Three stags 🔗Three crossing, The first two fast, The last one stops, Eyes locked. Gazing to the past. Of beasts, Prehistoric, Wandering the land, Not ours. Shared uneasily. A time Forgotten, A feeling Lost, A moment Glimpsed. The stag stares. I shout To the woods, To safety, Away, Enclosed. The stag stares. A moment longer Uncomprehending, But perhaps Feeling The injustice, The change, The alien. Into the woods I follow But soon They are gone.

An ode to rolling with the flow 🔗Friday 17th May - Sunday 26th May 🔗 Berneray. prelude 🔗To take an idea, grow it and watch it bear fruit is a special thing. But ideas aren’t just sitting there waiting to be picked, someone has to dream it up. That happened when Rebekah announced to me: “we should do a bikepacking trip”. To think of an idea, through some kind of interest and wonder, then to say it, is probably further than most people get. I’d bet most ideas don’t even get to this stage. They’re somewhere unthought, unborn, in a void, for many different reasons. To have been inspired by a similar adventure, to be naive and not know what can or can’t be done, are both surely important ingredients. After that, I guess many great ideas are shot down because of insecurities- whether valid or imagined- “it can’t be done, I don’t have time, I’m too busy, I’m not strong enough, nobody will join me” etc…

About a year and a half ago one of my friends and I started swimming every week in an attempt to learn how to do it properly. At the time I could just about swim a single length of a pool doing front-crawl, but would be completely out-of-breath when I reached the other side. I seemingly didn’t progress at all for months, despite watching lots of videos and feeling like I understood what to do. One day a random guy in the pool told me my legs were bent and I should hardly be kicking at all, and also to “scoop” more with my arms. Upon focusing more on using my legs less (very zen), rather than kicking harder, gliding, my swimming improved over the next few weeks exponentially. Since then it has gone back and forth until now I feel as though I can jump in the pool and swim quite happily even after taking a length of time off.

Sunday 3rd September - Friday 8th September 🔗What started off as a climbing holiday turned into more of a Welsh road trip with bits of climbing and swimming at each destination. I’d spent a couple of fairly glum days in Sheffield in the lead up to the trip, feeling unusually without much to do, uncertain about upcoming adventures and ‘waiting for things to happen’. The working life was trudging along solemnely, sameness turning into blandeness. Usually this drives me to a frenzied, desperate search for adventure, and fortunate for me the trip came at just the right time. Sunday morning my dad gave me a lift to the train station, and through the peaks to a small, leafy town called New Mills I went. Shortly after, Joe arrived and picked me up, and the adventure had begun.

The Question: What would happen if we paid cocoa plantation workers in the Ivory Coast the British minimum wage? 🔗The background to this post is that yesterday I was making brownies, and happened to be using a brand called “Tony’s Chocaloney”. This brand says it is trying to end slavery in chocolate production. At that moment, a strange confluence of thoughts hit me, meeting between Joel Haver’s new video, Jori Lewis’ new book (Slaves for Peanuts) and Silvia Federici’s book (Re-enchanting the world). Those thoughts mingled for a bit and the above question occurred to me.

Norway: July 2022 🔗 The Gjende in all it’s glory, with the Bessegen ridge continuing on the right. At the time of writing this, about one year ago I embarked on a solo trip to Norway. I’d just been told I would be let go from my job and expected to be offered a new on starting in about 6-week’s time, and I saw the opportunity looming ahead of me to get away on some travels.

Dark Grain Spoon 🔗August 2023 🔗 Spiral Spoon 🔗August 2023 🔗 “Mountain” spoon 🔗December 2021 🔗 Hollow spiral spoon 🔗April 2020 🔗

About 🔗 I want a place to share stories that isn’t the advert-filled, hyper-partisan, toxic world of social media. This blog emerged as a place to act as a portfolio for my web development projects and a traditional blog. There are a bunch of old-school blogs I enjoyed reading over the years. Blogs with a consistent, domain-specific type of content like Steve McCurry’s photography blog, or idiosyncratic blogs packed full of information that operate more like a place for imparting ideas like Bret Victor’s, blogs with humorous trip reports like Julian Todd’s, random old blogspots like Straybob’s, places to share deep, meaningful stories like Ben Winston’s.

My Portfolio (GitHub/LinkedIn) 🔗 🔗CitizensForCycling (https://www.citizensforcycling.com/) 🔗React, Google Maps API, Supabase, Cloudflare Worker. A fully-fledged application with user authentication, persistent data and interactive visualisations. 🔗#Deep (https://www.hashtagdeep.com/) 🔗React, Typescript, NodeJs, Postgres. A small application that posts a philosophical question each day. 🔗UK Supply Chain Project (In Progress: https://github.com/matt-chaib/uksc-backend) 🔗Django, React, Postgres. 🔗Mini Vue Data Dashboard (https://vue-js-dashboard-kappa.vercel.app/) 🔗Vue.js 🔗Old blog posts on text mining (https://lovely-phoenix-f840c2.netlify.app/post/) 🔗R (Tidyverse) 🔗Some fun animations: 🔗Javascript, CanvasJs https://mogs-git.github.io/circle_waves/ https://mogs-git.github.io/raindrops/ https://mogs-git.github.io/flower_maker/