen the kind: a collection of characters who would never otherwise meet crammed together in the same public square, each demanding to be heard above the rest.

The image the philosophers of the Enlightenment may have had in mind was something serene: a gathering of thoughtful citizens, heads bent together in rational discussion, the air scented faintly with coffee and pipe smoke. What they got instead—because human beings have a way of disappointing theory—is closer to the open-mic night of civilisation. Everyone wants the stage, everyone thinks they’ve got the killer set, and no one wants to listen when it’s not their turn.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, if you outlaw the dreadful acts of public speaking—the half-baked rants, the tin-foil soliloquies, the crackpot confessions—you also outlaw the possibility of greatness. If you silence the bore in the corner, you also silence the prophet before anyone knows he’s a prophet. The price of Shakespeare is that you also have to sit through a Brian, who thinks his poetry about his stamp collection deserves publication.

Which brings me to the park, and the dog. Letting people speak freely is exactly like unclipping the lead from a Labradoodle: you know it will end in chaos, but you also know it will be glorious chaos. The dog will frolic, the children will laugh, and then at some point it will roll in something unspeakable and return triumphantly to the picnic blanket. You love the freedom, but you do not love the consequences. Freedom of speech is the same. You’ll get soaring oratory, and you’ll get flat-earth manifestos. You can’t have the first without tolerating the second.

The problem with freedom is not that it produces noise—it always has—but that we now carry the park in our pockets. Twitter, or X as it was hastily renamed, is essentially Hyde Park Corner fitted into an app, with the added bonus that every heckler has a global microphone. What used to be the rant of one determined eccentric standing on a milk crate is now an international broadcast, garnished with hashtags and emojis.

Clive James once said that television had made it impossible for a public figure to conceal their stupidity, because given enough airtime, it would seep out like damp through a poorly plastered wall. Social media has extended this to everyone. We are all now public figures, and our damp patches are on display. You can admire the democracy of it—at last, the right to be a fool is equally distributed—but you must also endure the sight of a great many damp walls.

Yet, to retreat from this, to sigh and declare that perhaps some speech should be tidied away for the greater good, is to forget the harder lesson: who decides which speech gets swept under the rug? Once you grant the rug-pullers their authority, you might find that the things you care about are the first to vanish. History is obliging on this point—it offers shelves full of examples, all of them grim. From bonfires of books to regimes that vanished entire languages, the story is always the same: censorship comes wearing sensible shoes and saying it only wants to tidy up, and before long it has burnt the library down.

The odd thing is, we already live with limitations. Nobody is free to shout “fire” in a crowded theatre. You can’t libel your neighbour, however satisfying that might feel after they broke your lawn mower. We have rules, and rightly so. But these are rules about harm, not about offence. Offence, after all, is democratic. Everyone has their list. You may be offended by vulgar jokes, while your neighbour is offended by whistling. In this sense, freedom of speech is less a polished principle than an agreement to tolerate each other’s barking, howling, and occasional growling.

Does this mean everything uttered under its protection is noble? Hardly. Much of it is as nourishing as a three day old reheated slice of pizza. But the virtue of the principle is not in the content, it’s in the space it leaves open. It says: “Here, in this messy park, you can speak. Someone may laugh, someone may boo, someone may walk away, but the words are yours.” That is what separates the open society from the closed: the chance, however small, that amid the nonsense, a voice will say something that changes everything.

We live in a time when every word feels like a grenade, and every silence like an act of cowardice. In such times, it is tempting to wish for silence, to mute the babble. But that temptation is a wolf in a librarian’s cardigan. Better to endure the endless karaoke, the soap-box sermons, the late-night monologues. Better to let the dogs run free and accept the occasional ruined picnic. For in that freedom is the possibility of sense, wit, beauty—and even, on rare occasions, truth.

So the next time you find yourself wincing at a half-cooked rant online, remember: this is the price of keeping the park open. Freedom of speech does not promise you a view uncluttered by nonsense. It promises you that the nonsense is not compulsory. You can walk on, or you can bark back. But what you cannot do—what you must not do—is close the gate.

Because once it closes, the silence that follows is never as peaceful as it first seems.

Strong Enough: Rethinking What Resilience Really Looks Like

It’s been one of those weeks when the news cycle appears to have been designed by a committee of doom merchants with a talent for melodrama. Every headline has the punch of a heavyweight, and by Wednesday you’re ducking instinctively when you read the news, as if a stray paragraph might actually leap out and hit you. It’s tempting in moments like these to think resilience means standing there steely eyed, clenching your jaw, and waiting for the storm to pass. But really, that’s the cinematic version — the Hollywood cut. The truth is rather less glamorous and, fortunately, far more achievable.

Resilience is not about being made of granite. It’s about being made of flesh and nerves and the occasional cup of coffee, and still moving along. It’s not grit-your-teeth endurance. It’s rewiring gently, and often.

I was reminded of this during the week, walking through a city that seemed to be simultaneously collapsing and thriving. On one side of the street, a scaffolded building was shedding bricks with all the grace of a drunk unicyclist. On the other, a florist had arranged buckets of sunflowers that shouted “Cheer up!” to anyone within a five-yard radius. Resilience, I thought, is much more like the florist than the scaffolding. It’s not about holding up a crumbling façade. It’s about planting something that insists on being alive, even if the pavement is cracked.

The city, in fact, makes a good case study. It doesn’t stay upright because of heroic feats of steel and stone. It survives because someone, somewhere, keeps repainting the door frames, fixing the traffic lights, and planting trees that insist on growing even when dogs insist on… well, you know. Resilience isn’t one grand gesture; it’s the sum of little recalibrations.

If you’ve ever watched an electrician at work, you’ll know they don’t fix the whole power grid in one go. They fiddle with one connection, test it, adjust, and then move on. That’s how humans really get through hard times too. Not by giving the world a steely stare and growling (no matter how tempting), but by quietly adjusting a thought here, a habit there, until the current runs again.

Take this man I saw in the café, who looked like he’d just lost a particularly bruising argument with the universe. He stared into his espresso as if hoping for divine intervention. Then his phone pinged, and he smiled — a small smile, but real — at a message that probably just said something like “Don’t forget milk.” That’s rewiring. A reminder that ordinary connections, however small, keep the current flowing.

And then, because the city enjoys throwing in a parable when you least expect it, a busker appeared on the corner playing a battered accordion. The tune was both hopelessly out of tune and heartbreakingly sincere. Passersby grinned in spite of themselves. I gave him a pound, not out of charity but gratitude. Because resilience is also being reminded that imperfect music in the middle of chaos can be exactly what you needed.

There exists a universal law to the constant traveller, you’ll know the trick is not to look for monuments but for moments. The man playing the accordion was a moment of sorts, only mobile and slightly wheezy.

The trouble is, resilience has been branded as a form of moral weightlifting. The more pain you can lift, the more impressive you are. But real resilience is closer to optimism in disguise. It’s taking the next bus, even if it might be late. It’s buying tulips when the headlines are shouting catastrophe. It’s laughing at a joke that wasn’t all that funny, because you needed the laugh more than you needed the wit.

There’s a reason clichés like “this too shall pass” have stuck around: they’re true. But there’s another truth just as important: while it’s passing, you don’t have to be heroic. You just have to keep rewiring gently, and often.

So if this week has felt like too much, try this:

• Walk outside and let a street corner surprise you.

• Buy fruit that looks too colourful to be real and eat it like a child who doesn’t know what a vitamin is.

• Phone someone and talk about anything except the news.

• And if you see a busker, listen for a moment. Even if the music is terrible. Especially if the music is terrible.

Because resilience isn’t a statue carved from stone. It’s a city alive with cracks, paint, flowers, scaffolding, and an accordion that can’t quite hold a tune.

Strong enough, in other words, isn’t about being unbreakable. It’s about being breakable and carrying on anyway.

And with that in mind, perhaps next week’s headlines will be slightly easier to read.

Wings of Pride, Chains of Folly: Watching the Skies for Patriotism, Not Nationalism

There are few sights as stirring as a Spitfire banking low over the Cambridgeshire fields, sunlight catching its elliptical wings as though even the air itself were bowing in respect. That was the spectacle at Duxford during the Battle of Britain airshow: a living memory of a time when the skies above Britain were the thin line between survival and surrender. To stand there, neck craned and ears ringing from the Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, is to feel—if only briefly—that heady mixture of gratitude and awe. Patriotism, if it has a sound, surely hums somewhere between that growl and that whistle.

And yet, patriotism is not nationalism, just as admiration is not obsession, and pride is not paranoia. One can look up at the planes of Duxford and feel the joy of belonging to a country with history, sacrifice, and stubbornness in its bones, without immediately declaring that one’s neighbours, should they speak another language or eat another spice, are the enemy within. Unfortunately, the flag—our ever-flexible piece of cloth—has a way of being both a symbol of collective memory and a weapon of individual resentment.

Take, for instance, the English flag, often recruited for every pub wall and front garden during any major football tournament. On one hand, it is a cheerful backdrop for beer and sausage rolls, a symbol of shared hope that this might, finally, be ‘the’ year that football comes home. On the other, in less forgiving contexts, it becomes a semaphore for exclusion: a way of declaring that England, and by implication the English, are under siege. Immigrants, the story goes, are not just neighbours or workers or friends but unwelcome intruders gnawing at the very timbers of the house. The flag flaps over them like a warning sign.

That is the chain of folly. The flag, instead of flying above us all, gets wrapped around the idea that Englishness is a fortress under attack. The result is not unity but suspicion, not pride but defensiveness. We start to hear “take back control” as though control were an heirloom misplaced under the sofa by sheer carelessness, rather than a shifting, negotiated reality in a world where planes, people, and ideas cross borders whether we like it or not.

At Duxford, nobody looked up at the aircraft gracefully wheeling over the crowd and shouted, “Foreigners out!” Instead, they watched with moist eyes as engine sounds carried the echo of crews who were, in many cases, barely out of school when they took to the skies. They flew not because of what they hated, but because of what they loved—family, home, the right to wake up tomorrow with a chance of living in peace. Patriotism is that: the love of something enough to defend it, not the fear of everything else.

But nationalism? That’s different. Nationalism takes the same symbol—the same Union Jack or St George’s Cross—and drains it of love until only suspicion remains. The Nazi flag in 1930s Germany was not terrifying because it was red and white and black, but because it became shorthand for an ideology that made entire populations disposable. The Confederate flag in the US still sends a chill down the spine because, for many, it isn’t history but a continuing whisper of racial supremacy. Even the proudest banners can curdle into warnings when wielded to exclude.

The Spitfire teaches the opposite lesson. It was, ironically enough, designed by a man—R.J. Mitchell—who worked closely with European ideas in engineering, and whose plane was flown not only by British pilots but by amongst others (see below) Poles, Czechs, Canadians, Australians, and even Americans who slipped across the Atlantic before their own country entered the war. The “few” were never so few as we like to imagine, nor so exclusively English. The Battle of Britain was won not by closing England off but by opening her arms to those willing to fight alongside her.

Which brings me back to the flag at Duxford, the RAF ensign fluttering against the September sky. It was uplifting, not terrifying, because it spoke of shared memory rather than exclusion, of gratitude rather than grievance. Patriotism, at its best, is like that flag in the wind—visible, confident, and above all generous enough to wave for everyone. Nationalism, by contrast, is when the same flag is nailed to a stick and jabbed in someone’s face.

So perhaps the task is this: to reclaim our symbols not by hiding them away in embarrassment, nor by brandishing them in aggression, but by letting them fly as reminders of what was fought for at such cost. At Duxford, I watched children look skyward with mouths open, hearing the same sounds their great-grandparents once did. It was a reminder that pride does not have to be weaponised, and history does not have to be hijacked.

Patriotism lifts the eyes. Nationalism narrows them. One is wings; the other, chains. And on a breezy afternoon at Duxford, I knew which sky I’d rather be under.

As a side note, it is worth remembering that during the Battle of Britain, brave airmen from a number of countries flew above the skies during the summer of 1940

Great Britain - 2,342, Poland - 145, New Zealand - 127, Canada - 112, Czechoslovakia - 88, Australia - 32, Belgium - 28, South Africa - 25, France - 13, Ireland - 10, USA - 9, Rhodesia - 3, Jamaica - 1, Barbados - 1 & Newfoundland - 1

During the Battle 544 lost their lives and a further 795 were to die before the end of the war.

The Joy of Getting It Wrong (And Other Accidental Lessons) Because life’s best stories never start with “I nailed it first time.”

There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who pretend they’ve never got it wrong, and those who are worth having a drink with. The first group tend to speak in bullet points and wear pastel jumpers draped over their shoulders. The second group are the ones who will tell you about the time they accidentally boarded a train to Belgium when they meant to go to Bath. Guess which group has more fun.

Airports are the great levellers of human dignity. Nobody, however important, escapes unscathed. Business titans are reduced to fumbling with plastic bags of toiletries; seasoned travellers wander like stunned livestock in search of Gate 47B. My own catalogue of airport disasters includes the time I sat serenely waiting for a flight out of Barcelona, reading the Spanish sports pages (to try and learn Spanish, not because I understood it), and then glancing up into the smiling eyes of a lovely local lady throwing words I could barely comprehend at machine gun rate. Mesmerised by the language and her stunning good looks, I almost missed the disembodied voice calmly calling my name over the tannoy like a summons to purgatory.

In the ensuing chaos — the sprint, the pleading with gate staff, the expression on their faces that suggested evolution had taken a step backwards in me — I learned more about myself in that short moment of panic. The lesson wasn’t about time management or attention to detail. It was simpler: you will get it wrong, often, and the world will keep spinning. Sometimes it will even spin you somewhere better than where you intended.

Now, if I’d got it right — if I’d simply boarded the flight on time and unstressed, sat down, and eaten a cellophane-wrapped croissant in peace — I would remember nothing of that day. But because I got it wrong, I can still feel the sweat dripping down my back as I pleaded with the gate attendant, who looked at me with the expression of a person trying to decide whether incompetence is contagious.

And here’s the curious thing: I wouldn’t trade that moment. The memory has outlived the embarrassment. Wrong turns, I realised, have a way of burning themselves into your story far more deeply than anything you do “correctly.”

Paris taught me this again. Armed with a map and unearned confidence, I set out to find a gallery. Thirty minutes later, I was standing in a residential courtyard while a grandmother beat a rug over a balcony, showering me with dust and what I can only assume was centuries of biscuit crumbs. I apologised in broken French, which only deepened her suspicion that I was casing the joint.

Eventually, I gave up on art and wandered into a café where the waiter brought me a coffee so strong it could peel paint. It was, of course, the wrong café. But there I learned more about Paris than any gallery could tell me: the sound of scooters backfiring, the gossip of locals at the bar, the wallpaper peeling in elegant curls like the city itself growing weary under her own expectations. Had I found the right gallery, I would have stared dutifully at the right paintings and come away with nothing but a brochure. By getting it wrong, I met the city.

Not all mistakes are so picturesque. Some take place under the merciless fluorescent light of a British living room. Once, in a fit of optimism, I attempted to install a shelf. The instructions were in Swedish. The tools were blunt. My confidence, however, was sharp. Two hours later, the shelf was on the wall, slightly tilted, as if nodding in agreement with its own absurdity. A week later, under the weight of three hardbacks and a ceramic cat, it detached itself with the commitment of a kamikaze pilot.

Friends now ask about that shelf with the kind of affectionate malice reserved for inside jokes. And here’s the thing: I wouldn’t trade the disaster. Competence is silent. Failure leaves an echo.

Contrast this with perfection, which is sterile, airless, and frankly a bit smug. Imagine living a life where nothing ever went wrong — no missed trains, no wrong turns, no collapsing DIY projects. What stories would you tell? “Well, Margaret, I put up the shelves exactly as planned, and they’re still there.” Riveting. Call the publishers.

The great paradox is that the pursuit of perfection often creates more mistakes. Jeremy Clarkson — a man who treats mistakes not as missteps but as professional strategy — has blown up more vehicles than NATO and somehow became loveable for it. But would we have watched him so religiously if he’d driven carefully at 70mph, signalling properly? Not a chance. His calamities are his charm.

Comedy, too, rests on failure. Chaplin tripping on his shoelaces, Basil Fawlty losing his rag, Del Boy falling through the bar. These aren’t stories of getting it right. They’re reminders that we recognise ourselves most clearly in the pratfall.

There is, however, a darker side to perfection. A life lived with the volume of error turned down to zero would be unrecognisable — and unbearable. Imagine the tedium of flawless days: meetings on time, trains punctual, soufflés always rising, trousers never splitting. It’s antiseptic. It’s beige. It’s the motivational quote section of a stationery shop stretched across a lifetime.

Wrongness, by contrast, is colour. It’s the spice rack. It’s the reason why, when telling a travel story, we skip over the perfectly executed museum visit and go straight to the part where the taxi driver misunderstood the request and took us to a chicken farm on the outskirts of town.

And so, I’ve come to think of mistakes as souvenirs. Each one says: you were here, you tried, and the universe reminded you not to take yourself too seriously.

The point, if one exists, is simple: mistakes aren’t interruptions to the story. They are the story. When we laugh about them, we’re not just laughing at our own ineptitude, we’re celebrating the fact that we dared to do something in the first place.

And if the day ever comes when someone asks me to summarise my life, I doubt I’ll talk about the things I got right. I’ll talk about every trip, slip and fall.

Because those were the moments I was most alive.

And if you can say that — that you lived, and you laughed at the mess — then getting it wrong wasn’t a failure at all. It was the whole damn point.

Trowels & Triumphs: Gardening as a Rebellion Against Despair. Growing hope, even in terrible soil.

The last bank holiday before Christmas is a funny one. It creeps up on us like the last slice of cake at a family gathering—nobody’s quite sure whether it’s meant for them, but heaven help the soul who doesn’t grab it when they get the chance. We’ve all had the usual summer: rain, then heatwave, then rain again, with the occasional plague of ladybirds thrown in just to remind us we live on an island where nature enjoys a good laugh at our expense.

And yet, here we are, coffee in hand, ready to march into the garden armed with little more than optimism and a pair of gloves we’re fairly certain have not been washed since the Blair administration. It’s not that we think we’re Monty Don. We’re not. Monty floats serenely about in immaculate linen, whispering encouragement to roses. The rest of us are sweating buckets, swearing at bindweed, and trying to remember whether foxgloves are poisonous (they are, by the way—so don’t make a salad out of them).

But gardening isn’t about competence. It’s about habit. And ritual. And, if I may be so bold, survival.

Every bank holiday, the same dance plays out. Someone decides the hedge must absolutely be tackled before autumn, usually around 10 a.m., when the first cup of coffee is still only halfway gone. Out come the shears, which are blunt enough to qualify as heirlooms, and the massacre begins. By lunchtime, the hedge looks like it’s been trimmed by Sweeney Todd after a solid weekend down the West End, the wheelie bin is already overflowing, and someone has stormed off to B&Q muttering about “proper tools.”

It’s the same up and down the country. People are on their knees in flower beds, muttering “what on earth is that?” as though they’ve just discovered a new civilisation. Lawns are being scalped into submission. Barbecues are dragged out “just in case the weather holds,” which guarantees torrential rain by 4 p.m.

And yet, underneath the chaos, there’s something deeply reassuring about it all. The hopeless gardener is an eternal figure: ill-prepared, slightly sunburnt, but determined to keep fighting the good fight with the persistence of Helen Keller and the skillset of a Labradoodle.

This is where the rebellion comes in. Not rebellion in the grand, banner-waving sense, but in the small, stubborn acts. Cutting back a rose bush that has more thorns than leaves. Sweeping the patio clear of moss only for it to return two days later like an uninvited house guest. Planting bulbs in soil so poor it could qualify as modern art—and doing it anyway, because hope is the only fertiliser we can afford in bulk.

In a world that feels increasingly complicated—wars, elections, news so grim it should come with a health warning—the garden is our frontline. A patch of ground, however chaotic, that we can push back against despair with. Every clipped hedge and watered plant is a mutinous little act that says: I will not go quietly into the compost bin of history.

Let’s be honest—tea and coffee are the backbone of the whole operation. Without them, the garden would collapse into anarchy. Breaks punctuate the day like commas in a very long, muddy sentence. You sit, steaming mug in hand, surveying the destruction you’ve just inflicted on the hydrangea, and think, “Yes. That’s progress.”

And it is, in its way. Progress doesn’t always look like Versailles. Sometimes it looks like a slightly less unruly jungle than yesterday. Sometimes it looks like your neighbour leaning over the fence to say, “You missed a bit,” which is neighbourly code for “I’ll have my revenge when the leaves fall on your side in October.”

The triumph isn’t in perfection; it’s in persistence. A perfectly weeded border may last a week, but the memory of having tried lasts longer. You went out, you fought, you bled (usually via bramble), and you came back in with that warrior’s swagger only the truly bedraggled understand.

And when evening falls and the tools are shoved haphazardly back in the shed, when the garden chair groans beneath you as you collapse into it, that’s when the rebellion feels real. You’ve fought despair with a hoe and a half-dead hanging basket. You’ve turned exhaustion into quiet pride. You’ve proven that, even in terrible soil, something like hope can grow.

So this bank holiday, whether your lawn looks like Centre Court or a battlefield, get out there. Pull up a weed. Plant a bulb. Sweep a corner. Sip a mug of something hot and sweet. And when the inevitable rain arrives, retreat indoors with wet socks and the glow of victory.

Because gardening isn’t about skill, or neatness, or even results. It’s about showing up, stubbornly, joyfully, to say: I am still here. And so is the garden. At least for now.

And frankly, that’s enough.

Chasing Light, Escaping Screens

I’ve just had a week off work. Not the kind where you mutter something about “downtime” while secretly nursing your laptop like an injured pet. No, this was proper time away — stepping outside, leaving the glow of the screen behind, and remembering that life is not best lived hunched over a keyboard, but somewhere out there, in the wind and sun.

It took about forty-eight hours for me to notice how much the computer has been killing me. Not dramatically, of course — there’s no melodramatic “death by spreadsheet” headline in my future — but quietly, stealthily: sitting in front of a computer for most of your waking life is not, in fact, the route to vitality and joy. It’s the route to a posture that resembles a question mark and eyes that look permanently startled. As soon as I stepped outside, I felt it. That buzz of being alive again. Muscles working. Lungs filling properly. Thoughts loosening their grip from the artificial urgency of emails and deadlines.

The revelation arrived with a nudge from Krystle Wright. I stumbled across her National Geographic documentary on Disney+, and within minutes, I was halfway to throwing my keyboard into the nearest canal. Wright’s world is one of extremes: clinging to cliffs, dangling from helicopters, chasing the image and encapsulating the memory. Her images are not merely photographs — they are important snapshots, frozen in a time and place that many of us can only dream of. They remind you that the world is staggeringly big, untidy, unpredictable, and that’s exactly why it’s beautiful.

Her images are breathtaking, of course, but what struck me wasn’t just the drama. It was the spark. The way her work makes you feel like the world is alive, untamed, and waiting for you to come and at least try to meet it halfway.

Now, let’s be honest: I am not a photographer – just someone who enjoys taking photographs and yes, there is a distinction. My camera roll is more “wonky horizon” than “majestic cliff.” If she’s producing symphonies in light and shadow, I’m closer to a man whistling off key in the shower. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter. What her work sparked in me wasn’t envy, but appetite. A hunger for more light, more air, more life lived outside the inbox.

Michael Palin once said of his travels that the joy wasn’t in the distant destination, but in the small, ordinary encounters along the way. I think that’s the note I’m striking here. I don’t need to dangle from a paraglider in the Andes to feel alive (although if offered, I would consider it). What I do need is more adventures, a return to where I once was and what I once did almost without thinking.

And here’s the knot I’m wrestling with: I need to earn my way in the world, like anyone. The bills do not politely disappear because I fancy an existential rethink. But the balance is wrong. The screen has crept too far into my days. My body knows it. My mind knows it. My heart shouts it every time I catch the golden flare of evening sun on the horizon and think, “I nearly missed this again.”

So perhaps this week was more than just time off. Perhaps it was a reset button. Krystle Wright may inspire people to climb cliffs, she has for me, but her work has sparked the more modest, but no less radical, idea that I need to reclaim more hours outside. To swap the glow of pixels for the glow of sky. To remember that even small adventures — a walk, a camera, an hour under trees instead of fluorescent lights — add up to a bigger, braver way of living.

So perhaps that’s the real legacy of Krystle Wright’s work for me. Not to emulate her extremes, but to embrace her spirit. To be reminded that we are not here just to “get through” our days. We are here to chase the light, however clumsily, and to find ourselves — not in pixels, but in places.

And if my photos never grace the cover of National Geographic, well… at least they’ll remind me of something far better: that I was there, outside, living.

Go and check Krystle’s work out for yourself, see if her images resonate in you the way they have with me

https://www.krystlewright.com/overview

Engineering a Better Course: Lessons from the Astronauts Who Steered Us Home. Why the human spark to improve is worth protecting

Normally, I give myself a week to prepare these posts — time to sit, let ideas simmer, and see what bubbles up once the froth of the first draft has settled. But today the news of Jim Lovell’s passing hit like a sudden course correction, and my original plan for the week was promptly jettisoned, somewhere between the launch pad and the second paragraph.

There are certain stories you become aware of that feel almost stitched into the lining of your mind. For me, a visit to the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida sparked an interest in the NASA era of the ’60s, ’70s and beyond. Those scratchy radio calls from space, the crew-cut engineers hunched over consoles, the spacecraft that looked more shed than shuttle. And, at the centre of my favourite one of all, a calm Midwesterner named Jim Lovell.

Apollo 13 is the kind of story that, if you pitched it now, would be sent back for “believability issues.” An oxygen tank explodes 200,000 miles from home. The spacecraft’s computers would blush at being compared to a digital watch. Plans are ripped up, not by choice but because physics demands it. Yet somehow, with ingenuity, teamwork, and a very handy roll of duct tape, the crew make it back to Earth in one piece.

For all its drama, Apollo 13 is not a story about heroics in the Hollywood sense. It’s about what happens when people know their craft, respect each other’s skills, and are trusted to solve problems. It’s about using what you’ve got — however meagre — to close the gap between “this is broken” and “this works well enough to save our lives.”

Which brings me, somewhat reluctantly, to today. I have my own engineering problem to wrestle with. Nothing so dramatic as life support systems failing in space — I’m not currently orbiting anything more dangerous than my own coffee mug — but the challenge comes with its own ethical knots. The kind where the technical fix is possible, possibly even straightforward, but the “should we?” hangs in the air like an unanswered radio call.

It’s a reminder that engineering isn’t just about doing things. It’s also about deciding which things ought to be done, and which ought to remain on the drawing board, however clever they are. In the rush to solve problems, we can forget that why we solve them matters just as much as how. And sometimes the right answer isn’t a new design at all, but a decision to stop, think, and make sure the solution serves more than the spreadsheet.

This is where the Apollo lesson still matters. The team at Mission Control weren’t just trying to get three men home; they were doing so in a way that didn’t compromise their principles. There was no question of cutting corners that might save time but cost lives later. Every decision passed through a quiet, unspoken filter: is this the right thing to do, not just the fastest?

Today’s engineering challenges are different — climate change, renewable energy, AI — but the ethical compass is still the same. We need to keep trusting people to think creatively under pressure, but we also need to give them the moral framework to know when “yes we can” must be followed by “but should we?”

And perhaps, if we zoom out from our own industries and apply this thinking to society as a whole, we might chart a better course collectively. Imagine policy built with Apollo-style focus: evidence-led, resourceful, with a refusal to compromise long-term safety for short-term gain. Imagine technology rolled out with as much care for unintended consequences as for market share. Imagine infrastructure decisions made with the same patient problem-solving that turned a damaged spacecraft into a lifeboat. The problems facing our planet are vast, but so is our capacity to solve them — provided we steer with both skill and conscience.

So I find myself, like Lovell, staring at the controls and weighing the options. I have the tools, I have the know-how, and yet I pause — not because I don’t know the answer, but because I want to be certain the answer is one I can defend, years from now, when the dust has settled and someone asks: “Was that the right course?”

Jim Lovell taught us many things, but perhaps the most important is that steering home is never just about navigation. It’s about judgement. It’s about knowing that the course you set is not just the quickest, but the one you can live with once you land.

Here’s to engineering better courses — technically sound, ethically sure, and with enough room for duct tape, teamwork, and the occasional moral pit stop along the way.

The Lost Art of Doing One Thing at a Time Modern life is noisy. Here’s how to turn it down and tune in.

Somewhere in the blur of deadlines, dog walks, and digital notifications, we stopped doing things and started juggling them. These days, it’s perfectly normal to eat lunch, book a dentist appointment, attend a Teams meeting, and check your bank balance—all while trying to remember why you walked into the kitchen.

Life, for many of us, isn’t lived—it’s managed. Efficiently. Competently. Occasionally heroically. And while there’s great dignity in keeping the wheels on, there’s also a quiet ache that creeps in at 2am: Is this it?

Because, deep down, most of us aren’t just trying to survive the week. We’re trying to build a life that feels less like a spreadsheet and more like a symphony.

We Are Not Machines

There’s no shame in being busy. The world, frankly, runs on busy people. People who answer emails on trains. People who stack family, work, ambition, and a slightly stale Greggs sausage roll into a single lunch hour. That’s not failure—that’s modern life with the safety off.

But we’re not machines. We weren’t designed to process twelve tasks simultaneously while being permanently available via six channels of communication. We were built for rhythm. Focus. Breath. For the joy of doing one thing well.

That might be making soup. Writing a report. Planting a bulb. Watching the light change across a hill. Tiny moments, all—but done with presence, they become anchors in a drifting day.

The Seduction of More

Now, no one’s saying we should all pack up and go live in a hut. (Although there are days, aren’t there?) This isn’t about slowing down for the sake of it. It’s about choosing what we give our attention to—and doing it on purpose.

There’s a difference between wanting more and doing everything at once. Wanting more is human. It’s a glimmer. A dream. The whisper of something better—quieter mornings, deeper work, conversations that don’t feel like calendar entries. It’s the soul nudging us toward a life with a little more life in it.

But more doesn’t come from speed. It comes from depth.

Attention as a Superpower

In a culture that glorifies the grind, giving your full attention to one thing has become a rebellious act. It’s not indulgent. It’s powerful.

Read the book without glancing at your phone. Make a coffee and taste it. Speak to someone and really listen—not just nod while composing a reply in your head.

When we tune in—fully, wholeheartedly—we unlock something bigger than productivity: presence. And presence is the gateway to clarity, creativity, connection... and occasionally remembering where you left your glasses.

A Life Rewired

Here’s the thing: you don’t have to abandon your ambitions to live more fully. You don’t have to choose between “achieving” and “being”. The real magic is in learning how to weave the two together.

The dream is still there, glinting at the edge of your day. A better rhythm. A calmer mind. A life that feels more lived. And it doesn’t arrive in one grand, cinematic gesture. It arrives in the doing—one task, one moment, one focused breath at a time.

So yes, answer your emails. Walk the dog. Get the job done. But now and then—just now and then—pause. And do something simple with your whole self.

Because in a world wired for noise, tuning in might just be the quiet revolution we need.

Fit-ish: Rewiring Your Relationship with Fitness at Any Age No Lycra cults. Just movement that feels like freedom.

I always enjoyed sports, as a child of the ‘70s, exercise was something that happened to you, it was part of the day to day. From summers on the track and field to winters on the frozen rugby pitch it was challenging, tough but normal.

Somewhere along the way, exercise became a numbers game — reps, steps, BPM, VO2 max, and other abbreviations, we are sold the idea that if you’re not pounding protein shakes and spinning like a possessed washing machine, you’re essentially crumbling into dust. But real movement — joyful, sustainable movement — doesn’t live in data.

It lives in mood.

Have you noticed how even ten minutes of motion — a brisk walk, a few stretches, a dance around the kitchen while the kettle boils — can reset your entire day?

That’s because movement isn’t just physical. It’s psychological, emotional, even spiritual. It’s momentum in a world that so often wants to freeze us in place.

And here’s the truth most influencers won’t tell you: movement isn’t just for the young, the lean, or the Lycra-clad. Movement is for you. And it doesn’t have to be punishment. In fact, it shouldn't be.

Being fit-ish isn’t a half-hearted compromise. It’s a full-bodied choice to move toward a version of yourself who sees possibility instead of pain, curiosity instead of decline, and progress instead of punishment.

It’s about outlook. About rewiring the story you tell yourself every time you look in the mirror and think: “Maybe I’ve still got more in me than I thought.”

Why Move? Because Standing Still Feels Worse

Let’s not pretend: your joints click like castanets and your back now has opinions. You’ve tried the gym. You’ve flirted with yoga. You own a resistance band you last saw tangled in the vacuum cleaner.

And yet, for all the barriers, here’s what’s quietly true — the days you move, even just a bit, are the days your mind feels clearer. Your energy sharper. Your inner monologue slightly less hostile.

That’s no accident. Movement is the oldest therapy we have. It rewires the body and the brain. It fuels the chemicals that make you hopeful, makes your heart work better at loving you back, and brings you back into contact with the you that still dreams of walking further, living longer, laughing louder.

It’s Never Too Late (and You’re Not Too Far Gone)

Here’s the good news: you don’t need to run a marathon, take cold plunges at dawn, or become fluent in kettlebell. You just need to begin. Not from where you wish you were — but from where you are.

Even the most modest fitness journey — the dog walk you usually skip, the ten squats during the ad break, the stairs you choose over the lift — can build a quieter strength. And that strength slowly shapes how you respond to life’s nonsense. A fitter body doesn’t solve everything, but it often gives you more resilience to deal with what it can’t.

A fitter you isn’t just stronger — you’re more patient, more curious, more alive.

The Myth of the Perfect Body (and Other Lies That Age Badly)

Our culture likes to peddle ideals. Shredded abs, sculpted delts, and a life lived entirely on grilled chicken and regret. For the average human — particularly one who’s balancing jobs, families, bad knees and a mortgage — this is not so much aspirational as it is mildly offensive.

Fitness, as it turns out, doesn’t need to come with a side of existential shame. It can begin with standing a little taller, breathing a little deeper, and walking a little further than yesterday. It might be gardening with the fury of a 17th-century peasant, dancing in your kitchen to Taylor Swift, or doing squats while brushing your teeth because you forgot to go to the gym for the fifth year in a row.

You don’t need a six-pack. You need your back to stop hurting when you unload the dishwasher. That, my friends, is a noble goal.

Rewired, Not Remade

We are the ordinary adventurers. The people who are still busy living, not just logging.

It’s a mindset: less pressure, more presence. Less "transform your body in 6 weeks," more "remember you have one, and be grateful it still works."

You may need to warm up like a vintage car and rest like an Edwardian duchess, but that doesn't make you any less an athlete in the quiet theatre of daily life. You are training for something far greater than a beach body: you are training to still be able to lift your suitcase, chase a grandchild, climb that hill to the best view. You are training for life.

At A Life Rewired, we believe movement isn’t just about muscles — it’s about momentum. It's how you keep the light on in your soul. It’s how you find the breath to laugh harder, love longer, and carry your bags without grunting in front of strangers.

Final Thought: Fit-ish is Hopeful

There’s something quietly heroic about moving when no one is watching. When the world says “why bother?” and your body says “not today,” and you move anyway — for your mind, your mood, your future self.

That’s not vanity. That’s hope. And hope, as it turns out, has a surprisingly good resting heart rate.

So be fit-ish. Move freely. And keep rewiring.

The journey is still yours.