Staring at your feet

15 Apr 2026

Do you ever feel like the news cycle is sapping your sense of proportion? I heard a bloke walking around saying “Has anyone caught the news? Did they open the strait?” We were in a campsite in Kent, not helming a Kuwaiti tanker. Stare hard enough into the distance and you trip over your own feet.

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Getting older is what I hate. I don’t hate aging, my life is better every day than ever before. What I hate is mostly just the digits incrementing. The bullshit around it, messages from people just because it popped up in their calendar. Probably mostly it’s because I don’t have good relationships with my family.

I mention it because there was one such occasion which I’m still reeling from. It was my birthday and as is tradition my family had found a way to upset me. I don’t remember the details. It doesn’t matter now, because I took the right decision and cut that cancer right out.

Putting up walls, a tried and tested method.

Whatever it was, I put something vague and grouchy on the internet. On instagram, the place for such things. Not sure what I said, but it didn’t make me feel better.

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It’s easy to be judgemental about other people’s choices. I see so many British people speak about Trump voters but they don’t see their own mental tangles. Someone was excited to see so many people march in these No Kings parades. Why don’t we have those here?

Britain has only Lesotho for company in the club of countries with hereditary positions in the legislature. It has only Iran for company in the club of countries with lawmakers appointed by the state religion.

Our relationship with the barons and dukes and the king and the archbishops is like that of the reality television viewer. It’s a distant drama and a curiosity, but hardly a day to day issue except in a watercooler sense. People voted for Rylan but it had no consequence. We don’t choose the lord or royals precisely because these things are important.

America does clearly have a very bad head of state. You know how he got there? Americans elected him. The guy here in the UK got the job when his mother died. One of the features of being able to vote is that you are free to vote badly. Maybe it’s just Boaty McBoatface all the way down.

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Here is a super bad message to receive: “How dare you say that about my Jewish people?” It’s a notification that makes you spit out your tea, you can trust me on that one. I hadn’t said anything about Jewish people. I hadn’t said anything about anyone!

The message came from a friend, a former colleague. I think of him as a fairly close friend but the reality is I don’t have close friends and I’m optimistically a second or third tier friend for him. He’s Jewish, a Londoner who had recently been in Tel Aviv for a while. Evidently he had misunderstood my whinge about my mother.

It was October 7th, 2023. Hamas had killed and kidnapped people across various Israeli locations in the preceeding hours, but I hadn’t seen the news. I was out of the loop, upset with my shitty family, unaware of the horror everyone was now talking about. Sometimes you’re so busy staring at your own feet, you miss the setting of the sun.