A grey, empty afternoon at Lyle Hill, just the two of us, the dog and the view over the Clyde disappearing into the rain.

Three days before my first 10K in years, I caught a cold. The day before, I nearly phoned in sick from work, then thought better of bragging about a race I’d skipped the Friday before it. I ran it anyway, nearly gave up on a hill nobody warned me about, and finished in 1:06:05, faster than my own phone thought I’d gone.

A few weeks ago I cancelled Tidal. This is everything I built instead, on a server that answers to nobody but me.

Two nil, Kavanagh twice, and a league table I intend to look at every single day this week.

Oldham open the EFL season live on the telly, and for now everything is still possible.

Couch to 5K is finished, two months after I started it, and the Bellahouston 10K is a week on Saturday. Which leaves one taper week, one long run that matters, and a plan for running further than I ever have. Nine minutes running, one minute walking, repeated until the finish. Here is the whole thing written down.

Stephanie talked me into signing up for the Bellahouston Park 10K, on the 22nd of August, right as I finish Couch to 5K. Her reasoning: I won’t run it well, but that’s exactly why it’s useful. A number now, however rough, is something to measure everything else against by the time I stand on the Paisley 10K start line next summer.

I have spent three years arguing that automation taking work away from us is a reason to want it rather than a reason to fear it. I still think that. But almost every objection worth answering comes from the left, and working through them one at a time has landed me somewhere more specific than enthusiasm: the technology is not the question, ownership and permission are. Including the part where I admit I could not walk away from it now if I tried.

I wasn’t there to race anyone. I was just curious whether the training was actually going anywhere. Turns out it is.

A throwaway line in Pulp Fiction about finding your food waiting for you when you get back from the bathroom. On why noticing small good things is a skill rather than a mood, and why it is not the same thing as being told to count your blessings.

Health and safety reps have had legal standing since 1977. Equality reps get theirs this October. Green reps have nothing, and a net zero target with no plan behind it is just a press release.

A bowl of plant based udon at Wagamama in Silverburn, a note on why an RSS feed beats an algorithm, and how Stephanie’s chillies ended up in my broth.

I spent a few evenings adding excerpts to years-old posts and accidentally read my own life back in fast-forward. On running threads, hospital wards, a screaming modem, and why the archive, not the audience, is the best reason to keep a blog.

I’m 46 and just getting back into running. Here’s my one-year plan to go from Couch to 5K to running the Paisley 10K in under 50 minutes.

After an MS diagnosis and one too many “I’ll start tomorrow”s, I got moving. Calorie counting, Couch to 5K, and logging it all on my own terms.

I got tired of Google treating my search history like a diary it owned. So I built my own private search engine. Here is how, and why you might want to do the same.

Three quotes sit at the top of this blog. This is an explanation of why they’re there, what they mean to me, and the kind of thinking this site grows from.

I went looking for some relaxing background music for the housework and stumbled into a bizarre genre I didn’t know I needed. What started as a standard Gregorian chant playlist took a sharp turn when the monks started singing John Lennon.

Oatly has lost its long-running battle with the dairy lobby over the use of the word “milk”. The Supreme Court says shoppers are confused, but is this really about clarity or just stifling competition?

I have been out of hospital for three days. While the staff on Ward 27 were marvellous, my stay exposed a breaking system. From “bed blocking” my own recovery to the wave of preventable admissions, here is why we need to fix the roof of the NHS, not just buy more buckets.

When your world shrinks to the size of a hospital room, the window becomes your television. From the “incinerator” chimney to the drama of the air ambulance arriving from the islands, here is a look at life outside the window of Ward 27.

Writing from a hospital bed, I see the NHS as a shield against the market. But the vultures are circling. The same tech oligarchs who want to strip-mine our digital lives are now eyeing up our medical records. Why defending socialised healthcare and self-hosting your data are two sides of the same fight.

A poster on the ward confirmed what I have always suspected: rudeness is a virus. The hard data shows that incivility lowers performance and ultimately provides poorer care. Why kindness is the only way to get anything done.

I can self-host my email. I can self-host my photos. But stuck in a hospital bed, I’ve realised I cannot “self-host” my groceries. When the only supermarket in reach demands your data in exchange for fair prices, privacy becomes a luxury good. A look at the failed experiment of the “Communal Clubcard” and the new digital feudalism of the weekly shop.

Five nights into a hospital stay, sleepless and bored at 3 AM, I did what any reasonable person would do: built a simple two-player reflex game for a sight-impaired friend. Accessible, private, and playable from a hospital bed. Not every day you get to play-test a game like that.

Written from a hospital bed with time to kill: a case for why the English should actually want Scottish independence. Not out of dislike for England, but because democracy, a greener future, and a real left-wing alternative all point the same way. It’s not separation, it’s choice.

Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine” and the fallout from Venezuela should be a wake-up call for Scotland: if Europe can’t be trusted to stand up for Greenland, NATO’s promises don’t mean much either. The case for Scottish independence isn’t just about self-governance anymore, it’s about self-defence.

My 2026 resolution isn’t less screen time, it’s owning the screen. Moving my digital life onto my own VPS instead of renting space from billionaires who treat our data as raw material. Data sovereignty isn’t just for the technical elite anymore, and reclaiming it might be the first step toward a future of freedom rather than dependency.

Reform UK just won its first contested council seat in Scotland. Mainstream politics here has started to feel like a broken smartwatch: full of features nobody asked for, always needing updates, dead battery right when you need it. Reform’s offering a different device entirely. It might be ticking backwards, but at least the display is clear.

Moved this blog off rented hosting and onto my own Hetzner VPS, cutting monthly costs from over £12 to £3.05 while gaining full control: Docker, WireGuard, AdGuard Home, the works. No walled garden, no black box. It’s mine.

A “top ten” library page sounded simple until music proved impossible to whittle down. New rule: one in, one out. First swap: Plain White T’s “Hey There Delilah” in, Paolo Nutini’s “New Shoes” out, with every departing favourite archived below as a living tribute.

A £13 Casio F-91W from Argos, unchanged since 1991, and why it’s started to feel like a political statement. A battery that lasts a decade, a back you can unscrew and fix, and a small act of resistance against an economy built on planned dissatisfaction.

Doomscrolling before your feet hit the floor is a tool of the status quo. Borrowing from the Stoics, the dichotomy of control still applies to climate grief: I can’t rewrite energy policy before breakfast, but how I show up to fight for it is entirely mine to choose. Coffee up. Chin up. Let’s get to work.

I’ve spent years leaning into blogging as quiet resistance to platform social media, so joining Bluesky sounds like a contradiction. It isn’t. Built on an open protocol, more intentional than algorithmic, it’s a tool I’m using on my own terms, not one I’m subject to. And no, the blog isn’t going anywhere.

I barely open Wikipedia myself anymore, I ask an AI instead. But that AI learned from Wikipedia, which makes it less like a website I visit and more like a public park everyone relies on. Renewing my £5 donation felt less like paying for a product and more like funding the digital gardeners.

Should AI have rights? Thinking through the case for capacity over origin, the case against category errors and diluted accountability, and a slower middle ground built on duties before rights. If a book moves me, does it matter whether the author was human?

The UK’s 10-year settlement route forces some migrants, carers, nurses, parents already building lives here, through nearly £19,000 in fees and repeated renewals before they can settle permanently. A look at why campaigners say five years should be enough, and why this shouldn’t become the standard for everyone.

I believe in the BBC, just not in the TV licence that funds it. A flat £174.50 a year hits people on Universal Credit as hard as millionaires, and can land you in court if you don’t pay. Funding it through general taxation, like Norway, Finland, and Sweden do, would be fairer.

26°C in Paisley isn’t a fluke anymore. A look at how Scotland’s climate is shifting, hotter summers, wetter winters, rising heat-related deaths and wildfire risk, and what it’ll take beyond clean energy to actually adapt.

An anti-burka message got me thinking about how rarely these complaints are actually about fabric. If freedom of expression means anything, it has to include the freedom to dress how you like, even when that makes other people uncomfortable.

Canada and Scotland aren’t so different: both quietly distinct from a bigger, louder neighbour, both caught in decisions made somewhere else. Trump’s “51st state” jokes about Canada aren’t so far removed from what Scotland has heard for years. It wears you down, but people keep asking anyway.

Went in expecting a zombie film and came out thinking about Brexit. 28 Years Later reads like an allegory for a country cut off from the world, and it asks a question that still feels unresolved almost ten years on: what kind of place do we want to be now?

A US jury found Greenpeace liable for $667 million in a SLAPP lawsuit brought by a fossil fuel company, a tactic designed to bankrupt critics rather than win on merit. Now Greenpeace International is fighting back in a landmark case that matters far beyond just them.

English by birth, German through my grandmother, living in Scotland, and named “Ireland” for reasons that have nothing to do with Ireland. A look at the name I chose for myself, the one I left behind, and the strange family threads that got me here. The Guinness, at least, is real.

Shouting at the telly, pacing the room, laughing and swearing, the usual. After years of decline, false dawns, and near-misses, Oldham Athletic came from behind twice at Wembley to win in extra time and get back into the Football League. Still doesn’t feel real.

Took a first drive over the new £114 million Renfrew Bridge, open just a day and already a good alternative to the Erskine Bridge or Clyde Tunnel. Wide, smooth, still quiet, and apparently possibly a lifting bridge too, though that’s still unconfirmed.

Oldham Athletic have reached the National League play-offs, one win away from a Wembley shot at getting back into the Football League. I’ve followed them since I was ten in the early 90s, through the Premier League highs and the record-breaking relegation lows. Watching from Scotland via stream, but it still means something.

A sarcastic rundown of everything to “look forward to” under a Reform UK government, from gutted public services and a hollowed-out Civil Service to NHS privatisation and chlorine-washed chicken. In all seriousness, with just a touch of sarcasm: what are people actually hyped about?

Vinegar is easy, sharp words, cold silences, and it leaves you bitter and alone. Honey is harder, patience, swallowing pride, letting things slide, but every so often it turns a dead end into a second conversation.

I’ve finished Couch to 5K twice, and both times my trainers ended up back in the cupboard soon after. This time, sidelined by a back injury but hoping to start again, I’m wondering if running isn’t something you finish at all, just an ongoing conversation between motivation and habit.

The gym bags were packed, the plan was set, then a “quick twenty-minute nap” turned into two hours. Takeaway and beer won the evening instead. Sometimes what you need isn’t discipline, just a pause, a laugh, and a decent curry.

Getting online in 1994, the modem screech, Usenet, and IRC before feeds and algorithms took over. A look back at the small, personal web of the dial-up days, and why it’s worth bringing a bit of that spirit back, without turning away from what’s new.

First proper gym session back after a herniated disc: Power Plate, a slow treadmill walk, then gentle yin yoga with Stephanie. No pushing it, just showing up, moving, and ending the day lighter than it started.

Heading back to the gym for the first time since a torn disc landed me in hospital for four nights. No big comeback moment, just trying again and seeing how it feels. After everything, showing up feels like enough.

After a long back injury, what actually helped wasn’t rest or painkillers, it was a 1-to-1 session with Stephanie at Love Yoga Crew. Gentle movement, no pressure, and a reminder that healing sometimes means doing less, with intention.

A quiet act of protest against Trump’s trade war with Canada: two lattes at Tim Hortons, with Stephanie. Supporting decency, one overpriced coffee at a time.

On quietly stepping away from social media and rebuilding a slower, calmer corner of the internet instead. This site can do most of what the feeds do, just without the noise, the ads, or anyone else controlling the space.

Some thoughts on truth, and how hard it is to hold onto when the world feels chaotic. On people deciding what they want to believe first and hunting for evidence after, and on trying to stay someone who keeps looking at the facts clearly.

Homegrown leeks, potatoes, and chives from my own back garden, turned into a simple vegan soup. A few substitutions to the usual recipe, and perfect comfort food for a blustery autumn day.

I lasted three minutes watching the Coronation before switching off. As an Englishman living in Scotland, the pomp felt less like tradition and more like a reminder of a hierarchy I don’t accept. I went for a curry instead, and it tasted a lot better.

A Buckminster Fuller quote got me thinking about why “automation is taking away people’s jobs” is usually framed as an argument against it, when for me it’s the argument for it. Nobody actually wants drudgery, and self-service tills don’t take away things people love doing.

My partner Stephanie runs the socials for her yoga class, and this pakora recipe (or “kapora”, depending on which family in-joke you’re following) is the one she always serves. Too good not to share, in-joke and all.

Back in 2017 I made a set of political bets for the general election, staking a fantasy £100 on each. Six weeks after the result, I revisit the picks to see exactly how much I would have lost, and where Jeremy Corbyn’s surprise surge wrecked my predictions.

Leaving a political party is never easy, especially after investing time and effort into it. I’ve decided not to renew my SNP membership and to join the Scottish Green Party instead, driven by growing concerns about climate change, social justice, and grassroots democracy.