This page introduces The Shape of Now, a space for stepping back from the noise of the present and looking at the modern world through a slower, older lens. Instead of reacting to headlines, it traces the deeper patterns beneath them, the long continuities, the pressures that resurface in new forms, the ways history leans into the present. By offering reflections shaped by memory, context and historical depth, this page serves as an entry point for understanding contemporary life beyond the pace of daily news.
The Shape of Now
The present age arrives in fragments: a headline here, a tremor there, each moment insisting on its own urgency. Beneath the noise, the world still moves according to older rhythms, the slow turning of institutions, the long memory of landscapes, the deep structures that outlast any single crisis.
The Shape of Now is my attempt to trace those continuities, to look at the modern world not as a blur of events but as part of a much older story. I’m less interested in the churn of news than in the patterns beneath it, how power gathers, how societies strain, how the past leans quietly into the present.
This page is where I set down those reflections, not as pronouncements, but as a way of making sense of the moment we inhabit.
Reading the Present Through Older Rhythms
To understand the present, we have to look past the surface agitation and pay attention to the slower forces shaping it. Every society carries its past forward, in its institutions, its habits of thought, its inherited anxieties. What feels sudden is often the culmination of pressures that have been gathering for years, even generations.
By tracing those deeper lines, the moment becomes less chaotic and more legible: not a scatter of disconnected events, but a pattern emerging from long‑standing tensions and continuities.
This is the ground on which The Shape of Now stands, a place to read the present with a longer memory and a steadier gaze.
- Brexit and Gibraltar: A Case Study in Self‑Inflicted Damage
- Cadaver Tombs in England: Mediaeval Mortality in Stone
- The Book of Jasher
- Never Going to visit Florida
- A British Observer Tries to Make Sense of America’s Great Unravelling
- What are 5 everyday things that bring you happiness?
- Where My Writing Likes to Wander
- A Tent, A Cough, and Questionable Life Choices
- Holidays and Why I love going home
- The Universe Isn’t Sending Me Signs – It’s Just Raining
- Moving Forward, Mostly by Accident
- Raised in a Strike, Stuck With a Ballot
- When “Working Together” Has a Target
- Mystery? What Mystery?
- A Nation That Runs on The Stories We Tell to Tourists
- A Small British Quarrel With a Very Big Book
- The Accidental Road Tripper: A British Guide to Gettin’ It Wrong
- The Art of Almost Crying: Giuffre Family Appearances
- The Search for the Meaning of life in a Changing Universe
- Dinner with Diogenes of Sinope
- Another Refusal on Prostate Screening
- Notes from a British Gentleman
- Advice and The Want of a Guide
- The Province of Perpetual Discernment
- Review: Ibis Budget Carcassonne, Rue Général Leclerc
- McBurnie of Kirkmahoe
- The Olive Oil Jar in the Cupboard
- The murder of Henry Nowak
- The Sardine Diet and Older Men
- Bournemouth Airport Review: What Travellers Can Really Expect
- A British Guide to Boundaries for the Terminally Polite
- Why Britain Needs a Defence Bond
- All the King’s Men (1946)-Robert Penn Warren
- Flower of Scotland and Scottish Identity
- The return of old fears in new clothing
- Review: Ibis Budget Carcassonne, Rue Général Leclerc
Bodies for Sale: The Modern Male
- How the American Male Became a Commodity
- The Curated American Male Body on the slab and the insatiable beast
- Narrative Themes in American Gay Adult Media
Further Reading:
- You Won’t Believe What Lies Under This Quiet Isle of Wight Beach
- Walsingham: The Holy Land of Parking Confusion
- Burials: Social history and the dead
- The Oceanographic Institute, Monaco:Building, Views,Experience
- Ventnor Cemetery on the Isle of Wight