I should probably declare an interest here. I’m not a great consumer of ‘self-help’ - seminars, webinars, any-ars, or books. There seem to be an awful lot of people prepared to tell us how to be happier, richer, calmer, more productive, more resilient, better leaders, better parents and presumably better at loading the dishwasher. So I started flicking through Simon’s book like it was half time at Airdrie FC and we were, of course, 2-0 down. But then something slightly annoying happened. I quite liked it (there endeth any comparison to Airdrie FC).

That’s because I don’t really think it’s a coaching book. It’s a book about Simon, about the stuff that’s happened to him, the people he’s met, the things he’s got right and the things he’s got spectacularly wrong. Work, relationships, resilience, vulnerability, and the various bits of baggage we all accumulate while pretending we’ve got everything under control. It’s funny in places, and then later it’s uncomfortable in a way that makes you squirm. Simon isn’t showboating in any of it. There’s no sense of a man performing his own vulnerability for effect.

It reads like someone genuinely opening up, which is a rarer thing than the coaching shelves would have you believe. Somewhere amongst all of that are ideas that might actually be useful, which feels a lot more interesting to me than someone standing at the front of a room telling us the seven habits we need before breakfast.

It also feels very Third Half. Most of the conversations I’ve enjoyed over the past year haven’t really been about what somebody does, they’ve been about how they got there. The diversions. The cock-ups. The people who changed things. The moments when life didn’t follow the PowerPoint…..

So when Simon suggested launching the book at Wokingham Theatre and asked if I’d sit down with him and have one of those conversations in front of an audience, I said yes.

On 20th November, that’s what we’re going to do. No presentation, no 47 slides on unlocking your potential, just Simon and me talking about the book, the life behind it, and this rather provocative idea that none of us are broken. Because I’m not entirely sure I agree with him. What does “broken” mean anyway? Are there things that happen to us that actually do break something? Is resilience something we possess, something we learn, or something we only discover when life gives us no alternative? And when you write a book based heavily on your own experiences, how comfortable is it when someone else starts poking around in them? I’d guess the evening will have the same shape as the book. Some things to laugh at, and one or two moments where the room goes quiet.

We’ll find out. We’ll also open it up to the audience, so I won’t be the only one asking questions, and we’ll record the whole thing as a special edition of The Third Half.

None of Us Are Broken: The Launch 20th November 2026 Wokingham Theatre, Cantley Park

Reserve a place here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/none-of-us-are-broken-the-launch-tickets-1993916349476

Come along. You don’t have to agree with Simon. I’m not promising I will either. That might be the interesting bit.

People. Planet. Progress. The Third Half

But…. I started to think.

We know the signs. We’ve probably all thought about putting one up.

Don’t knock on my door. Don’t put stuff through my letterbox. Don’t try to sell me something I didn’t ask for.

Fair enough.

Except we spend the rest of our lives being sold things we didn’t ask for.

The new SUV that suggests our perfectly serviceable car isn’t quite good enough anymore. The watch that signifies success. The kitchen that suddenly looks dated. The holiday everyone else seems to be having. Deliveroo when there’s food in the fridge. A £1,200 phone that’s fractionally better than the £1,000 phone we already own. Klarna making something we can’t afford feel strangely affordable. Dating apps quietly suggesting there might always be someone better if we just keep swiping.

Upgrade your phone, your car, your house, your teeth, your body, your holiday. Upgrade your life.

(I’ve gone a bit Trainspotting again).

An awful lot of modern advertising isn’t really selling us products. It’s selling us dissatisfaction with what we already have, and we barely notice it anymore.

But put a badly photocopied circular through the letterbox and it’s outrage.

Except who’s actually sending those circulars? The local Indian restaurant. A window cleaner. Someone who’s just started a gardening business. A plumber. The village fete. A charity shop looking for donations.

And those dreaded “hawkers” we want to avoid? Yes, sometimes they’re flogging rubbish. But quite often they’re asking us to give a few quid a month to a charity, and we’ll slam the door or cross the road to avoid them while drinking a £4 coffee we’ve just been persuaded 20 mins earlier we needed.

Then there are Jehovah’s Witnesses. For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not religious and I don’t want converting. But strip away whether you agree with them and consider what they’re actually offering: their version of meaning, faith, community, a better way to live. You can completely reject their answer while acknowledging that those aren’t inherently terrible things to advocate for.

Which leaves us with a rather weird hierarchy of acceptable persuasion. Someone knocks on our door and says you might be happier if you found God, and they’re an irritating nuisance. A multinational corporation, armed with an extraordinary amount of information about us (bloody algorithms), whispers you might be happier if you bought this, and that’s just everyday life. One asks for five minutes of our attention. The other has built an entire economy around capturing as much of it as possible.

Perhaps there’s a consequence. We have more possessions, more convenience, more choice and more ways to consume than any generation before us. Yet we talk endlessly about loneliness, debt, anxiety, disappearing communities, struggling local businesses and the nagging feeling that somehow our lives don’t quite measure up.

I’m certainly not suggesting the answer to modern society is Jehovah’s Witnesses and a bloke selling dusters at the front door. But I do wonder whether we’ve spent decades shutting the door on people selling community, causes and local enterprise, while leaving it permanently open to people selling us dissatisfaction.

Maybe we’ve got the sign on the wrong door.

Scott

People. Planet. Progress. #TheThirdHalf #Community #Consumerism #PPP

Every vendor has an AI strategy. Every consultancy has an AI practice. Every board paper has an AI roadmap. And it is, without exception, the most boring content being produced anywhere in business right now, recycled slide decks wearing a new acronym, sold with the confidence of people who know you won’t ask what it actually delivered last time.

Nobody is getting rich off this except the people selling it to you. The hyperscalers want more compute burned. The vendors want more licences signed. The consultancies want a transformation programme, three years, seven figures, and a steering committee that meets monthly to discuss why the benefits haven’t landed yet. The SIs want the implementation contract that follows. The hardware people want you to bin infrastructure that still works because AI apparently needs a bigger box to run a chatbot nobody uses.

And the whole industry has the nerve to call this innovation. It isn’t. It’s the same trick played four times in twenty years, cloud, digital transformation, blockchain, the metaverse, now AI, and every time the pitch is identical: buy this or get left behind. Nobody ever gets left behind. They just get poorer and more confused, with a platform to show for it that someone will quietly decommission in 2029.

What’s missing is anyone in the room paid to say no. Not paid to say “let’s explore a phased pilot.” No. Don’t build it. Don’t migrate it. Don’t replace what’s still doing its job. The reason nobody says that isn’t because it’s wrong, it’s because restraint doesn’t have a day rate. The entire consulting model runs on selling you more, so the honest answer, the one that saves you money and carbon and two years of your life, is structurally unavailable from the people you’re paying to give it to you.

Here’s the bit everyone conveniently skips. Every serious voice in the industry now agrees the AI bubble bursts. Fine. When it does, who’s left holding the client relationship, the write-offs, and the awkward board conversation about the platform nobody finished paying for? Not the vendor. Not the consultancy that’s already three logos further down the hype cycle. It’s whoever sold you the thing and is nowhere near the room when the invoice for it comes due. Somebody always catches the phlegm. It’s never the person who coughed.

The most sustainable server is the one you don’t replace. The most sustainable AI model is the one you don’t run. And the most useful person in the room still isn’t the one shouting “AI-first,” it’s the one willing to lose the fee and tell you the truth instead.

Scott

People. Planet. Progress.

#AI #Sustainability #TechStrategy #ThirdHalf

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There are moments when The Third Half makes me smile as much and as wide as I ever smile (and I smile a lot!)

I’m absolutely over the moon, and hugely grateful, to say that My Girl The River will be playing live at our little shindig at the end of August.

When Kris and Joe joined me on The Third Half last December, I came away thinking that these wonderfully talented brilliant musicians (I’d already seen the live) were also genuinely lovely people too. We talked about music, purpose, creativity, and the realities of making a living in the industry, plus Joe’s extraordinary story of co-writing “No More I Love You’s” before Annie Lennox turned it into the worldwide hit we all know.

Since then I’ve been lucky enough to hear snippets of their forthcoming album, Manifest Good Things, out 4 September. From what I’ve heard so far, it’s going to be something special, and I can’t wait for the finished record.

If you want to hear them, they’re on Patrick Kielty’s Saturday morning show (1 August) at around 10.45am, amongst other things, taking on the football chant challenge.

I’ll link our original conversation below. If you haven’t listened before, give it a go.

Kris and Joe, thank you for saying yes. It means a huge amount to us, and everyone joining us at the end of August is in for a real treat.

CLICK THE LINK BELOW TO JOIN THE EVENT

https://luma.com/hdyshk64

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When I first read that Scotland had become the first nation in the UK to require swift bricks in appropriate new buildings, I smiled.

A brick for birds?

My mind immediately wandered into all the usual places. Bird mortgages. Luxury penthouses. “Prime nesting opportunities.” The kind of daft post that gets a few laughs before disappearing into the algorithm.

But I didn’t.

Because the more I read, the less funny it became.

Not because there’s anything sombre about a brick with a hole in it. Quite the opposite. It’s genuinely ordinary. It costs around £30, disappears into the fabric of a building and will probably never be noticed by the people who live there.

That’s exactly why it’s interesting.

Swifts have evolved alongside us for centuries, nesting in the nooks and crannies of our buildings. As we’ve become better at constructing warm, airtight, energy-efficient homes, we’ve inadvertently designed those spaces away. No villain. No conspiracy. Just thousands of sensible decisions that, together, had an unintended consequence.

This isn’t really a story about birds.

It’s a story about design.

How often do we optimise for one thing while quietly making something else worse?

Whether it’s technology, workplaces, public services or our own lives, we can become so focused on efficiency that we forget to ask who, or what, we’ve left behind.

The beauty of the swift brick is that it doesn’t ask us to choose between people and nature. It says perhaps we can be clever enough to accommodate both.

For the cost of a decent lunch, a new home can provide a home for something else too.

I like that.

It feels hopeful.

The sustainability conversation is often dominated by eye-watering numbers, impossible trade-offs and reasons to feel overwhelmed. Then along comes a humble brick that quietly reminds us progress isn’t always about doing more.

Sometimes it’s about thinking a little harder before we pour the concrete.

I nearly wrote a joke.

I’m glad I didn’t.

Because this little brick says something much bigger.

It reminds us that the world isn’t only shaped by grand gestures. More often, it’s shaped by thousands of small, thoughtful decisions that nobody notices at the time.

And perhaps that’s the point.

The best ideas are often the ones that simply become part of the wall.

So… to end.

Why did the swift refuse to move into the new-build?

‘No brickwork’ references on the estate agent’s listing.

(Told you it’d be bad.)

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Friends have been trying to persuade Katie and me to go for the best part of two decades. Every summer there was another excuse - too busy, wrong weekend, maybe next year.

This year we finally went. They were right.

I expected good music, interesting food and a few memorable performances. I didn’t expect to spend three days quietly restoring my faith in people.

It wasn’t the music that got me first, it was the atmosphere. Thousands of people - families, teenagers, older couples, campers, volunteers, musicians - and no edge to any of it. No pushing, no tension. Everyone simply seemed happy, relaxed, present.

Then I noticed something else. Every version of humanity seemed to be there: families with young children, people who looked like they’d been coming since the first WOMAD, goths, hippies, every shade of LGBTQ+, every imaginable style, background and age. Nobody seemed remotely interested in judging anyone else.

It wasn’t diversity as a slogan. It was diversity without commentary - people simply turned up as themselves. It felt surprisingly rare.

The weekend also reunited two families who hadn’t spent proper time together for years. Watching our children, now adults, fall effortlessly back into conversation was a good reminder that some friendships don’t disappear. They just wait for the right moment to carry on where they left off.

A few other things have lodged in my head since.

I’d never heard of Migrateful. Their idea is simple: refugees, asylum seekers and migrants become cookery teachers, sharing the food, traditions and stories of their home countries. Not because it changes anyone’s political views, but because it changes conversations. A meal becomes a story, a story becomes understanding, and suddenly someone isn’t “a migrant” - they’re the person who taught you how to make an incredible meal their family has cooked for generations. The shortest distance between two people is often a shared table.

Then I wandered over to CARE4Basket. At first glance, a stall selling beautifully woven baskets and bags. Then you hear the story. Plastic waste collected in Ghana is transformed into weaving material. Traditional weaving skills are preserved. Local artisans earn a fair income. Waste becomes opportunity.

It’s easy to think of sustainability as carbon targets and net zero. CARE4Basket is about people - it creates livelihoods, preserves skills, restores dignity. The environmental impact follows because someone started by asking a better question.

Then there was Butane Skies. Young musicians, proper guitars, proper drums, proper songs. Maybe I’m showing my age, but they were the real deal - no gimmicks, no backing tracks doing the heavy lifting, just musicians who’d clearly put in the hours. Delighted they’ll be joining The Third Half soon as one of our Music of the Month guests.

Ukrainian artist GANNA was another highlight, making traditional pancakes while singing completely unaccompanied. Sounds almost surreal written down, yet somehow it made perfect sense - food, music, culture, memory, identity, all shared in one performance. At a time when Ukraine continues to fight for its future, it said something about how culture isn’t just preserved in museums. Sometimes it’s passed on through a recipe, a song, and the generosity to share both with strangers.

And something also happened that nobody would have predicted, including me. I found myself in a Northern Soul pop-up - not watching, dancing, for twenty minutes. I’ve never danced Northern Soul before and nobody was mistaking me for an expert. Nobody cared. Nobody was watching or judging. People were simply dancing because dancing made them happy. I walked away grinning like an idiot.

Looking back, that’s probably what connected the whole weekend. Nobody was trying to impress anyone. Migrateful weren’t trying to win an argument. CARE4Basket weren’t simply selling products. Butane Skies weren’t manufacturing an image. GANNA wasn’t simply performing. The Northern Soul dancers weren’t worrying about how they looked. Everyone was simply sharing something they loved.

In a world that often encourages us to judge first and understand later, WOMAD quietly asks us to do the opposite. Be curious. Taste something unfamiliar. Listen to music you’ve never heard before. Talk to someone whose life is completely different from yours. Dance, even if you’re convinced you can’t.

Maybe that’s why it felt so different. Maybe that’s also what The Third Half has always been trying to create - not a place where everyone agrees, but a place where everyone belongs.

After twenty years of saying “maybe next year”, I suspect we’ve just started a new family tradition.

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Back in 2025, we welcomed Pip Mole onto The Third Half Blueprint to talk about a life that has taken more turns than most.

Over the years she’s been an athlete, broadcaster, psychologist and coach. Like a lot of the people we feature on The Third Half, she’s never been particularly interested in staying in one lane.

I’ve known Pip for more than thirty years, long before The Third Half existed. Back then I was busy building a career in technology and business while Pip was carving out a fascinating path of her own.

These days we’re both exploring different territory. For me, that’s meant writing, chatting with interesting people and building The Third Half. For Pip, it has increasingly meant painting.

I now have three of her paintings hanging on my walls, which probably tells you more about what I think of her work than any introduction ever could.

We recently caught up to talk about creativity, confidence, finding your voice, and why some paintings are much harder to let go of than others.

The First Sale

Scott: Do you remember the first piece you ever sold?

Pip: I do, actually, although it’s probably not the answer people expect. It wasn’t a recent painting, and it certainly wasn’t hanging in a gallery.

I was in my twenties, and it was a life drawing, a reclining nude, done in charcoal and chalk on a great big sheet of sugar paper. Fairly simple piece, looking back, but it mattered because it was the first time somebody outside my immediate circle wanted to buy something I’d actually made. You know what it’s like with friends and family, they’re lovely, but there’s always that small suspicion they’re just being kind because they know you. This was different. Someone I barely knew saw it, liked it, and wanted to take it home.

I sold it for £25 and thought I’d done brilliantly. Honestly, the money was never really the point, it was the fact that something I’d made out of my own head had connected with a complete stranger.

The Painting She Almost Didn’t Sell

Years later there was another one that mattered for completely different reasons. It was called Bali Garden, and it was in my first solo exhibition. I hung the show, went home feeling perfectly calm about the whole thing, and then lay awake half the night thinking, I don’t actually want to sell that painting. I’d spent so long with it by then, it felt like part of me.

So the next morning, before the doors even opened, I went back and put the price up. Which, looking back, wasn’t really a commercial decision at all, it was a slightly desperate attempt to put people off buying it. Didn’t work, obviously. Sold almost straight away.

But here’s the good bit. I know exactly where it is. It’s hanging in the home of somebody I like enormously, and we’ve stayed in touch all these years. And then I found out, quite by accident, that they’ve put it in their will. One day it’ll pass to their son. I know that sounds terribly sentimental, but it genuinely does something to me, knowing that.

That’s the thing about paintings, isn’t it. You spend hours with them, you wrestle with them, sometimes they drive you mad and sometimes they surprise you, and then off they go and belong to somebody else entirely. Knowing where that one’s going to be, long after I’m gone, that’s rather a lovely thought to carry around.

More Than a Creative Outlet

Scott: Listening to you talk about that, it feels as though art is much more than a creative outlet.

Pip: It is now, though it took a while to get there, if I’m honest.

You’ve known me for over thirty years, Scott, so you’ve seen the different versions of me, all the different chapters. Like most people I’ve had successes, disappointments, changes of direction, moments where I’ve basically had to start again. And art has turned up at exactly the right point in my life for all that, I think.

What it gives me is hard to put into words, because it’s not really about the painting itself. It’s about having somewhere to think. Somewhere to reflect, without feeling like you have to justify the thought before you’ve even had it properly.

I listened to your conversation with April De Angelis the other week and found myself nodding along the whole time. She wasn’t really talking about writing, not the actual writing bit, she was talking about everything that happens before it. The thinking, the noticing, just wandering about letting ideas turn over before they ever land on a page. Painting’s very similar. People imagine artists stood at an easel producing work all day long, but honestly, most of the actual creativity happens before a brush ever touches the canvas.

I read your piece on making space for imagination as well, and it reminded me how often the best ideas turn up when you’ve stopped actively hunting for them. When I’m working on a collection I tend to just disappear. Phone goes off, emails can wait, I shut the studio door and that’s it, I’m in there. Sometimes that’s a day, sometimes it’s three or four. I’m sure from the outside it looks faintly antisocial, but it isn’t really, it’s just what the work needs. Time, attention, and most of all, space.

Movement in the Work

Scott: One thing I’ve always noticed about your work is that even the most abstract pieces seem to contain movement.

Pip: I suspect that’s because movement has shaped most of my life, if I think about it. Sport, broadcasting, all of it, I’ve always been drawn to energy and momentum, what’s actually going on underneath things rather than what’s sitting on top.

People look at a painting and ask what it’s of, and the honest answer is usually that I’m trying to capture a feeling rather than a subject. A landscape might be the starting point, but the finished piece isn’t really about the landscape, it’s about what the landscape felt like standing there. Same with flowers, water, weather, sometimes even a conversation I’ve had. The feeling interests me far more than the object does, and that’s probably why abstract work suits me so well. It lets me chase the experience of a thing rather than worry about getting it accurate.

Why the Arts Matter

Scott: The arts seem to come up repeatedly on The Third Half these days. Music, theatre, writing, painting. Why do they matter?

Pip: Because they help us understand ourselves, I think. Simple as that, really.

I loved your piece on Ireland, by the way, the respect it showed for a culture that actually values its writers, musicians, artists, storytellers, where creativity isn’t treated as a bit of an extra but woven right through everyday life. We’ve got very good, I think, at measuring the things that are easy to count, and not nearly so good at noticing the things that are harder to measure. Art sits firmly in that second pile.

Most of us can think of a song that got us through a rough patch, a book that changed how we saw something, a painting that made us stop a moment longer than we meant to. None of that’s an accident. The arts get at parts of us that don’t respond particularly well to spreadsheets and performance metrics, which is part of why I like what you’re doing with The Third Half, if I’m honest. The conversations aren’t really about sectors or job titles, are they, they’re about people, curiosity, experience, starting again. Art belongs right in the middle of that, same as business does, same as sport does.

What's Next

Scott: So where does all this go now?

Pip: The thing taking up most of my head space at the moment is something called Bylines. I’m being quite careful about how much I say, actually, because it’s still finding its shape, but it’s probably the closest I’ve come to pulling together all the different bits of my life into one place.

It draws on my years interviewing elite athletes, sportspeople, and how often those interviews left me with this odd, very physical response. I could feel the energy in what people were telling me, the intensity, the movement of it, and that’s what the paintings are chasing. In a funny way it’s the broadcaster, the athlete and the artist all turning up in the same room, which I quite like the idea of.

I’m also looking at exhibition opportunities in London later this year. Exciting and slightly terrifying in roughly equal measure, that one. But that’s half the joy of exhibiting, isn’t it, the conversations people have around the work afterwards. No two people ever see the same painting in quite the same way, and I never get tired of that.

Pip has completed two solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions over the years and is currently exploring opportunities to exhibit in London this autumn.

If you’re connected to a gallery, creative venue, arts organisation or interesting space that supports artists, she’d be delighted to hear from you.

You can see more of her work at www.pipmoleart.com.

As for me, three of her paintings already hang on my walls. I have a feeling there may be more to come.

People. Planet. Progress.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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/

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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/

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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(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

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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/

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