Home Working Henry, Helping The Business of Life Starts at Home
Every time Arsenal win a trophy, whether it is the FA Cup or the Premier League title, it brings with it a bittersweet mixture of joy and nostalgia. Watching the Champions League final brought that Bittersweetness all together. There have been FA Cup victories, memorable moments, and days when everything felt possible. The last three years felt like a title was near. And yet during that period…
How I migrated my blogs to Bearblog, why minimalism matters, and what the numbers reveal about this simple blogging platform.
It is a slightly cold and damp autumnal day and I am in a park in Scotland, following my toddler discovering the wonders of trees, bushes and grass. Suddenly he points at a small cluster of mushrooms and looks at me curiously. I tell him, “do not touch,” and, for some reason, I take a photo. Snap. He laughs. We find more mushrooms. Snap. He laughs. That was how my journey with mushrooms began.…
Before we made the move up to Scotland, I lived in a place called “the Cottage” in rural Hampshire, at the edge of a village. It had a very Midsomer Murders vibe, nestled between a railway line, a village hall, allotments, and a village that, although in the countryside, was certainly not cut off from it. Many people still commuted into larger towns for work. We spent a good number of years there,…
As I write this, an American president is threatening to end a civilisation and chatting to toddlers about Autopens. America has throughout my life been a constant: the world’s superpower. An unabashed place that leads the world in science, art, creativity and raw military power. Today it feels like a superpower that has become a shadow of its former self. Childhood and Teenage Years As a child…
You can sense the grey skies through the light poking through the curtains and can hear the rain pitter-patting on the window. You can hear the dog snoring in the corner of the room. The slow rhythm of gentle sleep. The bed is warm. It’s snug. It feels wonderful. So why not stay in bed a little longer? Why not snuggle down and avoid getting up altogether? After all, the bed feels precious. This…
Britain feels remarkably flat at the moment. Is it just me? The other weekend, we travelled over the border into England. It just felt more miserable, flat and depressing. Anecdotally at least, this is one data point among many observations. Britain feels like it is in the middle of a deep crisis of confidence. As a nation it feels like something is going wrong. In England it feels even worse. As…
The fourth Gulf War (the ongoing US-Iran conflict, 2025-) has primarily been fought so far with drones, missile defence and unrivalled US air power. Wars in the gulf region have a habit of happening every 10 years or so, starting with the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (and ensuing conflict) and this present iteration. The conflict has…
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has written an excellent, insightful and interesting book that could have easily been a quarter of the length. The central premise of the book is that there are things that are fragile, robust and antifragile. Our society is increasingly built on fragility and complexity. This complexity is going to bite us in the ass, though Black Swans or as we called it recently Covid 19)…
This is the best book on the Soviet Union I have ever read. And I have read a lot about the Soviet Union. Too much in fact. Conor O'Cleary lived in Moscow towards the end of the Soviet Union, and he genuinely brings a superb perspective on the tradegy that the collapse of the Soviet Union. The book is insightful, full of facts, and paints a bleak yet real picture of Moscow during the collapse. The…