Category: Reflections
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Future Past
My daughter received her GCSE results today. She did remarkably well. Better than her old man ever did, in fact. Watching her consider her next steps, and all the possibilities that seem to stretch out before a sixteen-year-old, I found myself thinking back to my own youth. Like many people of that age, I was…
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Reflection on AI Use in Writing, Part 2: exaggerated language vs the old geezer in the pub
In my last post, I admitted that AI has occasionally helped me climb onto an imaginary soapbox and voice my ideas in a manner suggesting I’d discovered the answer to life’s great mysteries. The good news is that this pomposity isn’t entirely my fault, but partly a result of how the core engine of an…
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Reflections on using AI in writing, Part One or When AI makes you sound like you’re standing on a soapbox.
Perfect spelling, but… I’m a fan of AI. I use it regularly, and I think it’s one of the most useful tools to arrive in years. It helps me overcome writer’s block, tidy up awkward sentences, challenge my thinking, and occasionally rescue me from my own terrible punctuation. But there is something I’ve noticed. Sometimes…
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The Nation as an Operating System — and Why Tolerance Is Enough
Most of my adult life has been spent inside institutions: corporations, trade unions, chapels, clubs, political parties. Each had its own rules, officers, expectations, and rituals. Each was, in effect, an interest group — a collection of individuals and families coordinating their behaviour under a shared operating system. Eventually I realised that the nation is…
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Experience, Speculation, and the Space Between
There’s a tension I’ve lived with for years: the gap between the mystical experience I actually have and the metaphysical systems I enjoy constructing. They coexist, but they don’t meet. One is lived; the other is intellectual play. My spiritual experience is modest and quiet. What I actually feel is a unitive ground of being,…
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The Thin Metaphysics of the Steely Age
Triangularism For years I carried too much metaphysical weight: hiraeth, land‑mysticism, ancestral echoes, perennial philosophy, the ache for unity and eternity. All of it stirred something in me, but none of it changed how life actually works. None of it strengthened discipline, clarified duty, or stabilised a household. It enriched thought, but didn’t improve behaviour.…
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The Philosophy of Steel
The older I get, the clearer life becomes. Not mystical, not bardic, not wrapped in ancestral fog — just clear. For years I carried a soft, atmospheric worldview: hiraeth, land‑mysticism, cultural memory, psycho‑geography, the old stories. They stirred something in me, but they didn’t guide me. They didn’t heal anything. They didn’t change how life…
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The End of the Fluffy Era
Introduction Idealism lasts longer in some men than others. Mine lasted well into my fifties — far past the age when most people have already learned that good intentions don’t guarantee good outcomes, and that systems don’t save people from themselves. I spent decades in causes, charities, politics, and community work believing that structure, effort,…
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Explaining the Axiom
“To act well is to increase coherence without diminishing presence.” This axiom captures the ethical centre of a metaphysics built on dynamic balance. It proposes that good action has two simultaneous obligations. First, it should increase coherence: the degree to which relationships, meanings, and patterns fit together in a way that supports flourishing. Coherence is…
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Compassion and Coherence: A Path to Justice
1. Ethics begins where the part recognises it is not the whole. 2. To act well is to increase coherence without diminishing presence. 3. Every being has the right to unfold without coercion. 4. Freedom is the Infinite expressed responsibly within the Bound. 5. Humility is the part remembering its scale. 6. Pride is the…
Hearth and Heart Magazine 