The Dunwiddie Post – A record of storms survived and horizons still calling

Five Centuries in the Palm

February 12, 2026 / Dunwiddie / 0 Comments

The beach does not give.
It keeps.

Until it doesn’t.

Yesterday, under a grey sky, it let five coins surface from the shingle. Five small discs. Five centuries. I walked the line of tide, sand and stone alone, detector humming low. Each signal was brief. Each recovery deliberate.

When I laid them out in my palm, they formed a quiet chronology.

Charles II of England — Seventeenth Century

Copper. Thick. Dark with age.

A halfpenny from the late 1600s. The outline of the king still there if you angle it to the light.

This coin moved in a century of upheaval and rebuilding. Markets in mud. Ale traded for labour. Ships coming and going from harbours that were older than the crowns stamped into metal.

It passed from hand to hand without commentary.

A farmer settling a small debt.
A dockworker paid at week’s end.
A woman measuring grain behind a wooden counter.

No one carrying it needed a theory of empire. They needed acceptance. A coin either worked or it didn’t.

It worked.

Until it fell. Or was dropped. Or slipped from a pocket on a windy day much like this one.

George II of Great Britain — Eighteenth Century Silver

Silver changes the mood.

A Hibernia sixpence. Smaller. Sharper. Still carrying a trace of brightness beneath the tarnish.

Silver carries intent. It stores effort in a way copper does not. It might have crossed a market table in Dublin. Paid for cloth, for passage, for tools. It might have been saved for a week before being spent.

The word Hibernia sits there — neither defiant nor submissive. Just naming.

Metal does not argue politics. It records authority at the time of minting and then submits to circulation.

This one travelled. It did not live an idle life.

Queen Victoria — Nineteenth Century Penny

This penny is worn almost flat.

The face has softened into memory. The edges are tired.

It worked for decades.

It passed through repetition. Bread. Coal. Ferry fares. Wages broken into smaller parts. It might have travelled to Liverpool and back. It might have crossed the Atlantic in a coat pocket and returned years later in another.

The wear is the story.

You do not get that smoothness from one dramatic moment. You get it from thousands of ordinary exchanges.

History is often written in headlines.

It is lived in pennies.

George V — Early Twentieth Century

This coin sits at a hinge in time.

Empires shifting. Lines redrawn. Arguments hardening.

Yet the metal is calm.

It would have bought newspapers carrying declarations and denials. It would have paid for a drink in rooms where loyalties were debated. It may have sat in the pocket of someone who believed the future would look different from the past.

Political reality changes in bursts.

Coins change more slowly.

The head remains until a new one is struck.

Euro — Twenty-First Century

A ten-cent piece.

Light. Exact. Identical to millions of others.

The harp stands alone now. No monarch. No crown.

For a time Ireland held its own currency again. Small. Distinct. Entirely national.

Then came another choice.

Not conquest.
Not invasion.
Alignment.

Monetary authority sits elsewhere now — in institutions beyond the shoreline. Policies shaped in distant rooms. Interest rates determined far from this stretch of shingle.

It is not empire in red coats and ships.

It is coordination. Framework. Structure.

Shared stability when things hold. Shared exposure when they don’t.

The coin feels neutral in the hand. Efficient. Designed for movement across borders that once required flags and cannons.

But the structure is still there.

Every coin carries the signature of whoever sets the rules of money.

The Hands

That is what endures.

Five centuries of touch.

Farmers with soil under their nails.
Sailors smelling of tar and salt.
Women counting change at wooden counters.
Men arguing policy without ever seeing the rooms where it was made.
Children sent on errands, gripping a single coin like responsibility.

Copper.
Silver.
Bronze.
Alloy.

Crown.
Harp.
Stars in a circle.

Authority rearranges itself.

The metal changes its design.

The human exchange remains constant.

Standing there with the Irish Sea behind me, coins lined against the wind in my palm, I felt no outrage and no nostalgia.

Only continuity.

Power shifts form.
People adapt.
The beach waits.

And sometimes, after centuries, it returns what was dropped.

Bad Money Travels Well

February 9, 2026 / Dunwiddie / 0 Comments

I awoke early, determined to enjoy a full rain-free day for once, and took the first train available. It was late — no surprise, given the flooding — and I was the only passenger boarding at that particular station. That suited me. Trains are better when they’re half-empty, running slightly off schedule, moving through a landscape that has already started its day without you.

The journey fitted my travel instinct perfectly. Closed stations slipped past, now converted into houses where platforms still exist but purpose has drained away. I recognised stretches of line where I’d walked before, and others where I suspected the ground nearby would hold small, forgotten things — places worth returning to, should I ever get time to reconnoitre this route properly. Travel like this isn’t about arrival. It’s about observation and accumulation.

Next, there was a walk by the sea. Wind off the water, the familiar rhythm of scanning, listening, pacing. Metal detecting is never just about finding things. It’s a discipline of attention. Most days you come back with nothing more than distance covered and salt on your jacket. Occasionally, the ground answers.

This time it did — quietly.

What turned up was the remains of a forged silver coin. Late eighteenth century. French in origin, from a period when bad money was common enough that imitation became an industry. At a glance, it would once have passed. That was the point. A thin skin of silver over a copper core, made deliberately, not accidentally. This wasn’t decay masquerading as fraud; it was fraud, designed to circulate.

The timing matters. The later 1700s were a poor period for trust in money. War finance, repeated debasements, uneven minting, and collapsing confidence created the perfect conditions for forgery. Coins like this didn’t need to endure. They needed to move — quickly — from hand to hand, before anyone stopped to weigh them or listen too closely.

Time and saltwater eventually did what markets often don’t. The thin coating failed. The copper showed. The deception stopped working.

These pieces rarely survive. When discovered, they were pulled from circulation, melted down, or discarded — and the forgers themselves often paid far more dearly. The penalties ranged from execution to transportation to remote colonies. Official forgers, it turns out, have never been fond of unofficial competition.

The sea is one of the few places that keeps such things without judgement. Even in this condition, the forgery may have value. Counterfeit always does, once it has crossed fully into history.

That’s fine with me. It goes straight into my collection.

I like how the day brought several long-running interests together without effort: travel, movement, a walk by the water, history underfoot, and the mechanics of money stripped back to their simplest form. Silver, but only just. Trust doing the work authority failed to do.

The day ended in a Georgian pub, which felt entirely appropriate. Same century. Same worn surfaces. Different transaction.

Instead of a copper halfpenny, the ale cost seven euros.

Hawick — An Unexpected Day of Financial and Economic History

February 3, 2026 / Dunwiddie

It was simply a family day out, prompted by nothing more than curiosity — and a shared sense that we were being drawn somewhere specific. None of us had been to Hawick (pronounced Hoick) before. There was no inherited story, no prior familiarity, no practical reason to choose it over anywhere else. Except perhaps the Tweed, both the river and the fabric. And yet the pull was unmistakable.

From the moment we arrived, that instinct made sense. Hawick is rich in Georgian and Victorian architecture — serious, functional buildings that speak to confidence, permanence, and an era when towns were constructed around purpose rather than appearance. This was not a place that had grown accidentally or decoratively. It had been built to last.

What revealed itself over the course of the day was not nostalgia or heritage tourism, but something more precise: the physical remains of a town that once sat squarely inside Britain’s productive and financial system. Textile mills, commercial streets, river infrastructure, banks, clubs — all still legible if you know what to look for.

Hawick was not peripheral by accident. It was connected because it produced. Capital, labour, goods, and credit moved through it with enough volume to justify national integration. Today, much of that system has thinned or gone, but the evidence remains embedded in stone, layout, and institutional residue.

Part of that story is what no longer exists. Hawick was once a mainline railway stop, linking Edinburgh and Glasgow south through England to London. That level of connectivity does not arrive by sentiment or policy — it follows volume, output, and economic justification. The line is gone now. Not dramatically removed, just rendered unnecessary. As production declined and capital withdrew, infrastructure followed. The loss of the railway was not the cause of Hawick’s change, but a confirmation of it.

This post records what can still be read in the landscape: a small town that explains, in physical form, how money once worked — and what changed when production ceased to anchor it.

Scottish Banknotes and the Survival of Issuing Power

The notes are not issued by the British state. They are issued by private banks.

Scotland remains one of the few places in the developed world where commercial banks still issue their own currency — a legacy arrangement that survived political union and centralisation. Different banks issue different notes, all denominated in sterling, all circulating as money.

Whether this privilege was explicitly negotiated at the Union of 1707 or merely tolerated as a practical necessity is still debated. What is not debated is the outcome: Scotland retained a degree of monetary autonomy that England did not extend elsewhere.

Each note is today backed one-for-one by Bank of England reserves, yet the issuing identity remains private. That distinction matters. It reflects a time when money emerged from institutions embedded in trade, reputation, and locality — not exclusively from the state.

Seen together, the notes are not curiosities. They are surviving fragments of an older monetary settlement: loose, constrained, but not accidental.

Frugality Institutionalised: The Savings Bank Model

Hawick Savings Bank, established in 1815, was not a commercial bank in the modern sense. It was a trustee savings bank — part of an early movement to formalise thrift, restraint, and deferred consumption among working people.

This was not about growth. It was about preservation.

In an industrial town with cyclical income and narrow margins, security depended on behaviour. Savings banks assumed that capital should be accumulated slowly, custody mattered more than yield, and trust was local and personal.

The language carved into the stone is revealing: trustee, security, continuous history. These are not modern financial slogans. They describe a system designed to endure rather than impress.

Hawick produced surplus. Surplus required safekeeping. Safekeeping demanded credibility. The savings bank completed that loop.

Banking After Hours: When Cash Was Physical

The night safe is easy to miss, but it tells you exactly how money once moved.

Before electronic settlement, takings were physical. Cash accumulated during the day had to be secured immediately. Businesses deposited after closing. Banks collected later. Risk was managed mechanically, not abstractly.

The design assumes distrust, not convenience. Heavy construction. One-way entry. No street-side access.

This was a world where money was earned, counted, deposited, and reconciled. Responsibility sat with the individual and the institution, not with “the system.”

The ATM Hut: Automation as a Holding Pattern

The ATM hut belongs to a different era.

Where the night safe assumed custody, the ATM assumed access. Banking shifted from deposit to withdrawal, from relationship to convenience, from staff to machines.

For decades, this infrastructure spread everywhere. And now it is quietly retreating.

The hut remains not because it is valued, but because removal costs more than neglect. It is a transitional artefact — neither enduring like the savings bank nor central like earlier banking institutions.

Built for convenience, not discipline, it was never meant to last.

From Local Industry to Imperial Circulation

James Wilson was born in Hawick and died in Calcutta.

A manufacturer first, a publisher later, his trajectory mirrors Britain’s nineteenth-century expansion. Local production created surplus. Surplus demanded wider markets. Wider markets required predictable rules, currency stability, and commentary to bind them together.

Calcutta was not a romantic outpost. It was a financial hub — where imperial trade, taxation, and administration converged.

Hawick was not peripheral to empire. It was one of its starting points.

The Club, the Ale, and the Imperial Mindset

The day ended in a former Conservative Club, now a Wetherspoons, with a solid local ale.

These clubs were not leisure spaces. They were institutional rooms where trade, politics, and empire were discussed practically — as logistics rather than ideology.

Markets. Shipping. Currency. Risk.

Empire was not a theory. It was an operating system.

Border Reivers: Movement Under Pressure

The Borders were never stable territory. They were pressure zones — politically weak, economically exposed, repeatedly raided.

The Border Reivers were not romantic outlaws. They were an economic response.

When authority overstepped or failed and agriculture could not sustain life, people reorganised around mobility, kinship, and force. Independence was not ideological. It was practical.

My own ancestors were part of that world.

That matters because the instinct to move when conditions deteriorate is not new. It appears repeatedly in border populations, trading families, and merchant cultures. When systems stop working, people leave.

Sometimes by choice.
Sometimes by force.

When People Leave, They’re Voting

Hawick’s population loss is not sudden, but it is decisive. Over time, enough people reached the same conclusion: the town no longer sat at the centre of opportunity.

Other places grew. Hawick thinned.

That is not cultural drift. It is economic sorting.

People stay while systems reward effort. They leave when the future becomes narrower than the past. The decision is rarely ideological and almost never announced. It is executed quietly, family by family, job by job.

Depopulation is not failure. It is judgement.

And it always arrives after the systems that once justified staying have already gone.

Closing

Hawick explains something modern finance and planning repeatedly misunderstand.

Money once followed production. Savings followed discipline. Movement followed pressure. When those relationships weakened, people adapted — first locally, then geographically. Infrastructure did not fail first; it followed capital and people out.

There is now periodic talk of relinking Hawick to Edinburgh by rail. If it happens, it will likely bring commuters. Property demand may rise. The town may become better connected once again.

But commuters are not the same as local productivity.

A commuter economy imports income and exports time. It does not recreate mills, workshops, or locally anchored capital. It changes the function of a town without restoring its purpose.

Hawick has already lived through the difference between being connected because it produces and being connected because it is accessible. Those are not interchangeable states.

The buildings remain.
The systems do not.
What survives is not nostalgia, but evidence.

Shingle, Silver, and the Long View

January 26, 2026 / Dunwiddie

I went out metal detecting yesterday.

The sea had reclaimed the beach. After the recent storms, the shingle had come back in and covered the sand again, resetting the ground as if nothing had passed before. It wasn’t one of those rare, generous days like the bumper outing back in early December, but it was finally dry — and that was reason enough to go.

Everything they say about Irish weather at this time of year is true. You learn to move when the window opens.

What struck me most wasn’t the number of finds, but the number of conversations.

On an almost deserted beach, people wanted to talk. In fact, I probably spent a quarter of the trip standing still, leaning on the detector, chatting with strangers who were curious, cheerful, and entirely unguarded.

One couple had opportunistically decided to collect scallops that had been washed ashore by the tide. Another pair were searching for sea glass. They didn’t find much, but they were perfectly content — happy simply to be there, pockets light, spirits not.

Further along, on the long walk back, I met a man who stopped to ask about the detector. He turned out to be a long-time Time Team viewer and had always fancied having a go himself. That opened the door to stories — him gold prospecting in the mountains, the patience it demands, the silence, the feeling of working ground that doesn’t yield easily. Add that to the list.

He mentioned he had a four-year-old son.

That stayed with me.

It reminded me how I returned to metal detecting as an adult after a childhood moment that never quite left me — the wild excitement of finding an Edwardian penny, green with age, still carrying the authority of its era. It’s still in a tin somewhere.

My son may no longer be part of these walks. That chapter has closed. But years later, here I am again — this time finding Edwardian silver, a sixpence lifted cleanly from the Irish sand.

Sound Money Unearthed

Hold a coin like that and you feel something modern life rarely offers: density.

Not symbolic value. Actual weight.

The British pound sterling was once exactly that — a pound of sterling silver. This Edwardian sixpence now carries around four pounds’ worth of silver by weight alone. A figure I suspect is heading higher, given the modern appetite for silver — AI infrastructure, solar panels, electrification, and weapons all competing for the same finite metal. The beer pint index (BPI) agrees with me. This sixpence would’ve bought 3-4 pints back in 1905, now it doesn’t even buy one most places.

Fiat erodes quietly, daily, through mechanisms designed to go unnoticed. This coin has endured wars, resets, empires, and ideologies — and still holds value simply by existing.

No promises.
No counterparty.
No narrative required.

Just metal.

Sovereign Parallels

Metal detecting mirrors the nomadic path.

You move steadily. You ignore the noise. You dig where the signal rings true. Most swings yield nothing. Then, occasionally, the ground gives something back — a quiet confirmation that patience still works.

Ireland’s beaches reset every day. The tides erase tracks, cover ground, and rearrange the surface. But history persists beneath your feet, indifferent to policy cycles or opinion.

That man’s curiosity — and his young son — felt like a reminder. Cycles renew. People come and go. Systems rise and decay. But the hunt endures.

Next rain-free day, I may follow those mountain prospecting leads.

Sound assets over fiat traps.
Weight over promises.
Ground truth over abstraction.

Always.

The State You’re In

January 22, 2026 / Dunwiddie

I’ve been thinking about the word state.

Not the flag.
Not the buildings.
Not the men behind desks.

The word itself.

A state is a condition.
A way things are, for a time.

It is not a person.
It does not remember you.
It does not care.

It simply applies.

How It First Appears

Some people meet the state as a helper.

It arrives early.
It pays for things.
It smooths the road.
It makes life feel lighter.

For them, the state feels generous. Almost friendly. Like a great hand that keeps refilling the cup.

Others meet it differently.

As forms.
As rules.
As delays.
As a distant voice saying no.

Both experiences are real.

Both are temporary.

The Error

The mistake is believing the state has a nature.

That it is kind.
That it is cruel.

It is neither.

The state is not a being.
It is a condition applied to circumstances.

When the circumstances change, the condition changes.

That is all.

When Your Life Changes State

There comes a time when your own life shifts.

You earn more.
You move.
You age.
Your family changes shape.

Nothing dramatic needs to happen.

And yet the tone changes.

What once flowed toward you slows.
What once helped now measures.
What once supported now calculates.

People say the state has turned against them.

It hasn’t.

They are simply no longer in the same state.

The Gates

The state works like a series of gates.

If this, then that.
If not, then something else.

Denmark makes this easy to see.

There are supports that apply at certain phases of life — for children, for education, for housing — and there is taxation that applies at others. Under the right inputs, the flows can be substantial. Life can feel buoyant. Even generous.

Then one input changes.

Income.
Residence.
Age.
Status.

The gate flips.

The same machinery produces a different outcome.

No anger.
No memory.
No apology.

Just logic.

From Supported to Supplying

This is the moment many find hardest.

When they are no longer carried, but counted.

Benefits stop.
Obligations begin.
The tone sharpens.

People look for a reason.

There is none.

The state did not decide anything.

It recalculated.

Why This Hurts

We are taught stories instead of mechanics.

That the state cares.
That it protects.
That it provides.

Sometimes it does.

But only while the conditions hold.

The state does not see people.
It sees categories.

Fall inside them and life feels warm.
Fall outside and it feels cold.

Both are impersonal.

Seeing It Clearly

Once you understand this, much anger falls away.

You stop arguing with the weather.
You stop pleading with the tide.

You position yourself instead.

You learn when to sail.
When to anchor.
When to move on.

An Odyssean Ending

I do not see the state as an enemy.
I do not see it as a saviour.

I see it as a sea.

Sometimes calm.
Sometimes rough.
Always indifferent.

A man who mistakes the sea for a home will drown.
A man who learns its moods may cross it many times.

Odysseus did not curse the water.
He read it.

He lost ships.
He lost years.
He lost companions.

But he kept his hand on the helm.

Home, when it came, was not given.
It was reached.

And the mistake was never the journey.

The mistake was believing the waters would always be kind.

The Neutral Zone

January 21, 2026 / Dunwiddie

I’ve realised I’m in what can only be described as a neutral zone.

The old life is no longer close enough to touch. The house is gone. Accounts have been closed — not just the obvious, literal ones, but the quieter mental ledgers too. Obligations that once occupied bandwidth have loosened their grip. Narratives that once defined me now feel distant, almost abstract.

And yet, the new world hasn’t fully arrived.

The life I mapped out in early 2025 is taking shape, but it’s doing so in its own time. Some elements are already in motion. Others are still gathering quietly behind the scenes. Nothing feels stuck — but nothing can be forced either.

This in-between has a texture of its own.

What’s surprised me most is how much easier it was to say goodbye to certain things than I expected. Not because they lacked meaning, but because their season had clearly ended. Once that becomes obvious, clinging feels unnecessary. There’s relief in recognising completion when it arrives.

The neutral zone is not emptiness.
It’s space.

Space without urgency.
Space without explanation.
Space without the need to perform continuity for anyone else.

I can see now how much of life is spent rushing from one identity to the next, terrified of the pause in between. But the pause is where recalibration happens. It’s where noise falls away and signal returns.

Things are happening. Just not always on a visible timetable.

And I’m increasingly aware that some outcomes only materialise when attention is elsewhere. A watched pot never boils — not because nothing is happening, but because constant monitoring interferes with the process.

So I’m getting on with life.

Walking.
Reading.
Thinking.
Writing.
Paying attention to what’s in front of me rather than what’s forming in the distance.

The neutral zone doesn’t need to be filled. It needs to be inhabited.

If this period has taught me anything, it’s that transition doesn’t require drama. It requires patience and trust — not in outcomes, but in direction.

The old life is gone.
The new one is coming.

And for now, that’s enough.

On Metal Detecting

January 3, 2026 / Dunwiddie

Metal detecting entered my life quietly, but it stayed because it spoke to something fundamental.

It connects me to history in two ways at once — the literal and the metaphorical.
Actual objects, buried and forgotten.
And actual meaning, hidden beneath surfaces most people never question.

I walk ground that thousands of others have crossed without pause. Beaches, fields, edges of towns. Ordinary places, endlessly repeated. Most people see nothing there. They’re looking ahead, not down. They assume value is visible, signposted, approved.

I don’t.

I slow down. I listen. I trust signals that don’t shout.

Sometimes the ground gives nothing. That’s part of the discipline.
Metal detecting punishes expectation and rewards patience. You cannot force it. You cannot negotiate with it. There is no entitlement.

Then occasionally, the earth offers something precise:
a coin worn smooth by hands long gone,
a button, a clasp, a fragment of a life that once mattered intensely to someone.

When you hold it, history stops being abstract.

It has weight.
Texture.
Temperature.

You realise that the past wasn’t an idea — it was people moving through days, making choices, losing things, loving things, surviving systems that no longer exist.

That matters to me.

Actual Gold, Metaphorical Gold

Sometimes you find actual value — silver, old coins, things that once had economic meaning and still do. That’s satisfying, but it’s not the real reward.

The real gold is what the process trains you to notice.

Metal detecting teaches that:

value is often buried, not advertised
the obvious path is rarely the richest
patience compounds in non-linear ways
most people walk over opportunity every day

That applies to land, to history, to investment — and to life.

I’ve connected with metaphorical gold the same way I’ve occasionally found actual gold:
by ignoring noise, trusting instinct, and accepting long stretches of nothing without complaint.

That’s not optimism.
It’s realism.

Solitude Without Isolation

Metal detecting is solitary, but it is not lonely.

I didn’t realise this at first, but you are observed.

People watch quietly as you work. Some are curious. Some are respectful. Some simply want to understand what you’re doing. And quite often, they engage.

Strangers ask questions.
Conversations begin — unforced, unguarded, meaningful.

There is something disarming about a person absorbed in a task that isn’t performative. It invites genuine interaction. No status. No agenda. Just interest.

Metal detecting reminds me that solitude doesn’t sever connection.
It refines it.

Even when you’re alone, good people remain present in the world. They notice. They speak. They engage with curiosity rather than extraction.

That’s reassuring.

It’s physical without being competitive.
Focused without being anxious.
Purposeful without being productive in the modern sense.

There is no audience.
No performance.
No outcome demanded.

Just movement, attention, and response.

In a world obsessed with validation, that’s a relief.

The Keys

One of the things I find most often are house keys.

Not coins.
Not jewellery.
Keys.

They turn up in the sand after storms, half-buried, corroded, sometimes still on a ring. Ordinary objects, easy to overlook — but they always stop me for a moment.

Because every key marks a precise instant of panic.

Somewhere, long ago, someone finished a relaxed day at the beach. Sun, salt, ease. The sort of day where time loosens its grip. Then the moment comes — hands go to pockets, or a bag is opened — and the weight is wrong.

Keys gone.

What follows is easy to imagine:
the sudden tightening in the chest,
the frantic retracing of steps,
the dawning realisation that the door home will not open.

That quiet domestic crisis is now all that remains of the day. The laughter, the warmth, the pleasure — gone. The key is what survives.

I hold them sometimes and think about how small the moment was, and how large it must have felt at the time.

That appeals to me more than gold.

Because keys aren’t symbols of wealth — they’re symbols of access, shelter, belonging. They open doors that mattered to someone, once.

Now they belong to the ground.

Metal detecting teaches you that history isn’t only made of grand events. It’s made of dropped things, small mistakes, moments of distraction, lives briefly intersecting with chance.

Empires fall.
Houses change hands.
Keys rust.

And yet the story remains intact enough to be felt.

Why It Fits This Life

Metal detecting suits the life I’m building now because it aligns with everything else:

Sovereignty — no institution grants permission to listen to the ground.
History — not curated, not moralised, just encountered.
Health — walking, air, rhythm, patience.
Clarity — long hours strip thought down to what actually matters.

It also keeps ambition honest.

When you spend time with artefacts from collapsed empires and forgotten lives, you stop believing in permanence as a given. You build more carefully. You choose what’s worth carrying forward.

The Ground Remembers

The ground remembers far more than we do.

It keeps what was dropped, lost, hidden, or discarded — without judgement.
It offers it back occasionally, without promise.

I like that.

Metal detecting reminds me that history isn’t finished, value isn’t always visible, and progress isn’t always forward-facing.

Sometimes the most meaningful work is done with your eyes down, your pace slow, and your expectations restrained.

That’s not nostalgia.

That’s discipline.

The Man Who Spoke and Asked for Nothing

January 1, 2026 / Dunwiddie

The Man Who Spoke and Asked for Nothing

I have met him three times this year.

Once in Morocco, once in Ireland, and now again in Malaysia.

Different faces. Different languages. Different climates.

But the same man.

He speaks.

And then he leaves.

And he asks for nothing.

In Morocco he came to me without ceremony. No smile meant to sell. No story rehearsed for tourists. He said a few sentences—about the place, about the way things used to be—and then he was gone. No request. No lingering. No expectation that I would remember him.

But I did.

At the time, I didn’t understand why. I only knew that something in me had gone quiet afterwards, the way the sea does after a boat passes.

Ireland was different.

Ireland is my old world, not my exotic one. The fields are familiar. The air carries memory. When the man appeared there, it surprised me more. He spoke as if I already belonged, even though I felt between lives at the time. He said something ordinary—almost nothing at all—but it landed with weight.

He did not ask who I was.

He did not ask what I did.

He did not offer advice.

He simply acknowledged my presence, and then walked on.

That, too, stayed with me.

Malaysia was the third time.

By then I was no longer searching. I was moving slowly. Watching. Letting days be days. And that is when he appeared again. A few words. Calm eyes. No curiosity about my plans. No attempt to extract anything—money, story, validation.

He spoke because speaking was right.

And then he left because staying was unnecessary.

These men do not exist in the modern West, or if they do, they are buried beneath noise.

In the West, conversation is a transaction. Men speak to gain ground, establish position, sell something, or defend themselves. Silence is suspicious. Time is monetised. Presence is rare.

But in certain places—what I can only call intact cultures—there are still men who have nothing to prove.

They are not mentors.

They are not guides.

They are not mystical sages.

They are witnesses.

They appear when a man is alone but not lonely. When he is not extracting from the world. When he is walking without performance. They do not come to everyone. They cannot be summoned. They cannot be chased.

And if you try to turn them into a story too quickly, they disappear.

Odysseus met many men on his journey. Kings who demanded allegiance. Hosts who offered shelter at a price. Monsters who tested his strength. But there were also quiet figures along the way—men who pointed once, spoke briefly, and asked nothing in return.

Those were the moments that told him he was still on the right path.

Not home yet.

But not lost.

I don’t tell everyone about these encounters. I didn’t tell my inner circle this time. Some things lose their truth when spoken aloud too often. What is given freely should be carried quietly.

I don’t believe this is destiny.

I don’t believe it makes me special.

I believe it means something simpler, and harder to earn:

For brief moments this year, in Morocco, in Ireland, and now in Malaysia, I was walking correctly.

And that is enough.

I keep going.

Kellie’s Castle and the Men Who Stay Too Long

December 11, 2025 / Dunwiddie

I had waited to see this place for thirty-five years. Michael Palin’s railway journeys put me onto it long ago, but nothing prepared me for the feeling of standing in the shell of another man’s unfinished ambitions.

Kellie built this hill like a man laying out his immortality brick by brick. He wanted a palace, a monument, a statement carved into the heat and stone of Malaya. And yet, here it stands — empty, echoing, beautiful, and broken. A place half-born and never lived in.

You walk these corridors and you wonder:

Was there ever a better monument to how fleeting success and happiness really are?

How quickly a legacy can rot or die?

How quietly a story can end without anyone truly noticing?

Today, standing in the abandoned rooms, I thought of Montana — my own project, my own obligation, the weight I carried for years. I held onto that house until it was time to let it go, and when the moment came, I walked away. I exited my castle long before it had the chance to imprison me.

Kellie never had that luxury. He died in Portugal at fifty-six, still fighting bureaucrats and labour shortages, still believing he had more time. They say his ghost walks the upper corridor here. Not in anger — in yearning. A man trapped in the dream he never escaped.

There’s a curse whispered locally:

Any man who binds his identity to his creation will lose both.

Kellie’s story follows that script with frightening precision — a child lost, a labour force wiped out by influenza, a dream stalled by red tape, and finally, a sudden death. The castle became a tomb for his intentions.

I realised as I walked through the wine cellar — the one he planned to air-condition, the first in Malaya — that I am only two years younger than he was when he died. That hit harder than I expected. It forced a question I’ve avoided for most of my life:

What dream of mine is unfinished, and will I have the courage to leave it behind when the time comes?

The truth is this: legacy is fragile, memory is temporary, and the world is ruthless with sentiment. Even Ipoh reminded me of that this week — the colonial cemeteries bulldozed, the graves poured over with fresh concrete. Whole lives, whole sorrows, erased in an afternoon.

Maybe that’s why this castle struck me.

Maybe this is the lesson:

Do not stay too long.

Do not cling to the past.

Do not become a ghost in a house you once loved.

Kellie tried to build permanence.

I am learning to build only momentum.

And perhaps that is the real inheritance of these ruins — the quiet instruction to walk forward, lightly, before the walls close in.

Goodbye, Montana

June 2, 2025 / Dunwiddie

There are houses you live in, and there are houses that live in you.
Montana was the second kind.

I didn’t choose it casually.
I felt it the very first time I saw it — the weight of its old bones, the quiet pride in its Edwardian-era lines, the way it waited without demanding anything. It was a house built for seasons and storms, the kind that stands while everything around it changes. A man can come to love a place like that.

And I did.

I loved the wide rooms and the light that moved across the house as the day progressed.
I loved the heavy doors that closed with certainty, the high ceilings that held silence like a cathedral.
I loved the garden in early summer, quiet, private and still, the leaves emerging on the huge old copper beech.
I loved how the house watched over everyone inside it, even when no one noticed.

But Montana was also the place where the old life gathered around me.
A museum of years I outgrew.
A stage where I carried weight meant for three men, not one.
A place that held memories I had long outlasted.

For all its beauty, it became a harbour I could no longer stay anchored in.

Every house has its truth.
Montana’s truth was simple:
I was no longer the man to fit what I had built inside its walls.

There comes a point in a man’s life when he realises he cannot rebuild himself in the same place he was broken. Montana was filled with ghosts that never left — not tragic ghosts, just the kind created by routine, obligation, and the quiet dying of years you can’t get back.

I learned many things inside that house.
How to endure.
How to protect.
How to keep going when the foundation cracks.
How to hold a life together when everything else fell apart.

But I also learned the hardest lesson:
A man cannot stay where he is slowly disappearing.

So I left.
Not because I stopped loving it,
but because I finally understood that Montana belonged to a chapter of my life that had to end before I could begin the next one.

The day I walked through its rooms for the last time, the house felt lighter — as if it, too, knew the story was finished. The echoes were softer. The air felt still. There was no anger, no grief, just a quiet acknowledgment between a man and the place that sheltered him:

“It’s time.”

Montana will go on without me.
Houses do.
They take new families, new laughs, new storms, new light.
They outlive all of us.

But a part of me will always stand in the hallway, hand on the mahogany banister, knowing I was shaped there — hardened, humbled, and finally pushed out into the world to reclaim the man I should have been all along.

Some places you leave to save your future.
Montana was one of them.

This is my goodbye —
not in sorrow,
but in gratitude for a house that carried me long after it should have.

And now the road ahead is open,
the horizon wider,
the past sealed gently behind a closing door.