Fair warning: there is no editorial strategy here. No content calendar. No carefully curated themes designed to grow an audience. Just me, a keyboard, and an apparently uncontrollable urge to share my thoughts with whoever stumbles across this corner of the internet.
I'm in the business of sport, so don't be surprised if this skews heavily in that direction — it's where most of my opinions have been sharpened, occasionally to the discomfort of the people they were aimed at. But sport is only part of it. Politics matters to me. So does culture. So does the creeping sense that the world has gone slightly mad and nobody in charge seems to have noticed.
On that note: I've become increasingly convinced, especially in recent years, that history is grotesquely underrated. Somebody — I've never tracked down who, and I suspect neither has anyone else who quotes it — said that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. They were right then. They're even more right now. The world is in enough of a mess that a bit of reading about past mistakes seems less like a hobby and more like a public health intervention.
Which brings me to reading in general, a habit I'd cheerfully recommend to anyone currently watching their fourteenth short video in a row about someone else's gym routine. Books are tremendous. Long ones, short ones, old ones, inconveniently dense ones. I'll bang this drum regularly and without apology.
Not that long ago, if you had a strong opinion and the nerve to match it, you could rock up to Hyde Park, plant yourself on a soapbox, and hold forth to anyone who happened to walk past. Some listened. Most didn't. The pigeons definitely didn't. Today we have social media, which is essentially the same thing but with a global audience, a comment section, and a far higher risk of someone screenshotting you out of context.
This, then, is my soapbox. These opinions will be read by many, or possibly none — I genuinely have no idea and have made peace with both outcomes. Either way, it scratches an itch I've had for years to inflict my views on the world in long-form. You've been warned.