For Context The Luddites weren’t technophobes. Let’s get that out the way. They weren’t afraid of machines in the abstract - they were afraid of being replaced, discarded, and starved by them. And frankly, I think that’s fair. The story begins in the early 1800s, in the smoky belly of England’s Industrial Revolution. Skilled textile … Continue reading The Idiot Boy and the Machine: On Ned Ludd’s Kids in the Age of AI
Category: history
The Ghosts That Britain Needed: A Reflection on Arthur Machen’s The Bowmen
I’ve always had a fondness for stories that creep in sideways. Not the grand, operatic ones that march on with banners flying, but the sort that slip in under the door, uninvited and half-mistaken for something real. Arthur Machen’s The Bowmen is precisely such a story - a modest tale of supernatural salvation that, with … Continue reading The Ghosts That Britain Needed: A Reflection on Arthur Machen’s The Bowmen
A Soleful Misuse of Public Services: In Praise of the Cheesy-Footed Charlatan of Worthing
There are times in life when one must stop, take stock, and wonder if civilisation has, quite simply, had its day. That moment arrived for me this week in the form of a gentleman - and I use the term in its loosest, most elasticated sense - by the name of Richard Cove. A man … Continue reading A Soleful Misuse of Public Services: In Praise of the Cheesy-Footed Charlatan of Worthing
A Wizard’s Dream, or: Why My Toaster Is Probably a Portal
There are days - usually Tuesdays, always drizzly - when I suspect I’ve fallen out of time. I don’t mean in the Romantic sense, like I’ve become a flâneur of yesteryear, drinking absinthe with Baudelaire while watching Victorian dogs bark in sepia. No, I mean I’m quite literally out of step with whatever this “present” … Continue reading A Wizard’s Dream, or: Why My Toaster Is Probably a Portal
Arthur Wing Pinero: The Magistrate of Mirth and Other Dastardly Dalliances – Part Two of Dandy Dick
Or, how one man in a cravat brought Victorian theatre out of its corset and into its knickers. Before Wilde minced in with cigarette cases and cucumber sandwiches, and long before Coward lit up the drawing room with his razor-sharp repartee and possibly questionable moustache, there was Pinero. Arthur Wing Pinero, to give him his … Continue reading Arthur Wing Pinero: The Magistrate of Mirth and Other Dastardly Dalliances – Part Two of Dandy Dick
Wording 