I was woken early this morning by the seagulls of Brighton having a screeching session below my window. I like to think this is how they start every week: a parliament of anti-owls, plotting and screaming in democratic consensus, before unleashing their latest mandate of chaos, madness, and chip-based supremacy upon a cowering and fearful populace.

I saw an old friend on Friday. She came down on the stinking Thameslink, and we drank beer and dozed by the sea. At low tide in early evening under perfect blue skies, Brighton beach took on a surreal hue. Beyond the stones, the waters over the sands were shallow and seemed to stretch on forever.

Young people in bikinis halfheartedly threw beach balls to each other. A child waged an unwinnable war against seaweed. Time slowed down for a few perfect minutes.

Later on, drunk, kind boomers outside a pub near the station shared our table, and asked if we were in love.

This friend reads the blog. She’s probably reading this sentence right now. There’s nothing I can do to stop her. She gets updates sent direct to her inbox, so bits of my life appear alongside ticket receipts, purchase confirmations, and other slices of late-capitalist marginalia.

I try to tell her what I’ve been up to, but she already knows. “It’s a bit para-social”.

I understand and share the feeling of oddness. My life, after all, is a sandcastle of unease around the mere notion of being perceived. Coupled with the apparent desire to broadcast my life to all and sundry, this is an occasionally jarring juxtaposition. No wonder I have to have a little lie-down sometimes.

I have two platforms when writing online. [1]

One is this, my personal blog. Hello! I approach writing it with a degree of earnestness. Like I am ten years old and a hungover teacher has staggered in without a lesson plan on a Monday morning, and told the class to write about what they did at the weekend.

So it’s stuff I’ve been up to. Shows I’ve attended, or put on. Walks I’ve attempted, or places I’ve been or nearly been.

I essentially forget anyone reads it, and then get mildly startled when, say, a blog post about the Gosport Ferry gets tens of thousands of views due to a quirk of algorithmic spiders, and suddenly lots of people called Clive get in touch with minor corrections and to note their disapproval of my views on aircraft carriers.

Even this is quite interesting, as the internet now has so few pages left un-ridden by shitty ads and relentlessly SEOed AI slop that my humble personal blog is more reliable and certainly more readable than most local newspapers.

I’ve always attempted to maintain a faint, unironic distance from my actual life here. There are, nevertheless, hints and mentions of stronger tides, and clues and breadcrumbs left for some future version of me to dig through to help remember what I’ve been up to all these years.

But mainly, I write for pleasure, and for the joy of mangling and wrangling sentences, the only skill I’ve ever mastered. Truth will always crop up now and then. It always does, like a daisy missed by the otherwise ruthless mowing of Brighton and Hove’s estate maintenance team.

Some people reading these words are subscribed both to this personal blog and my slightly more public facing newsletter I run – currently – through substack.

Called All The Things We Did And Didn’t Do, it’s a weekly-ish (very ish) collection of writings, reviews, and doomed plugs for events and shows I’m involved in.

But talking to my friend on Friday – hi, Kelly, if you’re out there – I now understand that this delineation is meaningless to the reader.

If you’re getting stuff from me in your inbox, it’s just stuff from me in your inbox, regardless of whether one of those emails is wearing a special metaphorical tie and its best metaphorical hat.

So: plenty to think about. I’m trying to write more, at the moment, and to make my newsletter as regular as it can be.

Writing reminds me I exist, and thus is worth the occasional existential crisis. I hope the collective “you” – you disgusting, depraved, creepy, para-social weirdos – keep on reading, even though the fact you exist at all freaks me out from time to time.

Have a lovely week, everyone.

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[1] or, as we used to call it in the olden days, when the internet was still new and mildly hopeful… “blogging platforms”.