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Monthnotes: February 2026

This month has been about trying to keep on top of things. And about rest – partly enforced, due to catching covid. I also visited Liverpool for the day, saw John Higgs talk about Lynchian in Halifax, and organised my first spoken word event since I-don’t-know-when.

The event was great fun. I was very nervous in the run-up, even though I told myself it didn’t matter how many people turned up. In the end, we had a great audience, most of whom joined us in the pub, and there were wonderful performances from Lou and Toria Garbutt. I’ve written more about the event elsewhere. I loved putting it on, and want to do other events in the near future.

I don’t think I’ve ever been as idle as I was during my covid convalescence. I tried to go back to work as soon as I could, but ended up taking three days off to recover fully. I’d not realised how fatigued covid would leave me, and it was a week or more before I was back to full strength. I still don’t feel like I can climb hills as well as I could beforehand. I wrote a separate blog post on getting covid, a late addition to my lockdown retreat series: Day 2105

The covid helped me drop a little more weight, with 1.8 pounds slipping off over February. I am still a long way off where I want to be, and only exercise will fix things properly. I despair at that – between writing and work, it’s hard to find spare time in my life. But I can also feel myself getting less flexible, so I need to take action.

My aim for writing in 2026 was to set up a flow of work. Most of February was spent finishing the Mycelium Parish News and preparing a piece for the spoken word night. That piece, The Haunting of Wuthering Heights was fun but I’m not sure how effective a use of time it was – I don’t think I’ll use it again anywhere. I attended both Wednesday Writers sessions for the month and enjoyed seeing everyone. I’ve also been experimenting with writing longhand, which I’ve missed. I sent two stories about tarot readers out on the mailing list, both originally written for Wednesday Writers: Cloudy Days and Transfers. But I want to be sharing new work more consistently.

I read a good few books, including a re-read of Wuthering Heights. I finally read Stephen King and Peter Straub’s The Talisman, which I found to be an underwhelming portal fantasy (I am however loving the sequel, Black House). Other highlights were Saraswati and On the Bullet Train with Emily Bronte. John Safran’s Squat was fun, but didn’t always feel plausible.

Rosie the Labrador claiming that she has never, ever been fed

Due to the long time off, I watched 18 movies during February. My favourite was probably Marie Antoinette, which I’d put off watching for years as it’s Olive’s favourite film and I worried I might not like it. Perfect Days was beautiful, and I’ve been enjoying receiving photos of the film’s location from Laurence’s visit to Japan. The recent Candyman sequel was a brilliant slasher flick. I loved “Wuthering Heights” – mostly for Emerald Fennell’s refusal to produce a faithful rendition of the book. We already have enough of those. I also loved how the marketing for Wuthering Heights made it a talking point – was Fennell vandalising a classic or reworking it?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the best way to pick films from my Letterboxd watchlist and I’ve settled on ordering this by popularity. I’d previously tried ordering by average rating, but that surfaced a lot of old and sometimes obscure films. Putting it in order of popularity tends to overlap with things other people I know have watched. Letterboxd is what I want from social media, in that it encourages interaction. But feature creep is already starting, with Letterboxd opening a streaming video store. It’s worth noting that Letterboxd’s popularity rating is, at heart, a closed algorithm, but one that does not currently have a hidden motive.

This is not the first time I’ve taken this photo

Speaking of social media, I finally closed the substack, as I realised I’d been holding on to it, and people were only going to keep subscribing and need moving to the current list. I’ve still not removed Whatsapp from my phone because there are a couple of useful lists on there. A friend describing this as ‘liking the taste of steak’ – we know these things are a trap, but we prefer living in the Matrix.

Work continues to be chaotic, with too much happening at once. One of the big problems with remote work is that you don’t have the dampening effect of physical space. People can’t see how busy you are, so you’re receiving constant notifications. You don’t have to walk between physical spaces for meetings, so they pile up on one another. On top of this, consultancy is inherently about having to choose between competing demands. I’ve been trying a process of mise-en-place to keep control, but this was overwhelmed after a couple of weeks of February. But I am going to keep on at it.

In Winter the sun disappears behind the valley before 1pm

I gave a talk at work on MCP using Spring AI. I don’t get much chance to work with GenAI tools at my current client, so I’m having to keep up in my spare time. The software industry feels very unsettled, with large numbers of redundancies being ascribed to AI. Personally, I think that’s spin about reducing headcount due to the sluggish economy. In the long-term, I’m confident that GenAI will be good for job prospects, but the short-term could be a very bumpy ride. As powerful as GenAI is, code was never the bottleneck for most companies, and I don’t think agentic tools will replace all roles.

February was a good month. When I read back last year’s monthnotes at the end of 2025, I realised how stressed I’d been all year. I’m still not as calm as I’d like to be, but things are on the right track.

Liverpool Cathedral is a beautiful building and it’s a shame that it’s wasted on religion

There are so many things and places I’d love to see in America, but stories like this put me off travelling.
I loved this short story by Jubilee Finnegan: The History of Coming Out To Your Parents Any% Speedrunning
I recorded a podcast interview with Echologorrhea about my favourite work of art. I’ll share the link on the blog soon.
As much as I love living in an old house, my life sometimes feels like a slow panic about maintenance.

Ghosts and Haunted Houses

Alison Rumfitt is one of my favourite writers. She’s written two intense and problematic horror novels, Tell Me I’m Worthless and Brainwyrms. Her writing is precise, with flashes of experimentation. I want to re-read Brainwyrms for the sections about the internet as cosmic horror as much as I don’t want to re-read the scenes of degradation.

Tell Me I’m Worthless describes the encounter of two young women with Albion, a haunted house that stands as an explicit metaphor for modern England. This paragraph in particular stood out to me:

There’s a difference between a ghost story and a haunted house story. This feels so basic, but also so hard to articulate. A ghost story is about the thing that it tells you it is about: a ghost, an ephemeral thing from beyond the grave, trying to contact the living. A haunted house story is about more than that. It is about structure, architecture, and history, Like Jamaica Inn, a haunted house that isn’t haunted at all, but people said it was to cover up the truth of the matter. There aren’t any ghosts in the House. And yet it continues to be haunted despite this fact.

Ecosexual performance night at In a Land

It’s been a very long time since I put on a spoken word event, but last weekend I organised a show at In a Land Gallery featuring performances from me, Toria Garbutt and Louise Halvardsson. (Rosy would have joined us, but was taken ill after her Derby show the night before).

The day started with a hike to Todmorden, visiting Stoodley Pike on the way. I’ve been slack about hiking since the South Downs Way in June, so it was good to be out on the hills. In Todmorden, we bought some books from Lyall’s, ate ramen at the Ginger Tiger, then headed home so I could prepare my performance. (I should have done that days ago, but I’m more just-in-time than I used to be).

I did some short stories, including a new one about Wuthering Heights. I read another couple of longer pieces, A Bad Place to Stick Your Hand and meat. I’m alarmed that they are both almost 20 years old. I also read some microfictions, which seemed to go down well.

Toria performed a poem about growing up in Knottingley, to a backdrop of the current exhibition, which featured images of nearby Kellingley Colliery. Her short set ranged from heartbreaking to very funny. I love watching Toria perform.

I introduced Lou at the end of the first half so that the final part of the show could be completely devoted to her work. I’ve been friends with Lou for a long time (I wrote a post in 2012 about hiking around Mount Caburn with her). I originally knew Lou as a slam poet but her new work is experimental, featuring movement and sound poetry. The piece was based on her forthcoming Swedish collection and had been specially translated into English. It was a fun show, and very different to any other performance I’ve seen.

The best thing about the event was that most of the audience joined us in the pub afterwards. For me, that’s the best thing about In a Land – Bryony has built a lovely community. I knew some of the people who came to the night from recent writing workshops.

Running the event was hard work – and I fretted a lot about whether we’d get enough people in. But we filled all the chairs and had a great evening. I love that I helped to make something like this happen.

Lockdown Retreat – Day 2105

According to the Covid Calendar, it is March 2,112th 2020 – almost 6 years since the covid lockdowns. And, for the first time, I have a confirmed case of covid. I’d begun to wonder if I was somehow immune – I guess the best I can hope for now is ‘resistant’.

At the end of last week, I thought I had a cold, and casually went on with my life. I rested most of the weekend but, by Monday, my throat became painful. Whoever described it as ‘razor blade throat’ did a good job, and gave me a clue what had happened. The final confirmation came with two lines on a covid test. I tried to work on Monday, wanting to keep abreast of urgent tasks, but by lunchtime I submitted to not being well and needing to rest and recover.

I’m not the only person in the house – we have a friend staying too – so it’s been an old-fashioned quarantine for me, confined to the top floor. It’s not so bad – I’ve had delicious meals delivered, and so far nobody else has tested positive. I’ve been tired mostly – napping and catching up on my letterboxd watchlist.

It’s strange to finally get covid when it barely matters, particularly after all the fuss in 2020/21. Covid was such a huge event, and it sometimes feels like it never happened. Odd traces persist – like ghost signs in the streets, this article about queueing in pubs. Isolating with covid in 2026 feels a little like being a time traveller, trapped in 2020. At the start of March 2020, it seemed that things would have been very different because of the pandemic. It turned out to be business as usual, but slightly worse.

Monthnotes: January 2026

Work started a few days into 2026 and was immediately 100 miles-an-hour. I’ve been trying some new approaches to make things less tiring, which are mostly working, and I’m less frazzled than I was. It’s been a busy month outside of work too – workshops at In a Land gallery, a trip to Blackpool, and Rosy’s club night. The weather has varied between icy and quite warm. I’m doing a lot, but I’m mostly happy.

At the start of January my weight lurched out of control, reaching its highest level. This is the culmination of a long, creeping rise since starting with my current client. I still don’t have the capacity/schedule for a regular exercise session, so I’ve put myself on a diet. It hasn’t been too extreme, just cutting out the more indulgent treats. I’m walking a little more too. I’ve brought myself down from the peak, and am moving slowly in the right direction.

Having complained about deadlines throughout 2025, I’ve got several coming up. I’m writing a new performance piece for a poetry night I’m putting on in February, featuring Lou Ice doing her latest work. I attended both Wednesday Writers sessions, as well as some amazing workshops at In A Land. Bryony showed me how to bind my own books and I’m excited about doing some very short-run volumes in the near future. My aim for 2026 is flow, and I need to be getting more work out, but that will come. I did send out my first email on the new Buttondown mailing list.

I watched a lot of interesting films this month. Marty Supreme was fun, if a little flimsy. Kill Bill felt tiresome and over-long as a single movie. Sentimental Value was beautifully made, but kind of dull – it reminded me of Houllebecq’s comments about realistic fiction being less interesting than fantasy. Sentimental Value was a great haunted house movie that lacked a ghost. Hamnet felt emotionally manipulative and failed to impress me as much as it did the rest of the audience. The Bone Temple had fewer zombies than expected, but was incredibly entertaining (wow, that musical number!).

Train Dreams was a stunning view of a man’s life. Rosy and I streamed Emma Thompson entertaining thriller Dead of Winter. It was the 40th anniversary of Blue Velvet, a film I’d not seen for many years. Rewatching it was uncomfortable and troubling – the film’s vicious misogyny was impossible to ignore. Another uncomfortable film was Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla – while I didn’t love it, it was an excellent work of biography.

I picked up a 99p copy of Mick Herron’s Clown Town at the start of the month, and stopped in the first chapter – I don’t have time to read the same Slough House book I’ve read before. Spread Me was a good body-horror. The Bog People anthology was a great concept, but the execution didn’t work for me. I read a couple more Jarett Kobek books and loved Soft and Cuddly, a discussion of an old video game – I wasn’t sure if it was real or invented. John Langhan’s Lost in the Dark was an interesting story collection. Naomi Alderman’s Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today was thought-provoking and deserves a post of its own.

My only regular TV show at the moment is Spartacus: House of Ashur. This is flamboyant, unrepentant trash, but does that job well. Rosy and I also watched Taylor Swift’s End of an Eras documentary which varied between annoying PR exercise and fascinating competence porn. All other things aside, it was interesting to see the sheer scale and impact of the Eras tour.

I’ve been meaning to delete the Substack newsletter for a few weeks now, but have not quite gathered the courage to do it. But, overall, I’m enjoying not being on social media. My views feel less extreme than they did, and I’m calmer about some controversial topics. Reading Naomi Alderman’s new book has me thinking about the urgency of calming down social media in society as a whole. Letting corporations inflame peoples anger to sell ads is not working well.

The 2025 Mycelium Parish news has been through a round of revisions, so just needs the layout, which will hopefully happen in February. This has been a slog, mostly due to the compilation being so chaotic. This is something I’m trying to solve with the 2026 edition. This is already at 900 words and going much more smoothly.

I’ve been taking trying to apply the principle of mise-en-place in both work and outside. I’m trying to keep things tidier as I go, hopefully preventing them descending into chaos. This is mostly working, although there’s the usual problem that becoming more organised feels like an invitation to take more on.

Someone dammed a stream on my daily walk to divert it from the footpath.

I read tarot cards at Rosy’s David Bowie event. I’m not a great tarot reader, and reading in clubs presents challenges, but I had fun (and hopefully the querents did too). I’ve now read at two of Rosy’s events and I’m grateful to her for moving me beyond simply reading about tarot. It’s something I want to practise a lot more.

I had such a long break from work that I worried I might have forgotten some of my passwords.
I’ve been trying to touch type over the past few weeks. It’s proving hard to pick up the discipline, but I am improving.
I enjoyed reading this fanfic about Anthony Bourdain, No Reservations: Narnia.

Hebden Bridge Trades Club, relaxing at Rosy’s event

Saraswati and translit

I picked up a cheap kindle copy of Gurnaik Johal’s novel, Saraswati, and have it cued up to read after You Dreamed of Empires. The Guardian review is lukewarm, but attracted me with this section:

…his first novel is a representative example of a ubiquitous 21st-century genre. That genre lacks a name – in 2012, Douglas Coupland proposed “translit”… its features are all too recognisable. These novels contain multiple narratives, each set in a different country if not continent, often in a different century. Although long by modern standards, they are packed – with events, themes, facts. They address themselves to the big questions of the day, not by the traditional means of examining urban society but through a kind of bourgeois exotic. The characters are paleontologists, mixed media artists, every flavour of activist, but never dentists or electricians. The settings are often remote: tropical islands or frigid deserts.

The reader puts these novels together, like jigsaw puzzles. This term won’t catch on either, but one could call them “connection novels”; not in the Forsterian sense of human hearts, but rather the ecological, cultural and financial structures that link the globe… Not coincidentally, they owe a lot to science fiction.

The connection novel sounds similar to the systems novel (Keshava Guha’s review directly invokes DeLillo, Pynchon, Richard Powers and David Mitchell).

One of the thing I’m looking forward to with Saraswati is seeing a way of constructing a novel with smaller jigsaw pieces. I’ve always wanted to build something larger from the sort of microfictions that I write. The description of the ‘connection novel’ above sounds like a way forward.

Monthnotes: December 2025

The first part of December turned out to be even more challenging than November, and I counted the days until my Christmas break. Most of the month was working or hibernation, apart from a trip to Chichester where I led a seminar on comic books. I finished work with relief on the 19th and settled down to enjoy the end of the year. Both work laptops were stashed in a rucksack and hidden in a rarely-used cupboard. It took some time before I started to feel relaxed. Christmas Day was cosy, and we stretched out opening presents to about seven hours.

Exercise continued to be neglected, and I added a couple of pounds to my current weight. The lack of movement has left me feeling sluggish, achy and heavy. Something to deal with in 2026.

It was another slow month with writing. I’ve struggled to find energy and was not clear-headed enough at times. Mostly, I’ve been removing obstacles and obligations, ready for the new year. I finished a draft of the Mycelium Parish News and need to see what happens next with that. The writing highlight was an excellent workshop at Inaland gallery, which gave me lots of ideas. People were also reading the advent calendar, which was fun – although we perhaps went harder than people would have liked with the final image.

Art show at inaland where pieces were sold from the wall

The pause in work allowed me to get back into reading. I read a brace of Jarett Kobek books – Atta was superb, but the Zodiac true crime duology felt less compelling. I read a dreadful 19290s pulp novel for the dystopian book club. I caught up with David Lapham’s comic book crime saga Stray Bullets. The best book I read was When We Were Real, set in a world seven years after everyone learned it was a simulation. A lighter read was a fesshole compilation, which made me laugh so much that I couldn’t read it on the train.

Despite an excellent programme at the Picturehouse, I made no trips to the cinema until Christmas Eve. The films I watched at home were mostly Christmas ones, and mostly disappointing. Kanye West documentary In Whose Name? was more interesting for its content rather than its form but was compulsive viewing. I disliked It was Just an Accident, which made me feel bad considering what the director went through. My favourite watch of the month was My Cousin Vinny – I loved the relationship between the main characters.

After not liking the first episode, I enjoyed the rest of the season of Pluribus. Taylor Swift puff-piece End of an Eras turned out to be compelling competence porn. Spartacus: House of Ashur is shameless pulp, but it has the same delight in language that Deadwood had. The Chair Company didn’t take on a first attempt, but I want to try it again.

I’ve talked about the stress of work, but it’s also gone well. I enjoyed the office party, which is a good sign. I was given an award for my contributions during the year, which was a wonderful surprise. The break gave me a little time to play with technology – I worked on an MCP demo which I’ll hopefully show at our Java group, and accidentally vibe coded an Obsidian plugin when I should have been doing something else.

The main reason I’m enjoying work is much is probably post-pandemic working. Not having to travel to an office five days a week is much less tiring. I only have one mandatory office day a week, with my client, but I usually visit my home office most weeks. This feels like a good balance.

I took the opportunity offered by the Christmas break to clear some things out. I closed my mastodon account as that was proving to be more of a distraction than a joy. I’ve still not shut down the substack newsletter, but I’m now a paid-up user of Buttondown. I’m also getting closer to deleting my WhatsApp account.

2026 – Flow

In previous years, I’ve set resolutions. This year, someone suggested picking a single word – and the word I’ve chosen is ‘flow’. Having a single work makes more sense than a series of goals that inevitably includes ‘start running again’ like every other year.

Flow to me means removing the stagnation in my life. My impressions of 2025 were overwhelm and inertia. I was caught up in several unhelpful, repeating patterns. By increasing flow I can fix a number of issues – lack of exercise, distractions online, dissatisfaction with my writing. I can deal with the clutter in my life – virtual and physical.

I do need to get out of the house more. The pandemic was great for me, in that it removed the need to head to an office five days a week. But I also got out of practise with going out in general (not helped by giving up alcohol a few years back – I feel healthier for stopping, but I miss the energy of drunken nights out). Interestingly, this need to get out more was one of the themes that emerged in a tarot reading that I had a couple of days ago.

2026 is also the year that I turn 50. As a teenager, this seemed impossibly old but now I’m almost there. I think it’s important not to define or limit myself by my age, while making sure to draw the benefits from it. Sometimes, being this old excites me, other times it fills me with dread about all the wasted time in the past.

There are several things I still want to do in my life. I’d better hurry up and get on with them.

2025 – Pretty Good Year

2025 was hard work, on the whole. One of the benefits of keeping my monthnotes is that I can look back at trends. It turns out that I’ve felt overworked and overwhelmed pretty much throughout the year – not just in the past few months, as I’d thought. That’s something I need to fix as soon as possible.

There were some great highlights to the year: seeing Guernica in Madrid and the Goldsworthy retrospective in Edinburgh. Rosy moved up to Hebden Bridge. Kitty and John got married. Sinners was an amazing movie. I did my first public tarot readings. I performed at a wonderful event in the Brighton Fringe and had my first reading in Hebden Bridge.

Work has gone well. I’m more than three years into this job and still love it. The pandemic has helped with this – permanent office attendance ground me down in all my other jobs. Having more energy has meant I’ve engaged more with my colleagues. My role is challenging but I’m excited about going into 2026.

I’ve struggled with my writing a little, with work stealing much of the energy that I need for that. I’ve wound up the weekly substack and I’m looking into how I can bring a new energy into whatever I produce. I also want to concentrate more on writing that involves real-world interactions.

I’m ending 2025 far more tired than I should feel. It was a good year, but I want next year to be better.

My Favourite Books of 2025

Despite everything, I read 78 books in 2025, about 20 more than last year. Not all of these were good – I still struggle with my primary school teaching about how you should always finish a book once you’ve started. Still, there were a lot of great books to choose from for my top ten this year. As usual, these are ordered alphabetically.

Max S Bennett’s A Brief History of Intelligence was a gift and I would not have read it otherwise – I grew bored of pop-science after uni. But this is one of those rare books that changes the way you look at the world forever. Bennett uses the latest neuroscience to show how intelligence has evolved on earth, and how human brains contain the remnants of simpler systems; and, in passing, the reason for dreams and fiction are explained. Great stuff.

We had two books from John Higgs this year. My favourite was Exerminate! Regenerate! (blogged here), which had a little more space for exploring its subject. Writing about Doctor Who risks being fan service, but Higgs explored the nature of storytelling, as well as telling some great anecdotes about the show.

I originally heard about Miranda July’s All Fours via Sara Crowley’s blog. It’s not a perfect novel – too didactic in places, and sometimes blind to the main character’s privilege – but it’s also a book that’s been read by a lot of people I know, something I’ve not encountered in a long while.

Another excellent horror novel was I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There by Róisín Lanigan. I think we expected more haunted houses from the housing crisis, but this does the job perfectly. The iniquities of renting a home are almost more unsettling than the ghosts in this debut novel. I’m hoping Lanigan’s next book is also horror.

There have been a number of good books on folk customs over the year, but Lally MacBeth’s The Lost Folk stood out. MacBeth has a wide definition of folk, including church kneelers and cake-making, and the book ends with a rousing call about the importance of inclusion in folk.

Joseph Matheny is justly famous for Ong’s Hat, but the conspiracy aspects often overwhelm the literary ones. Matheny’s Ong’s Hat Compleat talks about all aspects of the experiment, including the building of an early language model. The form of the book is also experimental, being released as a parallel text and audiobook that explore different parts of the experiment.

Alison Rumfitt’s Brainwyrms is a deeply troubling and problematic book. It’s very much extreme horror and therefore not for everyone. But Rumfitt is an excellent writer, and this is one of the best horror novels I’ve read. Her first novel, Tell Me I’m Worthless would also have been a perfect addition to this list. She is very much on the list of writers I’ll pre-order.

Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken (blogged here) is a polemic about modern food production and its dangers. van Tulleken’s writing is lurid and comes close to body horror at times.

The White Pube’s Poor Artists was picked up at Todmorden books. It was a well-written, provocative and empathic book about the struggles of artists within today’s society, as well as a polemic in favour of making art.

Careless People is a gossipy book about Sarah Wynn-Williams’ time working at Facebook. It’s also a worrying portrait of the flawed and unpleasant people who have been placed in charge of our world.