The first post on a site is always a lie — it pretends to be the beginning of something, when really it’s the first surviving artefact of something that started messily, months earlier, in a document called untitled 4.
So, the small lie: this is the beginning.
The true version is that I left the publisher in October 2023, spent about a year writing things I did not show anyone, started a letter in March 2024 because a friend said the only cure for not-showing-anyone is a deadline with a name attached, and have now, twenty months later, worked up to putting some of it on a page that anyone can find.
What this is
Essays, mostly. About a thousand words. About things that are too small to be news — a stairwell, a pricing system in a bookshop, the specific way a month arrives in a building.
I have exactly one rule, which is that I am not going to write about writing more than twice a year. I have already used one of them. (This one is a beginning, not an essay about writing, and I would like that distinction respected.)
What it isn’t
It isn’t a newsletter, though there is one, and it isn’t a portfolio. Nothing here is trying to get me anything. I have a small income from freelance editing and it covers the flat, and the moment this becomes a route to something else I will start writing to be liked, which is the only failure mode I am genuinely afraid of.
The reason to publish without a purpose is that purpose is a kind of audience, and I can already hear the audience clearly enough.
The balcony gets sun until two. I’ll start there.