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What happens when a pathologist, medical researcher, and science communicator turns his lens toward human lives, history, and the power of narrative?

In this episode of The Third Half, I sat down with Dr. Allan Gaw to explore what it means to transition across careers, rethink our personal narratives, and apply a lifelong curiosity to new horizons. Allan’s work spans medicine, academia, and rich historical storytelling. That makes him a natural partner for a deep conversation on continuous contribution, identity, and growth.

Watch the full recording or prefer audio on the go? Listen to the full conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite player:

https://player.captivate.fm/episode/1f0bc93e-2989-4b46-87a8-a8702b36e22c/

What We Cover in This Episode

In this conversation, Allan and I dive into:

• The Intersection of Science & Narrative: How the discipline of clinical research meets the craft of telling human stories.

• Redefining Identity Beyond a Single Profession: Navigating major career transitions, stepping away from familiar roles, and finding fresh purpose.

• What The Third Half Really Means: Why reinvention is not about fading away or repeating the past. It is about applying everything you have learned to something entirely new.

Links & Resources

Connect with Dr. Allan Gaw:

• Allan Gaw’s WordPress Blog -

  https://researchet.wordpress.com/

• Allan Gaw on Facebook

• Allan Gaw on Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/allangaw8/

Featured Music:

Our Musician of the Month is Rachael Wood. This episode features her track “The Narcissist.”

Over to You

Allan’s perspective on narrative and transition brings up a fundamental question: If you were to write the next chapter of your career or life today, what would the central theme be?

Leave a comment, or reply directly to this email. I would love to hear how these ideas land with you.

Leave a comment

Last year I wrote about the Americans beating the French at cheese, and I mean in a proper actual cheese competition, as opposed to another Tromp-claim to be fact checked. At the Mondial du Fromage in Tours, an American team won the international cheesemonger competition. I imagined the news going down about as well in France as Scotland losing at Haggis making.

Now my friend Rashik Parmar has sent me a World Population Review newsletter titled The World's Biggest Cheese Lovers, Ranked, and it poses a different question: who eats the most?

According to one set of figures, it's Denmark, where people eat around 28 kilos of cheese each per year, just ahead of the French. That's about 75 grams a day, every day, or two or three decent portions before anyone has mentioned crackers. Another ranking names the United States, though it groups the EU into a single figure rather than counting Denmark and France separately. I'm not sure you can declare victory over countries that aren't individually on the list.

Scotland doesn't get its own line either, being quietly folded into the UK figure. We Scots usually are, right up until Andy Murray, or any other competing Scot, loses. Then he's definitely Scottish. Not that a Scottish fridge would trouble the Danes. The average one holds a standard cheddar (Scottish of course) a rubberised smoked cheddar on Sunday, occasionally a cheap Edam at Easter and, of course, Dairylea (every day). Ok I concede - there may be something more exotic making an appearance at Christmas. With cranberries.

Still, this has all given us two quite different cheese contests. The Americans won one with skill, presentation and storytelling. The Danes appear to be tackling the other with admirable commitment over breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I'd like to put the question to the brilliant rock guitarist Rachael Wood. When we spoke on The Third Half, she told me one of her passions was trying cheeses from around the world. She's also got definite views - sharp British cheddar is welcome, mascarpone is not. I suspect she'd judge a country by what's on its cheeseboard before asking how many kilos it gets through.

Julie Cheyney of St Jude's Cheese gave me another reason to look past the rankings. When I asked her which cheese deserves more credit, she picked goats' cheese, which she reckons suffers because too many people tried a strong one once and never went back. Her advice is to taste your way down the counter at a good cheesemonger and expect something fresh and creamy. Having started my cheese education on Dairylea, I'm in no position to argue.

So congratulations to the Americans for winning in Tours, and possibly to Denmark for eating the most. Thanks to Rashik for ensuring I've spent another morning thinking about cheese. And as I’m in Paris, that could be expensive - and fatal.

And Rachael, if you're keeping track of the world tour, how far have you got?

Happy Sunday.

It’s been a busy few weeks for a variety of reasons. Lots of domestic stuff going on and then a mad week in London - four days negotiating with the rail system (delays every day!) an IDC event on Agentic AI (not as boring as it sounds), a new emerging partnership, then an afternoon with inspiring impact driven start ups in Tower Hamlets.

Here’s a few links to what we’ve published on our re-vamped Substack over the last couple of weeks. Have a look around…. Some great chats with some brilliant people (more in the pipeline), and some written stuff that will hopefully inspire, or at least make you smile.

Eleemosynary - A Very Long Word for a Very Simple Truth

On The Turntable: Rachael Wood and her new solo album. And cheese.

Fyfe Dangerfield of The Guillemots. Living life more lightly

Baumpatenschaftsprogramm

Plastic bags on beaches - less of them!!

‘Margaret only has Tuesdays’. But she’s still keen to help….

And there’s more.

Click and browse.

Like and share.

And have a great weekend.

Baumpatenschaftsprogramm. What a word. Catches the eye, and great to say (if not spell). It means "tree sponsorship programme", and in Freiburg, Germany, it gives residents a way to care for the patches of soil around street trees. Which sounds formal for something that began, in at least one case, with a woman getting fed up with the mess outside her front door.

Olivia Besters started tending the ground beneath a chestnut tree because it was compacted and littered. Thirty-five years later, she cares for 36 tree beds around her neighbourhood. Other residents have joined in, and Freiburg now has hundreds of people looking after these little spaces.

I love that Olivia wasn't setting out to save biodiversity. She wanted her doorstep to look nicer. The biodiversity came along too. Researchers found that tree beds tended by residents supported around 1.6 times as many plant species as similar untended beds. And when people are out gardening, neighbours stop to talk. Some decide to have a go themselves.

It took me back again to my chat with Alex Montgomery of Generation Soil, who made me think differently about the life in the ground beneath our feet. In Bristol, his team turns local food waste into living compost. And to Matt Knight of Freely Fruity, whose half-time-in-the-pub question was so straightforward - why don't we plant more fruit trees where people live?

Neither conversation left me feeling that everyone needs to become an expert gardener. Freiburg's story doesn't either. It's about noticing a place you pass every day and giving it a bit of care. Sometimes the neighbours notice. Sometimes the plants notice too.

I may need to practise saying Baumpatenschaftsprogramm. The idea, thankfully, is much simpler.

Read the Freiburg story in The Conversation.

Next Friday, I’m taking part in Action for Children’s Boycott your Bed challenge and sleeping outside overnight. 

Over the past year, I’ve jumped in to support plenty of people and causes without asking for a single thing in return. But with under a week to go, my fundraising total for this sleep-out is looking embarrassingly low, and I really need everyone to now back me on this one.

Right now, 4 million UK kids are living in poverty - going to bed cold, hungry, or without a safe place to sleep. I'm braving the elements for one night to help Action for Children supply hot meals, warm clothes, and safe beds. 

Even just a few quid makes a massive difference. If you can chip in, I’d deeply appreciate it.

PLEASE DONATE - CLICK HERE

Thank you. Sleep well.

After years playing other people’s music, it’s Rachael’s turn.

When Rachael Wood agreed to join us, she ended her email with a confession:

“My other passions in life are cooking and trying all the cheeses of the world.”

So naturally, before we got anywhere near guitar riffs, songwriting or her debut solo album, we had to establish her cheese credentials.

For the record: hard over soft, British over French, Cheddar over Stilton. Mascarpone? A bit “nothingy”.

Serious journalism.

But there’s a really interesting story underneath all that.

Rachael has spent much of her musical life playing other people’s music. She started playing guitar at eight, spent around seven years with Cirque du Soleil, has worked with the likes of Sinéad O’Connor and Skunk Anansie, and is now part of The Wedding Present.

But all that time, her own riffs, fragments and ideas were accumulating.

Now, finally, she’s finished them.

Her debut solo album, It’s Not The End Of The World, puts Rachael somewhere she admits still feels slightly unfamiliar: front and centre.

We laughed a lot recording this one, but we also got into some lovely territory:

- Starting out at eight with an enormous guitar, learning by ear in the days before YouTube.

- ⁠Going from the self-described “side woman” to writing, singing and discovering what happens when everybody in the room is suddenly looking at you.

- ⁠Why Surfy #10 put John Travolta and Uma Thurman into my head, and why somebody else had already told Rachael the album sounded as if “Tarantino started writing music”.

- ⁠Why she finds lyrics so much harder than guitar parts, and describes them as exposing your “ultimate vulnerability”.

- ⁠Why she deliberately avoided using AI to help write those lyrics.

- ⁠What happens when you’re playing guitar for Cirque du Soleil and somebody’s backflip depends on you playing exactly what you’re supposed to play.

And naturally we get back to cheese, somehow devise a film about it, discuss David Bowie, guitar solos, sweaty little venues and the one guitar Rachael would save if she could only keep one.

It wanders about a bit, and we didn’t try to stop it.

Rachael Wood’s debut album It’s Not The End Of The World is out now.

▶️ listen to the full conversation below.

https://player.captivate.fm/episode/d41b9063-553d-438d-9646-5d23c1537ec6/

The Third Half. Interesting people, interesting ideas, and apparently quite a lot of cheese.

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Great environmental news. Actual proper great news. No asterisk, no complicated graph showing that it is only technically good news if you stand on one leg and ignore North Lanarkshire…

As reported by Positive News, in 2014, volunteers working with the Marine Conservation Society found an average of five carrier bags for every 100 metres of UK coastline surveyed. That has fallen by 80% over the past decade.

Five becoming one. That is worth celebrating.

It appears that the humble plastic-bag charge worked. Five pence at first, later ten. A small enough sum to be almost inconsequential, yet apparently sufficient to make millions of us think: “I’m not paying that. There are fourteen bags for life breeding in the boot of the car.”

And so our behaviour changed.

Not perfectly, obviously. Many British homes now contain a cupboard which, if opened carelessly, releases enough reusable bags to bury a medium-sized Labrador. But fewer single-use bags are being taken from shops and far fewer are ending up on our beaches.

That matters.

I have recently bought my daughters jewellery made from pieces of sea glass found washed up on the shore. There is something lovely about it: an object once discarded, softened and reshaped by years in the water, then found and made beautiful again.

Beach glass, yes. Beach bags, rather less charming.

This 80% fall is encouraging because it shows what can happen when sensible policy meets ordinary human behaviour. Nobody was asked to become a full-time environmental activist. We were simply given a small reason to stop taking a new bag every time we bought milk and a packet of crisps.

One person remembering a shopping bag changes very little. Millions of people doing it, week after week and year after year, changes a coastline.

Progress often happens like that. Quietly, cumulatively and without a grand launch event featuring a minister in a hard hat.

There is more to do, of course. Bottles, cans, lids and other single-use waste are still found across our shores. And dog-shit (that does drive nuts). But perhaps we can resist our peculiar urge to greet every piece of good news with an immediate list of reasons not to feel good about it.

This policy worked! People changed and now the beaches have become a little cleaner. Yay!!!

At The Third Half, we often talk about the fact that growth, contribution and reinvention do not suddenly stop. That applies to societies as much as individuals. We can learn, change our habits, repair some of the damage. Un-f*** some of the things we f***ed up (as one of my sea glass jewellery wearing daughter’s once challenged me to do).

Sometimes the evidence is sitting in a report.

Sometimes it is a piece of sea glass made into a necklace.

And sometimes it is simply the plastic bag that is no longer there.

Source:

Positive News

Residents of Little Standing have surprised themselves by discovering that it is possible to object to a government proposal and offer someone a cup of tea at the same time.

The discovery followed an announcement that a disused site nearby was being considered for asylum accommodation. Villagers had questions about the numbers involved, transport, healthcare and how a small community was expected to manage such a significant change.

The Government promised to listen carefully. Unfortunately, its first available listening appointment appeared to be shortly after everything had been decided.

A meeting was called in the village hall, where residents expressed understandable frustration and the microphone made everyone sound considerably more threatening than they intended.

Some wanted the proposal stopped. Others thought a smaller, properly supported centre might be workable. Several wanted more information before deciding anything, an approach which briefly confused those who had already printed the banners.

Then a woman near the back asked whether they might need two conversations.

“One about whether this is the right plan,” she said, “and another about what we do if people actually arrive”.

Nobody immediately objected, although the parish clerk wondered whether that would require separate minutes.

After considerable discussion, Little Standing put a question to its residents:

Should challenging the proposed centre mean ruling out preparations to welcome the people who might live there?

The village voted no.

It was not a vote to approve the centre. Nor was it a declaration that every concern could be resolved through goodwill, homemade cake and a slightly expanded rota for the village hall.

Residents still wanted answers. They wanted the numbers justified, local services properly funded and safe transport provided. They wanted meaningful consultation, rather than the opportunity to download a document explaining why they had been consulted.

But they also wanted to know what a workable relationship with their potential new neighbours might look like.

The parish council therefore continued its objections while a separate group spoke to a refugee charity about practical support. This involved an important early clarification - villagers would not be expected to become unpaid substitutes for the Home Office.

“We can offer friendship,” said one volunteer. “We cannot offer an entire asylum system. Margaret only has Tuesdays.”

A retired teacher offered help with conversational English. The football club suggested an introductory session. The gardening group wondered whether some of the newcomers might know rather more about growing things than it did, having recently devoted an entire meeting to identifying a courgette.

A bicycle repair workshop was proposed, subject to somebody locating the key to the shed.

Not everyone joined in. Some remained strongly opposed to the centre. Others were sympathetic but had neither the time nor the capacity to volunteer. The welcome group did not claim to speak for the whole village, and the parish council did not treat its existence as a betrayal.

There was also no assumption that the newcomers would be grateful, gifted gardeners who immediately improved the football team. They would be people - some sociable, some withdrawn, some struggling, some irritating. Getting along would take more than a photograph of everyone smiling outside the hall.

The village’s message to the Government became rather more demanding:

“If you believe this site is suitable, show us why. If you intend to use it, provide the services and support. And while we continue that argument, we will explore how to make contact with the people who may be coming.”

A television crew arrived to cover the disagreement and found plenty of it. The council chair remained angry about the process. Residents still differed over the proposal. The football club was embroiled in a separate dispute about whether its offer included lending boots.

But the reporter also found people preparing to help, without pretending that doing so settled the argument.

It made a rather good story.

Little Standing has not solved Britain’s asylum policy. It has not established that every accommodation proposal should go ahead, or that communities should quietly absorb decisions made elsewhere. Its preparations may prove inadequate. The plan may change or never happen.

What it has done is leave room for a welcome alongside an objection.

There is something appealing about that possibility, although I say this from the considerable comfort of not having been asked to accommodate a large centre next to my own home. It is easy to prescribe generosity when somebody else will be doing the work.

Still, I wonder whether these discussions have to become a choice between accepting everything and rejecting everyone. A community might reasonably say, “This proposal is wrong,” while also asking, “If it happens, how do we avoid making life harder for one another?”

In Little Standing, they decided those questions could share the same village hall.

They are currently arguing about who should put the chairs away.

As we speak, the first identified ‘new villagers’ have been on Zoom calls with the local parish - a new left back has already been identified and papers are being drawn up for inclusion in next season’s inter-village 7-a-side cup….

I played Through the Windowpane to death 20 years ago. So much so that when I told my now twenty-something kids I was talking to Fyfe Dangerfield, they immediately remembered it from being driven around in the car when they were younger.

When I told them I was actually chatting with him, their response was immediate. “How cool is that!”

And I still love the gloriously chaotic Guillemots performance of Made-Up Love Song #43 on Top of the Pops. Romantic, chaotic and completely frenetic, an older friend of Fyfe’s summed it up brilliantly at the time as “punk schmaltz.” For me, it remains one of my favourite Top of the Pops performances ever.

But this isn’t really a conversation about looking backwards.

I found Fyfe incredibly interesting company. He was thoughtful, funny, curious, remarkably open and, as I tell him at one point, incredibly chilled. He seems slightly surprised by that last description. But spending two and a half hours chatting with him was very chilled indeed.

Looking back, our conversation naturally mirrored the way Fyfe approaches his music right now. In the past, within the standard rules of the music industry, there wasn’t really the option for an artist to be formless. Now, with projects like The Stream, there is.

Our chat took on that exact same freedom. We wandered off in different directions, doubled back, disappeared down the odd rabbit hole and kept finding connections that neither of us could have planned at the beginning. And it’s all here, unedited.

That felt completely appropriate, because what happens when you create so much that you stop letting any of it go?

For years, much of Fyfe’s accumulated work simply sat on his computer. Eventually, he became creatively “waterlogged” by all this material he wasn’t sharing.

That realisation helped give birth to The Stream, part of his Channels May Change world. It created another option, giving music a home that might otherwise never be heard. It is an ever-changing broadcast of sketches, voice notes, characters, improvisations and recordings at various stages of completion. What if music didn’t always have to know what it was going to become? Tune in and you don’t know what you’re going to get. Neither does Fyfe, and he likes that.

There is an important distinction here though. He is still making records, of course. The philosophy is simply that there is a place for everything.

One of the things I enjoyed most about talking to him is his refusal to turn everything into an either/or. The Stream can be formless while an album has form, and Spotify can introduce someone to his music while Channels May Change takes them somewhere much deeper. Fyfe still very much believes in albums, songs and the pleasure of putting them together.

In fact, towards the end of our conversation he talks about working on music with his son’s group and rediscovering the joy of choosing tracks and sequencing an album. It has started to reawaken something in him about doing the same with his own music.

So maybe this isn’t really about finished versus unfinished. It’s about allowing both to exist.

That takes us into a much wider conversation about creativity, perfectionism and the pressure we put on ourselves to get things right. Fyfe talks about reaching a point where he could convince himself a piece of music wasn’t ready until he’d heard 200 different drummers playing on it.

We talk about fear, success, algorithms and listener numbers. We explore making money from art without allowing money to become the reason for making it, and why one person hearing something and being moved by it can actually matter.

Increasingly, we talk about play. That might be what sits underneath the entire conversation. It’s the freedom to make something without knowing exactly where it is going, to share something without proving everything you’re capable of, to follow an idea because it interests you, and to stop worrying quite so much about whether something is right or wrong.

As Fyfe puts it, “Play is life.”

There are plenty of diversions along the way, from Gilbert and Sullivan to X Factor, Bob Dylan going electric, punk versus prog, almond croissants, a woman unexpectedly singing in a restaurant, learning to use a chisel, Interstellar, the wisdom of children, and whether Fyfe Dangerfield should ever be trusted to become an astronaut.

We also go somewhere more personal. Fyfe talks very openly about a dark period in his life, what came afterwards and his aspiration to “live life more lightly.”

Maybe that’s why I came away from our conversation feeling so upbeat, and maybe that is why I was drawn to chat with him in the first place. Fyfe’s willingness to unlearn perfectionism, embrace play and keep evolving feels like the very essence of what The Third Half is all about. Make things, share things, finish some, leave others open, put an album together or throw an idea into The Stream. Life and art don’t move in neat, final quarters, and reinvention doesn’t stop.

Two and a half hours with Fyfe Dangerfield went by remarkably fast. Maybe that’s because neither of us was particularly worried about where we were going.

https://player.captivate.fm/episode/d3b94e3c-9ad1-49fa-9529-ca4083afbba7/

Very Fyfe, really. And very Third Half.

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A few simple questions at the end of a conversation. Don’t think too hard. Say the first thing that comes into your head. Move on.

That was the theory.

We’ve now done it with enough guests to discover that some people are naturals. Some need a moment. And some appear determined to challenge the entire concept of the word quick.

So we put a few of our favourites together.

Ken Deeks, Alex Montgomery, Julie Cheyney, Heather Manson, Fal Thompson, Mark Davyd, Sir Anthony Seldon and Fyfe Dangerfield.

Eight people from very different worlds. Eighty seconds.

And a fairly decent demonstration of what happens around here.

Quickfire. Mostly.

Great people. Great stories.
We think so.

You can pick and choose.

If you’ve been reading The Third Half for a while, you may recall a previous post where I openly wrestled with my own worst linguistic habits:👉 "Circumlocution or Sesquipedalianism?"For the uninitiated,sesquipedalian literally means "a foot and a half long." It is a brilliantly ironic, multi-syllabic term used to describe people who use unnecessarily long words when simple ones would do just fine. I am, as my friends and readers know all too well, repeatedly guilty as charged. I use to think it made me sound clever. It doesn’t. It’s now a form of self ridicule (like laughing about my baldness). Left to my own devices, I will happily trade a perfectly good two-syllable word for a five-syllable monstrosity, usually under the guise of "precision," but mostly out of an unabashed fondness for intellectual linguistic clutter. So, consider this my fair warning - I am about to do it again.

Except this time, I promise there is a genuine, human point behind the vocabulary.

Enter "Eleemosynary"

Pronounced el-i-MOS-i-ner-ee, it looks like the sort of word that escaped from an 18th-century tax manual or got lost on its way to a Victorian court document.

Despite sounding like a medical condition or an overly complicated legal clause, its definition is surprisingly gentle. It simply means relating to or dependent on charity, or charitable.

It traces back to the Ancient Greek eleēmosynē”, meaning compassion, mercy, or pity. Where modern usage of the word "charity" can sometimes feel transactional (tax deductions, annual gala’s, corporate press releases), eleemosynary retains a quieter, older resonance. It isn't just about writing a cheque - it is about the underlying posture of compassion that prompts us to look out for one another.

Beyond Big Words

In my earlier muttering on sesquipedalianism, I celebrated the sheer playfulness of language. It’s fun - honestly - to collect rare words the way some people collect vintage watches or obscure vinyl records. Ahem. But as much as I enjoy dusting off a foot-and-a-half-long term to see if anyone notices, vocabulary for vocabulary's sake is just intellectual decoration.

Where sesquipedalian is self-indulgent, eleemosynary points outward. It asks a practical question - What are you actually doing with what you have?

On The Third Half, we spend a lot of time talking about what happens after the traditional finish lines of career and ambition. When you stop sprinting toward the next milestone, what fills the space? The answer, more often than not, comes back to eleemosynary pursuits (redirecting our time, energy, and accumulated perspective toward helping others flourish).

What an Eleemosynary Life Looks Like

You don't need a grand foundation or a trust fund to live in an eleemosynary way. In fact, some of the most meaningful charitable acts have nothing to do with money at all:

• Generosity of Time. Showing up for people without an agenda, mentoring someone starting out, checking in on a neighbour, or volunteering for a local cause that gets zero spotlight.

• Generosity of Knowledge. Sharing what you’ve learned (especially the mistakes) without charging a consultation fee or holding back the "secret sauce."

• Generosity of Attention. In an era where everyone is competing for clicks and eyeballs, simply giving someone your undivided, unhurried focus is an act of genuine quiet charity.

A Resolution to Use Fewer Words (and Do More)

I will probably never fully cure myself of sesquipedalianism. The urge to use a word like eleemosynary when I could simply say charitable is a personal failing I’ve largely come to accept.

But if we’re going to indulge in long words, we might as well pick ones that inspire us to be better humans. A big vocabulary might make for an interesting essay, but an eleemosynary spirit is what actually builds a good life and a better community.

And it’s better than the dreadful ‘I want to give back’ (as you know…)

always show your source!

There is a brilliant, near-mythic piece of British cultural history making the rounds again.

Richard E. Grant was recently announced as the face of Oxfam’s ‘Second Hand September’. While doing the media rounds, he revealed a detail about his career that sounds like something cooked up in a screenwriter's room. His entire career break happened because of a secondhand coat.

Back in 1986, a young, broke Grant turned up to audition for Withnail & I soaking wet. He was wearing an oversized, secondhand Burberry trench coat he bought from an Oxfam shop. Director Bruce Robinson looked at him and instantly saw the manic, aristocratic, threadbare poet-slacker he was trying to cast. Grant had not just auditioned, he had arrived in character. As he put it himself, "No Oxfam, no Withnail!"

It makes you wonder. What life-changing role, pivot, or new chapter is sitting on a charity shop rail right now, just waiting for someone in their Third Half to try it on?

The Superhero in the Pre-Loved Cloak

Now, I am not saying I am destined to be the world’s next cinematic superhero in my Third Half, but I am certainly not ruling it out.

The main thing holding most of us back from global heroism is not a lack of origin story or a missing radioactive spider. It is simply finding the right wardrobe. Hollywood insists on custom leather and million-dollar CGI tights, but real, authentic Third Half heroism is likely hanging quietly on a plastic hanger between a pre-loved tweed jacket and a retro bowling shirt.

If I can just track down a suitably dramatic, secondhand velvet cape at my local shop, the world better be ready. The best heroes do not wear fast fashion, they wear stories.

The Art of the Secondhand Persona

In our first half, we spend a lot of time trying to look the part by dressing for the job we want, fitting into corporate uniformity, or keeping up with whatever fast-fashion trend is currently clogging the algorithm.

In The Third Half, the goal shifts. We care less about standard templates and much more about character, provenance, and stories.

A brand-new jacket from a high-street store tells you what a designer thought was trendy six months ago! A secondhand jacket, whether sourced from Oxfam or a British Heart Foundation home store, has a history. It carries the patina of someone else’s life, ready to be inherited and rewritten.

Cue Chris Brocklesby: Where Purpose Meets the Rails

When we talk about high-performing systems and charity retail, you cannot help but think of our recent TTH Blueprint guest, Chris Brocklesby.

As CTO of the British Heart Foundation (BHF), Chris operates at the intersection of scale, technology, and purpose. When you walk past a BHF furniture shop or browse their clothing rails, it is easy to see just a shop. But as Chris pointed out during our conversation, behind every store is a massive operational engine.

He summed it up brilliantly when he noted that the bottom line does not say profit, it says funds available for research.

That shift in perspective changes how we view pre-loved shopping altogether. Buying secondhand is not just a quirky aesthetic or a way to find a bargain. It is an ecosystem where logistics meet life-saving cardiovascular research.

While Chris and his team are building the digital infrastructure to keep those donations moving, you might just find the very suit, coat, or vintage cape that sparks your next big chapter.

Auditioning for Your Next Act

Whether you are stepping into the arts, saving the world in a vintage cape, launching a passion project, or simply redefining your everyday style, there is a clear lesson in Richard E. Grant’s trench coat.

• Originality is not manufactured. The best style and the best stories come from things that have lived a little before you.

• Accidental preparation. Sometimes, trying too hard to look the part holds us back. Stepping into something pre-loved allows a bit of serendipity to take over.

• Circular progress. Reusing, upcycling, and supporting organisations like Oxfam and BHF keeps great clothes in circulation while fueling vital research and community impact.

So next time you pass an Oxfam or a BHF store, step inside. You might not be auditioning for a cult movie or fighting crime in a pre-loved cape, but the costume for your next big breakthrough might just be hanging on the rack.

Enjoy the weekend. And if you can, watch Withnail and I.

Or Batman.

There’s a very simple thing you can do to support grassroots music.

Go to a gig..

Not necessarily the band you already love. Go to your local venue, have a look at the listings and take a chance on someone you’ve never heard of.

I recently chatted with Mark Davyd, founder and CEO of Music Venue Trust, and someone who has spent most of his life in and around live music.

Mark’s own story explains a lot about why this matters to him. His relationship with education was, to put it mildly, complicated. Music gave him somewhere to belong, and eventually a direction in life that could easily have gone the other way.

From there came promoting gigs, running a venue, and eventually Music Venue Trust, though what we end up talking about is less about the organisation and more about the strange, fragile ecosystem that lets live music happen at all.

We talk about what Britain stands to lose as grassroots venues close, the frankly bonkers economics of keeping them open, why they still matter for developing new artists, and the people who keep opening the doors despite all of that. We also get into something harder to pin down. Why being in the room when live music happens is different.

That matters to The Third Half. Music has become a bigger part of what we do, from conversations with musicians who’ve been at this for decades to the new and grassroots artists we’re finding through Musician of the Month.

Those artists need somewhere to play.

Those places need us to turn up.

So this conversation comes with a challenge from Mark.

Go to the gig you weren’t going to go to.

You never know what you’ll find.

Listen to the full episode below

https://player.captivate.fm/episode/0f290567-5e09-4d66-87a3-d51f3bad072a/

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A week has passed since we crammed a room full of people into The Flēot, served Yogi’s Sri Lankan food, cut into Dani’s cheese, listened to My Girl The River, and ran an accidental experiment in modern community.

The immediate post-event noise has quieted down. The train to Glasgow is long behind me. Now that the dust has settled, the real lesson of the evening isn’t about how many people showed up or what was served: it’s about what happens when you strip away the social script.

1. Predictability is Comfortable, but Curiosity Needs Room

When you gather people with no pitch, no commercial objective, and no clear target demographic, you take away the safety net.

As Fyfe Dangerfield observed when we discussed his open-ended music project, The Stream, there is a place for everything. There is still a necessary, functional role for corporate hotel conference rooms, structured decks, and curled-up triangular sandwiches on white platters. Predictability offers safety. You know why you’re in the room, what performance is expected of you, and how to exit gracefully.

When you replace that with refugee storytelling, live acoustic tracks, and an open door, you create a different frequency. For some, dropping the agenda feels like fresh air. For others, it’s disorienting. A week out, it’s clear that both reactions are completely valid. We don’t need to reject traditional structures; we simply need to keep offering an alternative door for those who are still curious about what’s next.

2. Silence Isn’t Absence

Watching the reactions trickle in over the past seven days was a quiet lesson in human processing.

Some sent deeply reflective notes about Yogi’s story: his journey rebuilding his life and moving fifty of us before feeding us incredible food. Others dropped a digital icon, while some quietly went straight back to their busy lives without a word. Some were overtly grateful, some quietly so. Some just.. well, quiet (and that’s ok!)

This has been a powerful reminder that genuine community doesn’t require uniform reactions. Silence isn’t absence; it’s just reflection happening on someone else’s timeline. People digest experiences in their own time and on their own terms, and the quiet processing was just as valuable as the effusive praise.

3. The Third Half Space

Behind the scenes, Happy kept logistics running seamlessly all the way from Abuja, missing the event to support from afar (we’ll ensure she’s front and centre next time). Writing this, I’m reminded of how easily we take seamless, remote collaboration for granted.

Jo, Lucille, and the team at Community Coworking provided the brilliant, quirky spot that allowed strangers to become collaborators over Dani’s curated cheese, artisanal kimchi from The Ferm, and CANS drinks.

The core belief behind The Third Half remains simple: good conversations matter, progress should benefit people as well as balance sheets, and curiosity becomes more valuable, not less, as we get older. Life doesn’t move in neat quarters, and growth doesn’t stop at an arbitrary milestone.

To everyone who made the room what it was, contributed their craft, or simply stepped through the door: thank you for being part of the experiment.

People. Planet. Progress.

There’s a slightly odd theme developing on The Third Half..

A few conversations ago, Rebecca Ghim at The Ferm got me thinking about fermentation and what happens to food we might otherwise throw away. Then Matt Knight at Freely Fruity got me thinking about growing food in our communities, getting people involved, and why we don’t simply plant more fruit trees. And now Alex Montgomery has got me thinking about what happens at the other end of all this. The soil.

I’ll admit, before this conversation I hadn’t given soil a great deal of thought. I garden (a little). I grow things (hmmm. Not many). I do buy compost. I complain like others - especially this year! - when the lawn goes brown. But at one point in this conversation I realised I didn’t actually know what soil was. Alex does, quite a lot as it happens.

He’s a researcher in UK food systems and the founder of Bristol-based Generation Soil, which collects food waste from homes and businesses, ferments it using bokashi and turns it into living compost that can go back into the ground. How cool is that.

But this conversation ended up being about much more than compost. Alex talks about the sheer amount of life beneath our feet, what happens to unhealthy soil during drought and heavy rain, the industrialisation of our food system, and a thought I keep coming back to: reciprocity. As he puts it, our current relationship with soil is largely one-way. We take from it. We grow food in it. We eat that food. Very little finds its way back. In fact it’s worse than that.

There’s also the discovery that Alex’s journey towards soil may have started with Minecraft; he’s a founder actively telling people not to pay for his service if they can compost themselves; and a quickfire answer about electric cars I wasn’t expecting.

Oh, and this - there can be around 10 billion microorganisms in a teaspoon of healthy soil. More microbes in your hand than there are people on the planet. Which is quite a thought when you’ve spent most of your life regarding the stuff as something you wipe off your shoes.

This is a conversation about soil. But really it’s about food, community, nature, and whether we might benefit from reconnecting a few things we’ve allowed to become disconnected. And appropriately enough for The Third Half, Alex never really planned any of it.

Listen and Watch the full conversation.

https://player.captivate.fm/episode/58aa1e26-4149-43a8-a79f-ad7c4be058de/

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On The Third Half, we talked about soil recently with Alex Montgomery of Generation Soil. This morning I read an article in the paper that therefore resonated straight off, and then hit quite hard.

46%. Almost half of the world’s farmers and farm workers are being poisoned by pesticides every year. Not exposed to them. Poisoned by them.

A new study, reported by The Guardian today, estimates 402–433 million cases of acute, unintentional pesticide poisoning every year among a global farming population of 934 million. It estimates another 11,000 people die every year as a result.

And pesticide use is going up, not down. In 2023, 3.8 million tonnes were used globally, twice as much as in 1990.

Those numbers are difficult to get your head around. But one sentence immediately chimed loud

“We are just taking food and not giving anything back.”

When I sat down with Alex a few weeks ago, we were meant to be talking about food waste and composting. But, as often happens on The Third Half, the conversation ended up somewhere much bigger.

Alex talked about our relationship with soil. “The relationship we currently have with soil isn’t a reciprocal relationship. We are just taking food and not giving anything back.” And then this. “What we are giving back is harmful pesticides and fertilisers which damage the soil health, the microbial health, our own health.”

Our own health. That’s quite a different message.

It’s easy to make soil health sound worthy and slightly abstract, something involving compost bins, worms and people who know considerably more about gardening than I do. (I had a wormery once, when the kids were young. It was a disaster). But it isn’t. Soil is where our food comes from. Farmers are the people who grow it. And we have somehow built a food system in which hundreds of millions of those people are being poisoned by the chemicals used to produce that food.

The study doesn’t even attempt to quantify the long-term health effects. Nor does it include the estimated 84 million children working in agriculture. Think about that for a moment.

This isn’t anti-farming. Quite the opposite.

Farmers are being asked to feed more people, produce food cheaply, cope with increasingly unpredictable weather and somehow make a living at the end of it. The answer cannot simply be to wag a finger at them and tell them to stop using pesticides.

The researchers want farmers given access to safer alternatives, and the most hazardous pesticides phased out. That’s a sensible place to start.

But perhaps there’s a bigger question too. What kind of food system have we built if poisoning the people producing our food has become an accepted cost of feeding ourselves?

Back to the soil

Alex wasn’t arguing that everyone needs to sign up to Generation Soil. He told people who can compost themselves not to pay them to do it. His point was simpler. We take from the soil. At some point, we have to start putting something good back. Fresh organic matter. Nutrients. Life. Not just more chemicals.

When we spoke, that felt like a conversation about soil. Today it feels like a conversation about people too. 402 million of them, at the very least.

That should bother us. A lot.

Read: The Guardian’s report on the new pesticide study

There’s something contradictory about discovering a punk band because Facebook’s algorithm decided I should. But that’s how I found The Indestructibles.

We did the introductions on Fal-day last week, so I won’t repeat all of that here. A few seconds of noise in my feed turned into a much longer conversation with Fal about what it means to start a punk band now, 50 years after punk was supposedly going to tear everything down. And it turns out there’s more going on here than Mohawks, shades and loud guitars.

A note on language: this conversation, and the band’s lyrics, don’t hold back. Fair warning before you hit play..

Punk in 2026

Fal has a pretty clear idea of what punk is, and what it isn’t. It isn’t the uniform, and it isn’t knowing the right bands, wearing the right T-shirt or being able to name three obscure tracks to prove your credentials. For him it’s still anti-establishment, anti-racist, questioning authority and, importantly, something that should be inclusive rather than guarded by people deciding who is punk enough to be allowed in.

Which inevitably took us to Johnny Rotten. I’d seen John Lydon doing a spoken-word show and came away disappointed by some of what I heard. Fal is considerably less diplomatic: his suggestion that Lydon should stick to selling Country Life butter and leave punk to the people still getting on stage may divide opinion. Good. It would be a fairly disappointing punk interview if everyone agreed with it.

Anger is more interesting when there’s a story behind it

Then we got into the songs. Woman in Black initially sounds like a fairly vicious punk song about a bailiff. Because it is. But ask Fal where it came from and suddenly we’re talking about being 18, getting into debt, having no real financial education, ignoring the problem and watching a relatively small debt become something much bigger through fees and penalties. From there we wandered into vulnerable people, addiction, homelessness and a system that can make life considerably more expensive precisely when you have the least money.

What rhymes with Farage?

Not everything became quite so serious. Fal writes constantly, hundreds of unfinished lyrics sitting on his phone, usually sparked by something that has annoyed, amused or fired him up. At the moment he’s trying to write about Reform, and there’s a significant artistic obstacle: nothing rhymes with Reform. Farage isn’t much easier, unless you’re prepared to get into a lengthy debate about how to pronounce garage. Punk rock has always had its struggles.

The new Top of the Pops

Perhaps my favourite part of the conversation brought us right back to how I discovered them in the first place: algorithms. The Indestructibles have built a sizeable and rapidly growing online audience, helped by Chris understanding how to make short-form video work. And apparently that isn’t punk.

Fal’s comparison is a good one. Punk bands in the 1970s and 80s might not have particularly wanted to appear on Top of the Pops, local radio, the BBC or ITV, but if you wanted people to discover your music, those were some of the tools available. Today one of those tools is a 16-second video appearing repeatedly in somebody’s Facebook or Instagram feed. The band don’t necessarily want to spend their lives making those either, but people see them. Some listen to a song. Some buy a ticket. Some turn up at a gig. Some buy a record or a T-shirt.

As Fal explains it, the music is the product. The videos are the fishing rod, and I was one of the fish.

And what does success look like?

This might be the bit I liked most. The Indestructibles are growing quickly, and Fal talks about riding that wave and seeing where it takes them. Of course he’d like bigger audiences, more gigs and the opportunity to take the band further. But underneath it all is a remarkably grounded ambition: he’d quite like making music to pay his rent and bills. Not fame for the sake of fame, not becoming a celebrity, just reaching the point where playing and writing music can replace working in a pallet yard.

Watch and listen to the full conversation

Fal and I get into Rancid, The Clash, The Ruts, Sex Pistols, stadium gigs versus tiny venues, covers of covers, songwriting, debt collectors, police, politics, Facebook algorithms, why his drummer sometimes causes an hour-long set to finish 15 minutes early, and why Fal really wears those shades. There’s also Seal. Obviously.

Watch Fal and The Indestructibles: The Third Half Musician of the Month Here’s a link to the official video for Don’t Stop.

The Indestructibles are The Third Half’s Musician of the Month.

https://player.captivate.fm/episode/dc7c9388-90b3-4c18-be11-49ab21e11986/

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A few weeks ago, Facebook’s algorithms decided to introduce me to The Indestructibles. They said I might like them.

Damn them. They were right.

So I got in touch with Fal Thompson to see what it was all about….

Next week, they are ‘on-the-turntable’ as our Musician of the Month. So, for no particularly sensible reason, Thursday has temporarily been renamed Fal-day.

Three clips. Three rather different sides of Fal.

1. Punk Isn’t a Uniform

What does punk actually mean in 2026?

Forget the Mohawk, the ripped T-shirts and proving you know three obscure tracks from an album.

As Fal puts it:

“It’s not a uniform. It’s a culture.”

2. The Truth Behind the Shades

Mohawk. Beard. Punk frontman. Shades.

All looking suitably rock ’n’ roll.

Except there’s a rather less rock ’n’ roll reason Fal started wearing the sunglasses in those videos...

Made me laugh…..

3. What Does Success Look Like?

The Indestructibles have been building a rapidly growing audience, but Fal’s ambition isn’t particularly complicated.

He wants to make music.

Why? For a very simple reason.

I liked that. And I really like Fal and his refreshing honesty.

The full conversation goes further - the songs, punk and politics, some colourful lyrics (be warned), debt collectors, algorithms, the state of live music, Johnny Rotten, Rancid, Seal – yes, Seal – and a few places I really wasn’t expecting the conversation to go.

The Indestructibles.

The Third Half Musician of the Month. Next week. Get a little punk back in your life…..

Last night I was on a bit of a high. The Third Half Live had been brilliant, a room full of the great, the good and the bloody brilliant, music and food and cheese and conversations with old friends and new ones, and all the slightly chaotic stuff that makes TTH what it is.

This morning I woke up feeling amazing, if slightly sleepy. Then I got on a train and reality kicked in.

I’m heading from the South East to Scotland today, and instead of cataloguing the woes of my particular journey, it feels like a fairly decent snapshot of something bigger. Problems around Wokingham and Reading meant my train north was late before it had even started. More problems around Wolverhampton, track issues, trespassers, trains and people displaced as one problem seemed to lead another. I suspiciously think they weren’t actually connected, but those infrastructure peeps would like to make you think they are. And all that’s just about getting the train to move.

I’ve barely managed ten minutes of continuous connection all day. Forget 5G. For huge chunks of the journey I can’t even get a usable 4G signal, in 2026, on one of the country’s major inter-city rail corridors. The train Wi-Fi isn’t much use either. The air conditioning in my carriage appears to be attempting cryogenic preservation, and there’s no power at the tables. For the privilege, the train is costing me roughly twice what it would have cost to fly.

I’m deliberately not flying. I’m trying to make the lower-carbon TTH choice when I can. But we’re making that choice remarkably difficult.

None of these things individually is the end of the world - I know that - and that’s the point. We’ve become so ok accepting infrastructure that nearly works. A train that gets there eventually. A mobile network that disappears. Wi-Fi that connects occasionally. A plug socket that may or may not contain electricity. A lower-carbon way of travelling the country that costs twice as much as getting on a plane.

We talk endlessly about productivity, growth, regional connectivity, net zero, getting people out of cars and planes, building a modern economy. But sometimes the grand strategies meet the slightly less glamorous reality of a man (me) trying to get from Berkshire to Scotland, do some work on the way, charge his laptop and remain roughly the same body temperature, without paying twice the price of flying. (I am also of an age that when icily cold, I need to go pee more often - fine if the loos are working, and unusually today, they are…)

If we actually want people to choose the lower-carbon option, it surely can’t be the slower, less reliable, less connected and more expensive one.

Yesterday, surrounded by brilliant people doing brilliant things, the world felt full of possibility. Today British infrastructure would just like to remind me who’s in charge.

Still feeling amazing tho. Just slightly sleepier, and considerably colder…..