No, really.

Well… absolutely not.

Let’s clear that up before anyone phones my wife.

This isn’t an announcement. It isn’t a stunt. It certainly isn’t a judgement on people who use the platform, whether they’re creating content or making a living from it. That’s their choice, and this article isn’t about that. Nor is it about exploiting people or making light of platforms that many people rely on for income.

It’s about attention.

I was reading an article this week in Positive News - probably my favourite read of the month, if not the year - about climate campaigners taking their message onto OnlyFans because they were frustrated that important conversations were disappearing into the noise elsewhere.

My first reaction wasn’t laughter. It was a full-body cringe. Then I read on, and the more I thought about it, the more uncomfortable it made me, not because of the platform itself, but because it forced me to confront a bigger question. What if they’re right?

My good mate Dan Ilet has been telling me for years that our favourite business networking channels are largely hopeless for this sort of thing. LinkedIn, in particular, is an endless conveyor belt of sales pitches, company announcements, recruitment posts, humblebrags, product launches, funding announcements and people congratulating each other for being thought leaders. Somewhere in amongst all that are genuinely interesting conversations, but they’re increasingly difficult to spot. I’ve moaned about the lack of genuine conversation there before….

The irony, of course, is that Dan still posts on LinkedIn. So do I. And therein lies the problem.

Some of my posts seem to find an audience. Others disappear without trace. Sometimes I think I’ve written something half decent and it sinks like a stone. Other times I knock something together over a coffee and thousands of people read it. I’ve even heard, third hand, that I’m becoming a bit of a LinkedIn bore. Fair enough. If you’ve thought that and been too polite to say it, thank you for your honesty. If you haven’t, someone else has done it for you.

Perhaps I should stop posting altogether. Or perhaps everyone who unsubscribes from The Third Half will receive a signed, tastefully lit glamour portrait of yours truly through the post.

Relax.

That’s satire.

Although, if subscriptions dip much further, the 2027 calendar may yet become a collector’s item.

The point is this. We’re living in an age where almost everyone is shouting and almost nobody is listening. Every platform is optimised to keep us scrolling, clicking and consuming the next thing. The algorithm doesn’t care whether your post is thoughtful or important. It cares whether people stop. Perhaps the problem isn’t the message. Perhaps it’s the venue.

The Third Half has always been an experiment in exactly that. We’ve had musicians, entrepreneurs, academics, playwrights, environmentalists, technologists, food innovators and people with extraordinary stories that deserve to be heard. There has never been a shortage of fascinating conversations. There has, however, occasionally been a shortage of people discovering them. That’s on me. Maybe I’ve been trying to fish in the same pond as everyone else.

The article made me wonder where ideas really travel today. Not where communicators think they travel, but where real people are actually paying attention. Festivals? Music venues? Theatre foyers? Football clubs? Breweries? Community projects? Farmers’ markets? Park benches? I genuinely don’t know. What I do know is that posting another worthy article on LinkedIn probably isn’t the answer. If climate communicators are prepared to challenge convention to reach new audiences, perhaps the rest of us should be a little more imaginative too.

No, I’m not announcing a new content strategy involving strategic nudity.

The world has suffered enough.

But I am becoming increasingly convinced that if we genuinely care about People, Planet and Progress, then we also need to care about where those conversations happen. Brilliant ideas whispered into empty rooms don’t change very much at all. So don’t be surprised if The Third Half starts popping up in places you weren’t expecting. The venue might change. The conversations won’t.

And if you clicked on this because you thought I’d finally lost the plot…

…thank you for proving the point.

PS. This article was inspired by an excellent piece in Positive News. The article isn’t really about OnlyFans at all. It’s about the challenge of communicating important ideas in a world that has become extraordinarily good at scrolling past them. Whether you agree with the approach or not, it’s well worth a read.

https://www.positive.news/environment/can-provocative-climate-messaging-on-only-fans-cut-through-social-medias-noise/

People. Planet. Progress.

Subscribe now

Yesterday should have been a complete write-off.

The hottest day of the year. Amber weather warnings threatening to turn red. Rail services collapsing in slow motion. My wife sensibly decided that spending an evening travelling around London in temperatures around 35 degrees wasn’t her idea of fun (and she was off working early in the morning too and didn’t want to get stranded – god bless our rail network).

To be honest, it wasn’t sounding much like my idea of fun either.

I spent most of the morning looking at train apps and weather forecasts, trying to convince myself that staying at home was the sensible option. Every time I checked, another train seemed to be cancelled, delayed or diverted. The logistics were becoming ridiculous. Three separate train journeys to get to a small gig in London.

Scotland were playing Brazil at 11pm. A neighbour had already invited me round to watch the match. There was a cold drink, a comfortable chair and a perfectly reasonable excuse not to go.

When I mentioned my doubts to my old mate JJ, he was having none of it.

“Get your lardy arse up to London. I managed to survive ‘76.”

As the day went on, the temperature climbed beyond that.

By mid-afternoon I had a headache, I was sweaty, uncomfortable and still unconvinced. Then I had one of those moments that probably happens less seldom that it should for all of us. I stopped looking for reasons not to go - and simply decided to go.

So I sensibly donned a hat and walked to the station in the roaring heat. Local train to Reading. ‘Fast’ (not fast) train to London - one of a very small number going anywhere at any speed. London underground (oh my, my lardy ass was getting fried right there). More walking. More heat.

And it turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve made in weeks.

First there was some time with child 2, Flora. Since she’s moved to London we don’t see nearly as much of each other as we’d like, so grabbing a beer together and having a proper laugh felt like a gift.

Then JJ arrived and the three of us spent the next hour putting the world to rights, talking about life, work, public services and everything in between. And laughing. A lot.

After that, JJ and I headed to The Water Rats.

If you’ve never been, it’s exactly the sort of venue that reminds you why live music matters. Small. Intimate. No distractions. No giant screens. No corporate hospitality. Just artists, songs and an audience.

Bella Collins, the support act, was excellent. (So good that I’ve already invited her onto The Third Half!)

Then Anna Howie walked on stage.

Now, I should declare an interest. Anna was the very first Musician of the Month on The Third Half, so I’ve been a fan for a while – she is a brilliant human. But if anything, last night exceeded expectations.

There couldn’t have been more than fifty people in the small intimate room, yet from the moment she started singing she held every single person there. Not through volume or theatrics, but through sheer presence. Some performers command attention because they’re loud. Anna commands attention because she’s authentic.

Her music sits somewhere between country and Americana, but that’s only part of the story. What really sets her apart is her songwriting. She notices things. Small details. Everyday moments. Relationships. Conversations. The things most of us walk past without a second thought. Then she somehow turns them into songs that feel deeply personal and completely universal at the same time.

The humour is there, of course. Anna has a wonderfully mischievous streak and a knack for making an audience laugh. But what had me pinned down last night was the emotional depth beneath it all. Behind the cheeky smile and the playful observations are songs about love, loss, hope, disappointment and the complicated business of being human.

The best writers tell the truth, even when they’re disguising it as entertainment. Anna does that exceptionally well.

For an hour and a quarter she had me and JJ completely engrossed. No checking phones. No trips to the bar. No wandering attention. Just listening.

In an age where we’re all supposedly consuming more content than ever, that’s a surprisingly rare thing.

Anna connected effortlessly with the room. The songs were wonderful, the musicianship superb, but it was the storytelling, the emotion. Every song felt like an invitation into a moment, a memory or an observation that mattered to her and, by the end of it, somehow mattered to all of us as well.

It was one of the finest gigs I’ve seen in the last year.

Then came the journey home. More trains. More heat. More delays.

I arrived back just in time to catch the second half of Scotland’s match.

Scotland lost 3-0.

Not every part of the evening was perfect.

But here’s the thing. If I’d stayed at home, I’d have missed all of it. The beer with Flora. The laughs with JJ. The discovery of a brilliant support act. One of the best live performances I’ve seen in a long time.

Sometimes perseverance sounds far too grand a word. Nobody crossed an ocean. Nobody climbed a mountain. I just got on a train.

But life has a habit of rewarding the people who occasionally make the effort when it would be easier not to.

If you get the chance to see Anna Howie live, take it. https://www.annahowiemusic.com/

And if you’re sitting at home wondering whether you can really be bothered to go somewhere, see someone or do something you’ve been looking forward to, remember the wise words (sic) of my old mucker JJ…

‘Get your lardy arse out the door’.

You never quite know what you’re going to find when you get there.

People. Planet. Progress.

Subscribe now

I seem to hear the same phrase several times a week these days.

Sometimes it’s at an event. Sometimes it’s over lunch. Sometimes it’s from a former colleague I haven’t seen for a while. Occasionally it’s from somebody who has somehow managed to steer a conversation about music, sport, holidays or the weather back round to their pension arrangements.

The phrase itself varies slightly, but the meaning is always the same.

“Of course I could retire tomorrow.”

I’ve reached the point where I barely react to it. Not because it’s unusual, but because it’s become so predictable. Partly that’s an age thing, of course. When you’re in your twenties, people talk about promotions, mortgages and where they’re going on holiday. Once you reach your fifties and sixties, conversations start drifting towards pension pots, downsizing, buy-to-lets, grandchildren and whether Portugal is really as good as everyone says it is.

What I find interesting, though, is that the people who tell me they could retire almost never seem to be making any serious effort to do so. In fact, the opposite is often true. The man explaining that he no longer needs to work is also advising three startups, chairing a board, mentoring two founders and somehow fitting in enough lunches to keep half the hospitality industry afloat. The woman telling me she could walk away tomorrow is in the middle of writing a book, raising money for a charity and planning a new business venture. Neither looks remotely ready for a life of daytime television and discounted coach trips.

Which makes me wonder whether retirement is actually the point.

There’s a particular version of this I notice mostly, though not exclusively, among men in their early fifties. It isn’t really about freedom at all. It’s a flex dressed up as a throwaway remark, a way of saying look how well I’ve done without having to say it outright. The pension pot becomes the new company car. I can usually tell the difference within about thirty seconds of a conversation starting, and it’s a different thing entirely from what follows.

Because for most people, I don’t think it’s boasting about money, at least not consciously. What they’re really talking about is freedom. They’ve reached a stage where they no longer have to do certain things. They can choose their projects. They can choose who they work with. They can say no to the client, the boss, the commute or the endless internal meeting that should have been an email.

That’s a wonderful position to be in. But it isn’t retirement. It’s autonomy. And the two are very different things.

Over the past year, through The Third Half, I’ve talked to musicians, academics, founders, campaigners, former executives, sportspeople and charity leaders. Many of them are well beyond the stage of life where anyone would blame them for putting their feet up, yet very few seem interested in doing so. What drives them isn’t money, and in most cases it probably hasn’t been money for years. It’s curiosity, contribution, the chance to build something or support something or leave something behind. Some are writing albums. Some are launching businesses. Some are mentoring younger people or campaigning for causes they care about. A few are doing all of it at once. The common thread is that they remain engaged with the world around them.

I suspect that’s what a lot of people actually mean when they tell me they could retire tomorrow. What they’re really saying is that they’ve earned the right to choose.

Fair enough.

But there’s another group. You know the ones. The people who have been telling you they could retire for the last five years. Every conversation somehow circles back to it. Every lunch includes an update. Every social gathering brings a fresh analysis of whether next year might finally be the year. At some point it starts to sound less like a plan and more like a hobby, and that’s the bit I struggle with.

Retirement isn’t a hostage negotiation. It isn’t a software implementation project. It doesn’t need quarterly updates and a steering committee. If you want to retire, retire. Travel, volunteer, read, walk, golf, paint, grow tomatoes, learn Italian, spend more time with your family, whatever it is that makes you happy, go and do it.

But if you’ve been telling me every six months for the past decade that you could retire tomorrow, I reserve the right to conclude that you don’t actually want to. And that’s fine too. Just be honest about it. There’s nothing wrong with continuing to work, create, contribute and stay involved if that’s what gives you energy. Some of the happiest people I know have built exactly that life.

So here’s my entirely unsolicited advice.

If you want to retire, FFS just do it!!

The rest of us don’t need the quarterly update.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

https://www.positive.news/economics/imagination-and-creation-are-products-of-time-and-space/

We have talked about this before on The Third Half. Phillippa Mole studied art at university alongside sport, then spent three decades as a sports psychologist, a GB bobsleigh athlete, a BBC broadcaster, a coach. The art never went away, she says, it was just bubbling under, unshown. She paints abstract now, chasing the feeling of movement rather than the thing itself, the kind of motion she spent half her life living through sport before she ever put it on canvas. April De Angelis trained as an actress, gave up on writing as a hopeless idea, then years later won a playwriting competition off the back of a leaflet and never looked back. Neither of them set out to become what they became. They just kept paying attention until something else became possible.

Imagination and creation are products of time and space.

Simple enough. Obvious, even.

Yet somewhere along the way we seem to have decided that every minute should be occupied, every silence filled and every empty corner of life optimised.

We carry entire libraries in our pockets but rarely sit long enough to read. We have access to more music, art, poetry and culture than any generation before us, yet somehow find ourselves scrolling past much of it in search of the next distraction.

The irony is that many of the things that make life richer require the very thing we seem least willing to give them: time.

A song is more than three minutes of entertainment. A painting is more than a splash of colour. A poem is more than words on a page. Art invites us to stop, observe, reflect and occasionally see the world differently.

That feels increasingly important. Neil Griffiths of the charity Arts Emergency made the same point recently, almost word for word, writing in Positive News about Ireland’s basic income for artists. The scheme has just been made permanent after the figures showed it paid for itself. One artist who benefited had been working part-time as a receptionist to cover her rent. Once that pressure lifted, she made her first film. The money didn’t buy her talent. It bought her time.

I have good Irish friends and find myself in Dublin a fair bit these days, so this one is for them, and for whoever out there is the next Joyce, Wilde or Heaney and doesn’t know it yet. Ireland has gone further than most in actually paying for that idea rather than just admiring it from a distance.

The world does not need another algorithm telling us what we already know.

It needs people willing to imagine something different.

The Irish have always seemed to understand this. For a relatively small island, Ireland has gifted the world an extraordinary number of storytellers, playwrights, musicians and poets, people who could take the ordinary and reveal something extraordinary within it. Not because they had better technology or bigger budgets, but because they paid attention. They noticed the details, the conversations, the landscapes, the humour and heartbreak of everyday life.

Great art rarely emerges from haste. It emerges from observation.

A musician sits with an idea until it becomes a melody. A writer wrestles with a sentence until it says exactly what it means. A poet finds a way to express something that everyone has felt but nobody has quite managed to describe.

Those things take time.

More importantly, they require space. Space to think, to wander, to be bored, to sit in a cafe, stare out of a train window, walk along a beach, listen to an old record or simply let the mind drift without purpose.

Many of the best ideas arrive when we stop trying so hard to find them. April still has half-written titles sitting on her computer, ideas she loved for four days and then quietly let go of on the fifth. They are not failures. They are the cost of doing the work at all.

Perhaps that is why art matters so much. Not because everyone should become an artist, but because art reminds us there is value beyond productivity, that not everything worthwhile can be measured, that beauty has a place in our lives. Creativity is not a luxury. It is part of what makes us human.

The next great poem, song, painting or story is probably already out there somewhere, waiting for someone to give it the time and space it deserves.

Maybe the challenge for all of us isn’t learning how to do more, but learning how to leave a little more room for imagination.

After all, imagination and creation are products of time and space.

The question is whether we are still prepared to make room for either.

People. Planet. Progress.

https://www.positive.news/economics/imagination-and-creation-are-products-of-time-and-space/

Subscribe now

Share

I’ve got a confession. I’ve never really been a festival person.

I’ve been to plenty of gigs over the years, more pubs and village halls than muddy fields, and I’ve spent far too much money on T-shirts that seemed like a good idea at the time. But the idea of a weekend at Reading, Leeds or even Glastonbury has never particularly appealed.

For many people, they’re bucket-list events, cultural institutions, a rite of passage. To me, they’ve often felt like badges more than experiences. They’re just not for me.

This year, however, Katie and I are heading to WOMAD. Less a race to the biggest headline act, more an opportunity to discover something unexpected.

Which is why a story I read this week about a festival on the Isle of Wight caught my attention. The organisers have put nature itself at the centre of the programme rather than celebrity performers. The island is the attraction, not as a backdrop or a venue, but as the star.

It sounds simple, but it’s a surprisingly radical idea.

For years we’ve talked about sustainability as though it sits alongside our lives rather than underneath them. We build businesses around growth, technology around convenience, events around entertainment, and then we ask how we can make them a little greener. The Isle of Wight festival flips that around. What if nature isn’t the thing we work around? What if it’s the thing we build around?

That question reaches well beyond a festival programme. Environmental impact tends to get treated as a constraint, a cost, something that gets in the way of progress. But the organisations that will thrive in the coming decades may well be those that start with the planet and design from there, not because regulation demands it, but because it creates better products, stronger communities and more resilient organisations. Every digital decision eventually becomes a real-world one. Progress and responsibility aren’t opposing forces. They’ve always been drawing from the same account.

What I particularly like about this initiative is that it avoids the trap of guilt. Nobody is being lectured or shamed. People are simply being invited to reconnect with the place they live. The most effective environmental thinking rarely starts by telling us what we’re doing wrong. It starts by reminding us what we value: a beach, a woodland walk, a favourite stretch of coastline. The things worth protecting are usually the things we already love.

In a world obsessed with finding the next headline act, there’s something quietly refreshing about an event that suggests the biggest attraction was here all along.

Nature doesn’t need a support act. It just needs us to pay attention.

People. Planet. Progress.

https://www.positive.news/environment/the-island-festival-putting-nature-before-acts/

Subscribe now

A lot of sustainability is sold to us as something new.

New frameworks.

New technologies.

New targets.

New reports.

Then you meet someone like Rebecca Ghim and realise that some of the most powerful sustainability ideas are actually very old.

Rebecca is the founder of The Ferm, a London food business built around fermentation and food waste. But what fascinated me during our conversation wasn’t really the kimchi.

It was the philosophy.

Long before sustainability became a boardroom discussion, Rebecca’s family simply didn’t waste things. Vegetable stems were food. Leaves were food. Parts of ingredients that many of us ignore were treated as valuable.

Not because it was fashionable.

Because it made sense.

That mindset now sits at the heart of The Ferm.

During our conversation, Rebecca described seeing hundreds of kilograms of perfectly usable vegetables being discarded. Not because they were spoiled. Not because they were unsafe. Simply because modern food systems often struggle to find a place for them.

The response wasn’t outrage.

It was action.

What began as a design project, and a slightly desperate need for a startup visa, has grown into one of the UK’s most interesting sustainable food businesses.

Along the way, The Ferm has worked with Ottolenghi, collecting vegetable offcuts from its kitchens and transforming them into products that eventually found their way back onto the menu.

That’s not a PowerPoint presentation about the circular economy.

That’s the circular economy.

Rebecca is refreshingly honest about the challenges too.

How much of a family recipe can survive commercial scale?

What compromises are acceptable?

How do you grow a business without diluting the values that made it worth building in the first place?

These are questions every founder wrestles with, whether they’re making kimchi, software or anything in between.

It’s a conversation about food.

But it’s also a conversation about identity, culture, entrepreneurship, community and the tension between growth and purpose.

And, because this is The Third Half, it somehow ends with a discussion about cheese.

I thoroughly enjoyed this one.

I think you will too.

Full Episode coming up on FRIDAY! dont miss it

People. Planet. Progress.

Subscribe now

It’s been a while since Word Daily delivered a genuine belter, but this week’s effort was worth the wait. The word was autochthonous, which sounds less like a piece of vocabulary and more like either a Greek philosopher from Kirkcaldy or a forgotten progressive rock album from 1974. (Bruce Soord, if you’re reading this, I apologise in advance, because somewhere in Britain there is almost certainly a man called Nigel explaining the deeper meaning of Autochthonous while playing a seventeen-minute bass solo to six people in a village hall).

The actual meaning is pretty cool actually. Autochthonous means native to a place, indigenous, originating where it belongs. In ancient Greece it referred to people who were literally thought to have sprung from the earth itself. Nowadays it mostly refers to plants, animals, cultures and communities, although I am at this moment trying to work out where I can feed it into my every day conversation, to irritate the hell out of members of my family.

NB: There comes a point in every middle-aged man’s life when he realises he has become exactly the sort of person he used to mock. For some it’s cycling holidays. For others it’s vinyl, real ale, or becoming interested in different types of compost. Mine appears to be getting over excited by obscure vocabulary and then looking for opportunities to deploy it.

Most people return from holiday with photographs. I come back with obscure words, opinions about railway stations and detailed observations about public transport systems that nobody requested and nobody particularly wants to hear.

A year on from wandering around Japan, while the famous sights were every bit as impressive as advertised, the bits I still find myself talking about are often the smaller and more local ones. The old bloke tending vegetables beside a railway line in Nikko. The tiny restaurant with six seats and no English menu. The shop that appeared to sell exactly one thing because, several generations ago, a family had collectively decided that making this one thing exceptionally well was a perfectly reasonable way to spend the rest of their existence.

The thing that appealed to me about those places wasn’t nostalgia. It certainly wasn’t resistance to change. Japan is hardly a country that fears modernity. It was simply the sense that these places belonged where they were. They couldn’t easily be copied and pasted into an airport terminal in Dubai or a retail park outside Milton Keynes. They were products of local history, local culture and local people.

In other words, they were autochthonous.

The more I travel, the more I find myself appreciating that quality. For all the benefits of globalisation, and there are many, we’ve become remarkably good at making places look and feel similar. You can fly halfway around the world and still find the same coffee chains, the same fashion brands, the same playlists and increasingly the same conversations. Entire districts of major cities now resemble airport lounges that have somehow escaped and colonised the surrounding streets.

That’s brilliant when you’re hungry, jetlagged and desperately searching for a flat white. It’s slightly less brilliant when you realise that everywhere is beginning to feel a little bit like everywhere else.

Perhaps that’s why I find myself increasingly fond of the things that refuse to conform. Yorkshire isn’t Berkshire. Glasgow isn’t Edinburgh. Airdrie isn’t - well - anywhere else, which anyone who has spent five minutes there will happily confirm. The accents are different, the humour is different and the stories people tell themselves about where they live are different too.

The same applies to the local band playing to fifty people on a Friday night, the family café that has somehow survived three recessions, two ownership changes and the arrival of every chain imaginable, or the football club that has disappointed successive generations of your family while somehow remaining central to your identity. Rationally none of this makes much sense. Emotionally? It makes perfect sense.

That’s because the differences are the point.

I’m not arguing against progress, technology or internationalism. Anyone who has listened to me talk about Japan’s railways for more than thirty seconds will know that. What I am arguing for is a little appreciation for the things that could only have happened there, in that place, among those people. The odd traditions, the local businesses, the community institutions and the quirks that make somewhere feel distinct rather than interchangeable.

Maybe that’s why the word appealed to me. Not because it makes me sound clever, although I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the attraction, but because it reminds us that not everything needs to be optimised, scaled, modernised or transformed into a global brand experience.

Some things are valuable precisely because they belong where they are.

Otherwise we risk ending up in a world where every high street sells the same things, every city centre feels vaguely familiar and every conversation sounds as though it has been assembled by the same algorithm.

And Archie Autochthonous of Kirkcaldy would never have stood for that.

https://worddaily.com/words/autochthonous/?lctg=2e294143-a1e0-470c-8ef7-69823b3a3257

Subscribe now

Share

Thirty years ago, a heroin addict from Leith delivered one of the most famous monologues in British cinema.

Most of us thought it was a joke.

Looking around today, I’m not so sure. Bigger houses. Better cars. Nicer holidays.

Larger televisions. More technology. Bigger mortgages. More debt. More consumption. More stuff.

The target was always the same.

More.

My generation was raised on a fairly straightforward promise.

Work hard. Get promoted. Earn more. Buy better things. Move to a bigger house.

Take nicer holidays. Retire comfortably. Success was measurable.

You could see it on the driveway, in the kitchen extension or in the holiday photos.

And if I’m honest, I bought into it too.

Most of us did.

After all, that was the deal.

The harder you worked, the more rewards you accumulated.

That wasn’t greed. That was aspiration.

Today I was reading an article about a group of economists who argue that rising inequality and environmental pressures are heading towards a collision course.

The report itself wasn’t what caught my attention.

What caught my attention was how quickly the debate became tribal.

Tax the rich. Don’t tax the rich. Climate crisis. Climate nonsense. Capitalism. Socialism.

The usual modern shouting match.

Yet I found myself thinking about something else entirely.

What if we’re debating the wrong question?

Maybe the issue isn’t who gets the biggest slice of the pie.

Maybe it’s whether we’ve built a system that only works if the pie keeps getting bigger forever.

Because that’s what we’ve spent most of our lives doing.

Growing. Consuming. Expanding. Upgrading. Accumulating.

Always assuming the next version would be better than the current one.

I spent most of my career in technology.

If any industry embodies this mindset, it’s ours.

More software.

More platforms.

More subscriptions.

More cloud.

More devices.

More data.

More complexity.

Technology has undoubtedly improved lives. Better healthcare. Better communication. Better access to knowledge. Better opportunities for millions of people.

But even technology seems trapped by the same assumption as the rest of society.

That bigger is always better.

That growth is always progress.

That enough is a destination nobody should ever reach.

The older I get, the less convinced I am.

Not because I’ve suddenly become anti-business.

Quite the opposite.

Business creates jobs, opportunities and prosperity.

Not because ambition is wrong.

Ambition is often what drives positive change.

And certainly not because people shouldn’t enjoy the rewards of hard work.

They absolutely should.

But somewhere along the way we’ve started confusing accumulation with success.

A bigger house doesn’t automatically create a happier family.

A better car doesn’t automatically create a better life.

Another overseas holiday doesn’t automatically bring fulfilment.

And the latest technology doesn’t automatically solve the problems that matter most.

Sometimes it simply creates a newer version of the old ones.

The uncomfortable truth is that the world has never been wealthier.

Technology has never been more powerful.

Human ingenuity has never been greater.

Yet anxiety seems everywhere.

Trust feels lower.

Politics feels angrier.

Communities feel weaker.

And despite all our progress, we’re still arguing about what a good life actually looks like.

Perhaps that’s why this debate matters.

Not because of climate activists.

Not because of economists.

Not because of billionaires.

Because sooner or later every generation has to decide what success means.

For most of my life, success was measured by more.

More money. More house. More holidays. More technology. More consumption.

Maybe Rent Boy’s joke wasn’t really a joke after all.

Maybe it was a warning.

The awkward question facing all of us now is whether we’ve finally reached the point where “more” and “better” have stopped being the same thing.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/04/world-inequality-lab-equality-academics-planetary-survival

Subscribe now

I’m sitting in a Premier Inn in Kent, eating breakfast and preparing for another day on the road.

I’m acting as support vehicle for a close friend who is cycling around the entirety of UK and Ireland. Madness! My responsibilities are varied: driver, navigator, bottle washer, and occasional dispenser of encouragement.

For a few days, I’m slightly removed from normal life.

Fewer emails. Fewer Teams calls. Less endless corporate jargon. Just roads, weather forecasts, energy bars, and the simple question of whether a grown man can really cycle hundreds of miles on determination and flapjacks.

And then, over coffee and scrambled eggs, I read an article about Karachi.

Temperatures above 40°C.

Oppressive humidity.

Water shortages.

Power cuts.

Millions of people living through what is now described as the city’s “new normal”.

It really is an ugly story.

A Tale of Two Realities

There is something unsettling about the contrast.

I am temporarily detached from everyday pressures, following a friend on an extraordinary but voluntary challenge.

In Karachi, millions are enduring extraordinary conditions that they did not choose.

I’m worrying about whether we have enough bananas and electrolyte tablets.

Parents there are worrying about whether their children and elderly relatives will survive another brutal night.

That is not a reason for guilt.

But it is a reason for perspective.

Climate Change Is Here

For years, climate change was treated as a future problem.

Something to be discussed at conferences, summarised in reports, and delegated to sustainability teams.

That is no longer credible.

Climate change is affecting health, infrastructure, productivity, insurance, migration, and social stability.

It is not a niche environmental concern.

It is a defining issue of our time.

Human Endurance

Watching my friend cycle around the UK is a reminder of what people are capable of.

Long distances are covered one pedal stroke at a time.

Headwinds are endured.

Rain passes.

Hills are climbed.

But there is a profound difference between choosing hardship and having it forced upon you.

One is an adventure.

The other is survival.

People, Planet, Progress

This is why sustainability matters.

Not because it is fashionable.

Not because it improves a corporate slide deck.

But because it sits at the heart of what The Third Half is all about.

People. Planet. Progress.

People, because real lives are affected.

Planet, because the natural systems we depend upon are under growing strain.

Progress, because we still have the ability to respond intelligently and responsibly.

The Extraordinary Becomes Ordinary

The line that jars most in the article was simple.

“It’s no longer exceptional.”

That may be the defining phrase of climate change.

Not a sudden apocalypse, but a slow shift in what humanity begins to accept as normal.

In a few minutes, we’ll load the car and head off for another stage of this remarkable journey around the UK.

For now, I’m in a Premier Inn in Kent, slightly removed from reality.

But the reality is still there.

And somewhere in Karachi, families are living with conditions that should never become ordinary.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/17/its-no-longer-exceptional-karachi-struggles-under-brutal-new-reality-of-extreme-heat

Subscribe now

Commiserations this weekend to Airdrieonians F.C. and to all the other clubs who have recently discovered that football is, in fact, a cruel and deeply unreasonable game.

To Ross County F.C., Livingston F.C., Barrow A.F.C., Harrogate Town A.F.C. and every other set of supporters currently staring blankly at the league table - we salute you.

Relegation is football’s way of reminding us that hope is temporary, but loyalty tends to outlast league tables.

The grounds may be a little smaller.

The sea air a little sharper.

The main stand may look suspiciously like a shed.

But the passion is just as real.

And whether you’re there every week, sponsoring from afar, or occasionally standing on the terraces at Pollok F.C., the feeling is exactly the same.

There’s always next season.

Subscribe now

I took three photographs in Glasgow last Friday. I didn’t plan to. I rarely plan these things. You walk, you look up and something stops you.

The first was a notice board outside the Metropolitan Cathedral of St Andrew on Clyde Street. Founded 1816. Mass times listed in gold lettering on dark wood the same information posted in some form for two hundred years. Confessions before weekday masses. As announced. The permanence of it sitting there in the middle of a city that tears itself down and rebuilds every generation with no apparent guilt about either.

The second was a glass office block directly across from the cathedral. In its curtain wall perfectly composed by accident the spires of St Andrew’s rose up and floated. Gothic pinnacles in corporate glass the clouds behind them white and moving. Not a painting. Not a postcard. Just the city doing what the city does old and new occupying the same square metre of light completely indifferent to the symbolism and achieving it anyway.

The third was a derelict building I know better than I’d like to admit. Fury Murrys. For anyone who spent their student years in Glasgow in the late eighties that name does something to the chest. Noise and bad decisions. I drank pints in there and danced badly and kissed people I probably shouldn’t have and made friends I still have. It’s boarded up now windows patched with blue plastic sheet gig posters still plastered across the shuttered frontage as though the whole thing is just between bookings. It isn’t. It’s gone in everything that matters.

Further along the Clyde there was Panama Jax on Custom House Quay. Smoked mirrors and a walkway outside where you took your chances at closing time with the river a short stumble away in the dark. I went occasionally though if I’m honest it was never really my scene. A bit too much Old Firm glamour for a boy from Airdrie. More interested in the music than the mirrors.

I have been thinking lately about what it means to carry the past through the present without being crushed by it. Not nostalgia exactly. Nostalgia is passive. This is something more active and more deliberate. The question isn’t whether the past shaped you because it obviously did. The question is what you do with the shaping.

Fury Murrys is gone but the people who met there and laughed there and found their voices in all senses of the phrase carried something out with them that the boarded windows can’t touch. St Andrews Cathedral has been announcing mass times in gold lettering since the city was mostly fields and that continuity isn’t stubbornness. It’s confidence in what endures.

The glass building the modern intruder the thing that should have nothing to say about spires and stone accidentally became the most honest account of the relationship between old and new. It didn’t replace the church. It reflected it. Made it visible from an angle that hadn’t existed before.

That feels right to me. The Third Half isn’t about erasing what came before. The career the title the institutional identity the version of yourself that existed inside all of that. You don’t pretend it wasn’t real. You hold it up to something new and see what it looks like from here.

I grew up thirty minutes east of those streets by train. I know the light. I know the stone. I know what it feels like to walk through a place that shaped you and find that it has moved on without you and that you have moved on too and that neither of those facts cancels the other out.

Progress doesn’t require forgetting. It just requires the courage to keep walking.

When I took those photographs on Friday St Andrews Cathedral was full.

Subscribe now

(Or: what it means when sensible people start hoarding Heinz)

Nearly half of Britons now have a stockpile of tinned goods at home. Seventeen percent have a dedicated cash stash, hidden somewhere domestic and deliberate, probably behind the good towels. The national emergency plan has quietly become a camping stove, an analogue radio and a tin of peaches in syrup. Welcome to 2026.

I was sitting on my previously documented stationary train the other night, going nowhere, chewing on biltong and wondering in a vaguely philosophical way whether this constituted my last supper, when I noticed people on the tracks below with actual suitcases, walking. Not in a film. On a Thursday evening in Britain, because the infrastructure had simply decided it was done for the day and everyone was adapting with that particular brand of grim cheerfulness that suggests we have been here before and expected nothing less.

We have, of course, been here before. Cast your mind back to 1999, when we were all absolutely certain that computers would fail at midnight and civilisation would reboot itself into something unrecognisable. Millions stockpiled food and cash, then woke up on January 1st with a hangover and an embarrassing quantity of tinned soup to work through. The Y2K bug turned out to be less apocalypse and more administrative inconvenience, and yet here we are again a quarter of a century later, making a considered trip to Argos for a wind-up torch and feeling entirely reasonable about it.

The survey behind all this was run by Link, the UK’s ATM network, who have apparently decided their brief extends to tracking civilisational anxiety alongside cash machine usage. What they found is that nearly half of us have battery-powered torches ready, more than a third keep a power bank in the house, one in five has a portable gas hob and fifteen percent have acquired an analogue radio in the year of our Lord 2026. The government’s own Prepare website, which is a real thing that exists and which someone in Whitehall had to write with a straight face, advises citizens to stock tinned food, bottled water and a first aid kit. The state is essentially encouraging the nation to treat its home like a particularly cautious campervan.

What stays with me is the twenty-three percent who did all of this within the last three months. Something shifted for them recently, some accumulation of headlines and power cuts and stationary trains that tipped the background hum of unease into a concrete decision to actually do something about it.

Here is where I connect it to the Third Half, because that is what I do. The people in this generation who have come through a significant career transition already understand something important about systems failing without warning. They have watched their own infrastructure go down. The diary that used to fill itself. The status that travelled with the job title and evaporated the day it was removed. The phone that rang because of the role rather than the person. When those structures dissolve, the ones who navigate it best are rarely the ones who assumed continuity was guaranteed. They are the ones who had thought about what was genuinely essential versus what they had simply been borrowing from an institution that turned out to be less permanent than it looked. A tin of Heinz beans behind the good towels is, viewed in a certain light, a perfectly coherent philosophy.

The people walking along those tracks were not panicking. They had somewhere to be and they went, quietly determined and slightly absurd in the best possible British way, and almost certainly better prepared for the next disruption than the people still sitting on the train waiting for an announcement that was never coming.

Stock the tins. Keep some cash. And maybe ask the question the Third Half always circles back to: what did you actually need, and what were you just assuming would always be there?

The film is still going. We are well past the opening credits.

People. Planet. Progress.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/may/09/worried-britons-prepping-for-major-disruption-with-stash-of-tins-and-cash-survey-shows

Subscribe now

There is a peculiar moment of identity crisis that happens when you hear a singer open their mouth to speak after three minutes of listening to them sing. The accent that places them squarely on a map you recognise has gone. In its place: something mid-Atlantic, vaguely neutral, acceptable to all and characteristic of none.

The science is fairly straightforward. A song’s melody replaces your normal intonation and speech rhythm. The beat cancels your natural speech rhythm. Vowels get elongated. Consonants get softened for smoothness. Your accent, which is not one single thing but a bundle of features including vowel and consonant pronunciation, rhythm and intonation, gets dismantled component by component.

The result, more often than not, is something resembling General American: a neutral accent defined by its absence of distinguishing features. Which is a polite way of saying it sounds like nothing in particular from nowhere in particular.

I understand the commercial logic. From the 1950s onward, many non-American singers chose to sing with a more American-sounding accent, either because they grew up hearing American music and naturally mimicked it, or because it opened the door to the U.S. market. Fine. The world is a marketplace.

But here is where I become unreasonable, and I’m willing to own that.

I am Scottish. From Airdrie, specifically, which has never been accused of softening its edges. The Airdrie accent does not elongate its vowels for smoothness. It arrives, unannounced, like a late tackle in a cup tie, and it means exactly what it says.

So when a Scottish band makes it big and I find myself unable to detect a single trace of Scotland in their singing, something quietly deflates. The music might be technically proficient. It might fill arenas in cities that couldn’t locate Lanarkshire on a map with a compass and a week’s head start.

Biffy Clyro. There. I’ve said it. Three lads from Kilmarnock. Kilmarnock. A town whose vowels have never been described as neutral or Americanised. Their first three albums built a loyal following. By the fourth they were arena rock, and somewhere in the transition, Scotland had been quietly packed away with the rest of the support act equipment.

The voice is one of the few instruments that carries geography inside it. The specific weight of where you grew up. What the rain felt like. What the banter on the bus sounded like at half seven on a Tuesday morning. When that gets stripped away, something small but real is lost.

Tom Waits sounds like the inside of a bourbon barrel in a bad neighbourhood. Mark E. Smith sounded like Salford had opinions and wasn’t finished sharing them. Eddi Reader, singing Rabbie Burns, sounds like Scotland actually sounds. Specific. Rooted. Unapologetically itself.

And then there is The Beautiful South. Paul Heaton, raised in Sheffield, forever associated with Hull. Flat northern vowels. Dry working-class plainness. Never once went mid-Atlantic. Just sang, and where he came from came with him.

A band called The Beautiful South. From Hull.

The name was always the joke. Turns out the music was the punchline.

https://interestingfacts.com/why-some-people-lose-their-accents-when-singing/

Subscribe now

I am writing this from Preston.

That was not the plan.

The plan was Glasgow. The plan was a reasonable journey time, a window seat, and maybe something decent from the buffet trolley. Instead I have a platform announcement, a termination notice, and 105 minutes of accumulated delay already banked before we got this far.

It started in Wokingham. Every train to Reading was either cancelled or delayed. Comms failures, apparently. Reading to Paddington: trespassers on the line. London Euston to Glasgow: overhead line problems somewhere that apparently required the whole service to give up at Lancashire.

Three legs. Three different explanations. One very long day.

Here is the thing. I chose the train deliberately. I always do, on routes where I have a choice. Not because it is cheaper (it is not). Not because it is faster (today, spectacularly, it was not). Because I have thought about the carbon cost of the alternatives and I do not want to carry it. That is the deal I have made with myself.

Today the infrastructure broke its side of that deal.

And that is the bit that genuinely gets to me. I am not naive about delays. Things go wrong. But this was not one thing going wrong. It was every single thing going wrong, in sequence, all day, on the day I needed to get to Glasgow. Wokingham. Reading. Paddington. Euston. Preston. Each one politely explaining itself, each one adding another shrug to the pile.

There is a point at which the pattern becomes the message.

I have been in boardrooms where exactly this happened. Not trains, obviously. But the same logic. The same accumulation of individual failures that no one owns because each one is technically explainable. The death of a system by a thousand apologies.

I believe in public infrastructure. I believe in shared solutions. I believe in the idea that getting on a train instead of a plane is a small act that adds up. But the infrastructure has to function for that belief to mean anything. You cannot ask people to make the sustainable choice and then make that choice a misery.

Today it was a misery.

Preston is fine. Lovely, probably. But I was going to Glasgow.

Scott

Subscribe now

Every other week I sit with my parents. They are in their eighties now, and I watch the decline. That is not a cruel way to put it. It is just honest. They had good lives and they worked hard and their bodies are doing what bodies eventually do.

But here is the thing that stays with me. When my mum and dad were in their sixties, they were fit and well. That decade felt like the reward. The work done, the kids grown, the energy still there. A Third Half, before we had a name for it.

New research published today suggests that for many people in the UK, that window is closing.

The Health Foundation analysed data across 21 wealthy nations and found that the average British man now spends only 60.7 years in good health, down from 62.9 a decade ago. For women, it has fallen from 63.7 to 60.9. The UK has dropped from 14th to 20th in international healthy life expectancy rankings. Only the United States is below us. Japan, Norway, Spain, all heading the right direction. We are going the other way.

The number that cuts deepest: across more than 90% of the country, people now begin experiencing illness before they reach state pension age of 66. Before they even get to stop.

And yes, before you ask the obvious question – life expectancy itself has not collapsed. People are still living roughly as long. Which means we are adding years without adding health. The extra time is not the good kind. We are living longer into decline, not longer in good shape.

The causes are not complicated to name. Obesity, now the worst in Western Europe. Alcohol. Mental illness at record levels. The geography of it is brutal too. Men in Richmond upon Thames average 69.3 healthy years. Men in Blackpool average 50.9. That is not a gap. That is a different life entirely.

The Third Half is built on an assumption: that you have enough health to make choices with. Reinvention, purpose, giving something back. None of that is possible if chronic illness arrives before you reach 66, which for most people in this country, it now does.

My parents are in their eighties and I see the reality of late decline up close. What I want, for anyone reading this, is for that phase to come as late as it possibly can. That the sixties feel the way they felt for my mum and dad. Capable. Present. Still in the game.

Right now, the data says too many people are not getting that. And that should bother all of us enough to say so.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/apr/27/people-in-uk-spend-fewer-years-in-good-health-than-a-decade-ago-study-finds

Subscribe now

Share

I went to see War of the Worlds this weekend. The immersive experience, in London. They gave me a top hat for the souvenir photo. I’m not sure it’s my best look but somewhere between the Victorian steampunk staging and the purple light and a gramophone the size of a small car, it felt like the least of my worries.

Jeff Wayne’s version has been soundtracking British anxiety since 1978. Richard Burton’s voice - replaced now - but the music still hits somewhere uncomfortable. Dramatic. Grand. A little ridiculous, in the best possible way. (And yes it has aged - but only a bit).

Standing there in my hat, surrounded by Martian machinery, then wandering through Victorian Britain meeting characters who were suffering unquestionable pain and hurt - and death - I thought: what if they did come? Not tripods. Just something we blundered into. Because that’s increasingly less science fiction and more genuine question.

Where Is Everybody?

Enrico Fermi looked up from his lunch in 1950 and asked exactly that. Any civilisation with a modest amount of rocket technology and an immodest amount of imperial incentive could colonise the entire galaxy within tens of millions of years. The maths works. The universe is old enough. So why the silence?

Maybe every civilisation keeps quiet precisely because there’s a very good reason to do so. A cosmic omertà. The whole galaxy agreeing not to make eye contact.

And then there’s us. Sending golden records into space with our location, our faces, and our music. Very ‘hello, please don’t be aggressive’. Very British, really.

Peter Sandberg - whose music has reached 700 million streams and soundtracked Stranger Things - told me he thinks about writing as excavation. You’re not constructing something new. You’re uncovering what’s already there. I wonder sometimes whether space exploration is the same. We’re not so much reaching out as digging up something we’re not sure we’re ready to find.

What Would They See?

If something intercepted our signals right now - our broadcasts, our encrypted military traffic, our social media - what would they conclude?

There are approximately 56 active armed conflicts on Earth at this moment. Over the last year, fighting raged on in Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar and the Sahel. Israel and Iran continue to trade blows, the Lebanon is being raided to the ground, with the United States joining in, taking the lead - because they want to ‘keep world peace’. How ironic. Thailand and Cambodia clashed. Afghanistan and Pakistan exchanged fire in their worst incident in decades. Drone strikes have jumped 4,000% in five years! Hundreds of non-state armed groups are now wielding them.

We’ve democratised new ways of killing people so thoroughly you can order the components online, while simultaneously arguing about whether to fund clean energy.

Martin Metcalfe sat across from me and said, matter-of-factly: “We have invented an alien.” He meant AI. But I keep thinking - any sufficiently advanced civilisation doing due diligence before making contact would look at our current situation and quietly back away. Which might, in fact, explain the silence.

We are, it turns out, the cautionary tale.

The Question

HG Wells wasn’t warning us about Martians.

The Martians in his novel behave more or less like Victorian Britain behaved toward the peoples it colonised. We know best. We have the technology. We’re taking this. The book was satire dressed as science fiction. Jeff Wayne gave it a laser show. The satire stayed.

What do we do when we encounter something we don’t understand? Do we reach for the weapon or reach for the hand?

We’re still working that one out down here.

Might be worth getting a bit further along with the answer before we go knocking on other doors.

People. Planet. But Progress?

- Scott (in his Sunday cosmic pyjamas)

Subscribe now

I could recite the entire Cheese Shop sketch by Monty Python by the age of twelve. Word for word. Every variety. Every increasingly desperate request. Every beautifully deadpan refusal.

I performed it on stage. I was not asked back.

This is I think the origin story of everything.

So when a piece about cheese facts landed in front of me this week I did what any reasonable person would do. I cancelled what I was doing and read it twice.

Here’s the thing about cheese. It is one of humanity’s oldest foods and after nearly four thousand years of making it we still don’t actually know why Swiss cheese has holes. The leading theory involves bacteria releasing gas as the cheese matures. A more recent study suggests tiny particles of hay in the milk might be responsible. Nobody is sure. I find this genuinely wonderful. We can sequence the human genome and land a rover on Mars but the Emmental remains a mystery.

It is also the most stolen food on the planet. Not jewellery. Not cash. Cheese. Around four percent of global supply disappears every year and the black market for it is thriving. In Italy Parmesan is so valuable it is accepted as loan collateral by actual banks. Between 2014 and 2016 organised crime stole roughly seven million dollars worth of it. In New Zealand two men once led police on a high speed car chase and attempted to throw off pursuit by hurling boxes of cheddar out of the window. I have read this several times. It remains one of my favourite sentences.

Medieval England had a tradition I’d genuinely like to revive. When a child was born the father would buy a large wheel of cheese hollow it out and pass pieces to everyone present at the birth. At the christening the baby was passed through the wheel for luck. I’ve attended some memorable christenings over the years. None involved structural dairy. I feel this is a gap in modern ceremony.

And then there is the music experiment. In 2018 Swiss researchers took nine wheels of Emmental and played them different music continuously for six months. Mozart. Led Zeppelin. A Tribe Called Quest. When food technologists later assessed the results the hip-hop cheese had developed a stronger smell and a fruitier more complex taste than every other sample including the control.

I have been sitting with this information for a few hours now.

Because there is something in it that goes well beyond cheese. The idea that what surrounds something during its formation shapes what it eventually becomes. The environment. The energy. The noise in the room. We talk about this all the time on The Third Half without ever quite putting it that way. The careers that surprise people. The late bloomers. The ones who came alive after the big job ended. So much of it traces back to what they were absorbing when nobody was watching.

What were you listening to when you became who you are?

Maybe it was Mozart. Maybe it was Zeppelin.

Maybe like the best of us it was Madchester

https://interestingfacts.com/cheese-facts/

Subscribe now

B Corp is tightening its standards.

And—shock—some companies aren’t happy.

Too hard. Too complex. Too much to maintain.

Funny that.

Because for a while, it was starting to feel like B Corp had drifted into the same territory as every other well-meaning badge:

Nice logo.

Good on a slide.

Light touch when it mattered.

Here’s the uncomfortable bit

If your “values-led business” can’t meet tougher standards…

…were they ever really embedded?

Or were they:

   •   a comms strategy

   •   a recruitment hook

   •   a slightly shinier ESG paragraph in the annual report

This is what progress actually looks like

Standards should move.

Otherwise we’re just freezing “good” at a point in time and calling it leadership.

The planet’s not static.

Expectations aren’t static.

So why should certification be?

Yes, some will drop off

Good.

That’s not failure—that’s credibility.

Because a badge that everyone keeps, no matter what,

isn’t a standard.

It’s a participation trophy.

The Third Half view

This isn’t B Corp losing its way.

It’s B Corp growing up.

Less comfort.

More accountability.

Closer to what People–Planet–Progress actually demands.

Final thought

If the badge gets harder to earn—and harder to keep—

…it might finally mean what people always hoped it did.

And if that makes a few companies uncomfortable?

Even better.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/apr/06/b-corp-status-standards-overhaul-certification-companies

Subscribe now

The Third Half: Xenogenesis (or… a Slightly Unsettling Episode of Us)

There’s a version of the present where everything is smarter. Your fridge orders your food. Your watch tells you you’re stressed (which, ironically, makes you more stressed). Your car suggests routes you didn’t plan to take, but it’s “optimised”, so you go along with it. And somewhere in the background, an algorithm is quietly deciding what version of you turns up each day.

That’s not the future. That’s… Tuesday. And it’s either reality… or a slightly underwritten episode of Black Mirror.

Xenogenesis sounds like something out of science fiction—and to be fair, it is. The idea that something entirely new can emerge. Not improved. Not upgraded. Not “now with AI”.

Different.

Like:

• a species evolving that doesn’t quite behave like anything before it

• a system that rewrites the rules rather than playing the game better

• a version of reality that feels slightly… off

That’s not iteration. That’s mutation.

Now here’s the problem. Most of what we call “innovation” today wouldn’t make it past the first five minutes of a decent sci-fi episode. It’s too safe.

If Charlie Brooker pitched:

“What if we made email… but faster?”

He’d be politely shown the door.

Because real sci-fi—real xenogenesis—asks more uncomfortable questions:

• What if technology didn’t just support us, but subtly replaced parts of us?

• What if convenience became control?

• What if progress solved problems we didn’t actually have… and created ones we didn’t see coming?

And that’s where it gets interesting for People, Planet, Progress (PPP).

Because xenogenesis doesn’t just create shiny new things—it creates new consequences.

People

We build tools to make life easier. Then we find ourselves:

• outsourcing decisions

• curating versions of ourselves

• measuring our worth through metrics we didn’t invent

At what point does “augmentation” quietly become replacement?

Planet

We talk about greener tech. Smarter systems. Efficient everything. But xenogenesis asks a harsher question:

What if the entire model is wrong?

• Not “less consumption”

• But “different consumption”

• Not “offset emissions”

• But “rethink why we produce so much in the first place”

That’s not optimisation. That’s a different species of thinking.

Progress

We love the word. Feels positive. Forward. Inevitable. But not all progress is… well… progress. Some of it is just momentum with better branding.

True xenogenesis forces a pause:

Are we actually moving forward… or just moving faster?

If this all feels slightly uncomfortable, that’s the point. The best episodes of Black Mirror don’t show you a distant dystopia. They show you something that feels about five minutes away from being real. That’s why it lingers. Because deep down, you recognise it.

And here’s the twist. Xenogenesis isn’t just happening to us. We’re part of it.

Every time we:

• adopt something new without questioning it

• trade a bit of control for convenience

• accept “this is just how things are now”

We’re nudging the system into something different. Not always better. Not always worse. Just… different.

The Third Half lives somewhere in that space. Between:

• optimism and scepticism

• progress and pause

• building and questioning

It’s not anti-tech. Not anti-progress. But it is quietly asking:

What are we becoming in the process?

Because xenogenesis doesn’t arrive with a launch event. It creeps in. One behaviour at a time. One system at a time. One “this makes life easier” at a time.

Until one day you look around and think:

“This isn’t quite what I expected…”

Which, if we’re honest, is exactly how most great sci-fi starts. And occasionally… how reality does too.

Subscribe now

https://www.oldglasgowpubs.co.uk/mitre.html

I stood on Brunswick Street today and didn’t recognise it.

Not in a dramatic way. Not in a “this is unrecognisable Glasgow” rant.

Just… a quiet, slightly uncomfortable feeling that I knew exactly where I was—

and none of it felt like mine anymore.

There’s a mural now.

A woman staring straight out at you, bold colours, perfect lines, every detail deliberate. She’s brilliant, by the way. Properly brilliant.

But she’s finished.

Complete. Designed. Signed off.

And just along from her, there’s that building—half stripped, half exposed, like someone’s peeled the skin back and walked away mid-job. Bricks, beams, scars. No story told, just layers left hanging.

And then in between it all—glass, light, neatness. The Social Hub Glasgow sitting there like it belongs in any city, not this one in particular.

Three versions of a place.

All at once.

And me, standing there, thinking about a pint.

I never went to The Mitre Bar for the Mitre.

That’s the truth of it.

I went because I’d finished work at Lennard’s, and that’s just where you ended up.

No decision. No message. No “shall we”.

Just muscle memory.

Cross the road after shutting and locking the shop, into the door, wave through the fag smoke, pint in hand before you’d even fully arrived.

“One pint.”

That lie we all told ourselves.

What I remember isn’t the place.

It’s the feeling.

The noise. Not loud—just constant. Like you’d stepped into something already in motion and didn’t need to catch up.

Old boys with papers, properly reading them, folding them like it mattered. Football results getting debated like someone could still change the outcome if they argued hard enough.

Faces I didn’t know the names of, but would have noticed instantly if they weren’t there.

No one asking what you did.

No one caring, really.

You were just… in it.

Standing there now, I realised something I hadn’t before.

It wasn’t the pub.

It was the pause.

That pint wasn’t about drinking. It was about the gap between who you were at work and who you were when you got home.

A small, unspoken reset.

And you didn’t have to work for it.

It was built into the street.

Now?

Everything looks better.

It does.

The colour, the art, the ambition of it. You can see the intent everywhere—someone’s thought about this, designed it, made it good.

But it doesn’t catch you.

You don’t drift into anything.

You pass through.

People around me had bags, headphones, somewhere else already in mind. Even when they stopped, it felt temporary. Like they were pausing between things, not part of something.

That building—the half-demolished one—is the only thing that felt honest.

Because it’s not finished.

It’s not trying to be anything.

It just is.

And for a second, it reminded me of what the street used to feel like.

Unpolished. Unplanned. Slightly rough, but real.

I’m not saying it was better.

I’m really not.

It could be small. Repetitive. You could feel stuck in it if you weren’t careful.

But it had something we don’t build in anymore.

Effortless belonging.

You didn’t choose it.

You just turned up often enough, and it happened.

I looked at the mural again before I left.

Bright. Confident. Certain.

And I thought—

we’re very good now at creating places that look like they mean something.

I’m just not sure we’re as good at creating places where people feel something without trying.

I walked away without the pint.

Not because I didn’t want one.

But because the pint I was thinking about isn’t there anymore.

And maybe that’s the bit you don’t notice disappearing—

until you go back looking for it.

Subscribe now