Unfortunately I cannot share professional assignments, so here are some examples of personal writing.
Linked in post - July 2025
‘We’re excited to see you at 11.45am on Monday …..’ is the opening of a text from a high street optician about my forthcoming eye test.
Excited? Really? I have an eye test every two years, and I’m not even excited about it.
My local branch is open for over 60 hours per week. So I assume they see a lot of customers with, I assume, a correspondingly huge amount of excitement.
Excitement is generally a passing state and requires a lot of energy. To be perpetually excited is either unsustainable or must be exhausting.
And the likelihood is it’s neither - it’s probably just a word chosen by the directors or a comms team with little reference, and no testing, as to how the audience will receive it.
Is the message really a reminder of the date and time of my appointment?
I don’t need an excited optician and nor do I really want one, but the reminder is useful.
Language matters because language has meaning.
Book review – Good Reads - Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan
Short review
Andrew O’Hagan’s novel Caledonian Road is epic as in heroic or grand in scale or character. It borrows from Henry James in style; Dickens and F Scott Fitzgerald in character; and echoes or references Brett Easton Ellis, Truman Capote and Herman Melville. It is long and it’s convoluted and takes pleasure in being so. It follows the life of Campbell Flynn, a rich man with a growing social conscience who flirts with a life he doesn’t understand. The book chronicles his connections – his family, work, friends and acquaintances, as well as interactions with his lodger. It would be a plot spoiler to say more.
If you take pleasure in a book that ducks and weaves, has a strong cast of realistic but unlikeable characters and makes you flex your brain, then this is a winner. If you like something more upbeat and simpler then leave this one on the shelf.
Long Review
I read other reviews with interest, and some dread. I found this book quite difficult to get into, but once I did, I thought it was fantastic. Yes, many of the characters are unpleasant (but so are many characters in Dickens) and if they appear one dimensional, surely that's the point - many are one dimensional. I felt the book had echoes of The Great Gatsby (many characters are equally unpleasant), Henry James (with sentences beautifully pivoting on a central comma), and even Brett Easton Ellis' Less than Zero (also with unpleasant characters). There are also some redeeming characters - admittedly bit parts such as Jakub and Gosia - who are there, I assume, to provide greater emphasis on the awful ones. I liked the reference to Truman Capote - a nod to Andrew O' Hagan's fantastic one man show at Edinburgh as few years ago.
Caledonian Road is not perfect - there's nothing wrong with a long book, but Caledonian Road doesn't need its length for everything to play out. But it's only marginally too long, it needs some length to explore all avenues with the depth it does.
If there is one criticism, it's that it does a lot of tell, not show ie it tries very hard to illustrate O'Hagan's breadth of knowledge. We veer from Captain Ahab to (Farrow & Ball's) Rectory Red paint colour with multiple references to other 'names' in the process. However, whilst I felt rather smug in recognising many of these references (and writing styles), it is perfectly possible O'Hagan was merely illustrating how far the characters go to try to impress. And perhaps I have also fallen into that trap!
As a final point - it is a read that needs dedication, so less good for a few minutes before sleep and much better suited to a lazy Sunday and a few hours of fabulous reading on a sofa or sun lounger!
Travel writing - Cambodia - May 2025
Today it’s staircases. My eyes are often drawn to the quirk in the scene. And, having seen it, I can become fascinated by it … it’s my nerdy side.
In rural areas here, traditional houses tend to be built on stilts (supports) – perhaps to have protected inhabitants from wild beasts and kept living areas dry from monsoon related or other flooding – of course the latter still applies. The area on the ground floor is useful for storage – a cow or goat or two, car, moped or accumulated junk. It’s also a cooking area. And it’s a cool place to have respite from the heat. Many people in hammocks!
But this post is less about the why the houses are on stilts, but my nerdy fascination in the variety of staircases leading to the first floor.
Yesterday was perfect. A boat across the Mekong to an island, Koh Trong, where I hired a bike. The island is small, and it takes no more than an hour or two to cycle round. It is entirely rural, with fruit (pomelo and mango) in abundance – I gathered a few mangos from the track (juicy and delicious). There were also a few very small shack type shops, trackside stops for food and some homestays; and a medical centre, school and temple. There are no cars, just bicycles, a few scooters and some small farm machinery. Idyllic.
But back to the houses. My sense is Koh Trong isn’t wealthy and yet people consider their staircase and spend money on it. Is this the equivalent to our Farrow & Ball painted front door, Lexus on the kerb or ornate front garden ie internal pleasure and outward show of taste, wealth, sophistication?