Sitting here, on Scarborough beach, I started to ponder. I thought about whether my cat is getting pudgy, how I’ve been wearing the same flip-flops all week, about the smell of the sea when the air is cool and misty, and then, as passers-by smiled and winked and nodded over at me, I had a thought about journalism. Journalism has transmuted tremendously since my childhood nights and lecture days spent hungrily dissecting Rolling Stone and National Geographic articles that made me feel as though I was a member of The Doors or a remote tribe in the Amazon). In all its forms, the media has such a poignant way of connecting us even when we aren’t on the same continent, in the same tribe or band. There are many things haywirey and soul-crushing about it. Journalists have been called terrible names, not only by Hunter S and my own writery father. Many of them get things wrong, they sensationalise, they invent fake realities. But the good ones, they’re what pulled me. I’ve never seen the …

We live in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy (to quote C.S. Lewis), and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship. I’ve never known a time like this, of enforced solitude, silence and privacy. But I’ve known the joys of it when chosen. Sometimes the things we don’t ask for have a way of teaching us lessons we need most. Maybe all the time. I’ve never known a time like this where a revolution of global consciousness felt so possible and so widespread (I wasn’t around in the 70s and South Africa wasn’t particularly woke then anyway). I’ve only read about this kind of chaos, perhaps even the word anarchy could apply, in books. I’ve never lived through war or rations or curfews but I’ve felt my own war, my own rations, my own curfews. Having the world hand these over, having our grip on the future and present so drastically shaken, is terrifying and annoying and saddening, but in some way, and it feels blasphemous to admit, it’s also resurrecting. It feels …