The Pessimism and Occasional Optimism of Juvenile Adulthood

William Penn wrote that "Time is what we want most but use worst." The more we want time to stop in its tracks, it races ahead of us, causing life itself to accelerate beyond our perceptions of the world. There is a slight irony in so bleakly forecasting a doomed struggle against time in the introduction of a piece that is, ostensibly, about a running race. But it is a race long enough for pride to be measured not in rankings but pace, though satisfaction as an amateur can perhaps only be accurately measured by lactic sensations. Today, at the Uppsala Half Marathon, there were inevitably too many.  This morning, time was an embuggerance and a bliss. Looping repeatedly back on myself through the outskirts of Uppsala's old and new, time was all I could calculate - my head constantly contorting my distance covered and time spent in an almighty effort to estimate a resemblance of my final time. My head was full, yet empty, liberated from the banal stresses of the everyday, bo

 A man jolts upright, his day not having intended to start so abruptly. Instantly he rises. Unable to conventionally breathe, he makes a dash for the toilet, raiding the tissue to empty his nose and wipe his face from the muck that has gathered from the hours of previously laying in bed. The immediate struggle to breathe, heightened by the excessive brightness of the toilet light, kicks too many wheels into motion. Only upon checking his watch to see the clock strike three does the adrenaline of the day subside into a slow sense of delirium.  Groaning for branded eucalyptus oil, he lumbers back to his bed. Immediately he is too warm under the covers, his body already beginning the brutal spin cycle of awakening before the mind could cancel such a typically cheap transaction. Soon he is too cold, left exposed to the room's unheated temperature. A headache pounds, though not heavily enough to stop his mind from endlessly whirring. Tonight the mind's theme of imagination was an at

There was a brief moment yesterday when, watching another DJ pushing buttons for his set at All Points East festival in London, I nearly denigrated him internally. He was the third of five DJs I would watch and listen to in the afternoon who would all in turn either ‘take it up’ or ‘take it down’, each in their own slightly imitable way. I swiftly realised the hypocrisy of such negativity, having delayed starting a year abroad in Sweden precisely so I could watch even older men press said buttons. Soon, I may be able to write an article without incorporating or shoehorning references to German electronica, but that time lies ahead. I booked to see Kraftwerk almost as soon as I heard they were performing. I wanted to feel the thumping bass lines, sink into the hypnotic melodies and revere the ‘gesamtkunstwerk’ - universal work of art - before co-founder Ralf Hütter (who turned 76 yesterday) looks at his watch and calls it a day, through choice or circumstance. Decades of German precisio

Working on three and a bit hours sleep at the time of writing, the cusp of delirium draws ever nearer, sitting on my shoulder, waiting to seize even a slightest act of surrender. I’m quite proud to have held it off for quite so long. My long weekend in Paris (acting as both a final reunion of flatmates and a celebration of the Tour de France) operated on a system of long days, late nights, and sleep being consistently demoted in favour of talking, walking or occasional doomscrolling. Adding to the creeping sense of madness is the nature of Paris itself. Years ago, cycling into Paris with Explorers, I wrote a crap blog entry, where I referenced how the traffic lights offer a greater ambience to the city than instruction to passing vehicles. In that regard, little has changed. Cities are places of purpose, action, intention. Desires are geographically concentrated for your convenience, activity is the currency of a city’s success. Arriving on Saturday lunchtime, having been awake for nea

As ‘Le Grand Depart’ came to a conclusion on Sunday, Wout Van Aert’s frustration at a third consecutive second place was palpable. Though Van Aert’s ultimate quest for the green jersey will be helped by a lack of sprint stages such as these, neither the upcoming terrain nor his current ownership of the yellow jersey will yet console him. If he was feeling inaccurately self-deprecating, Wout could consider himself a Jack of all Trades against masters. But Fabio Jakobsen’s competitive spirit in the high mountains will be channelled into surviving time limits - his personal and sporting rival Dylan Groenewegen will only hope his toils at the Dauphiné weeks ago will spare him the worst of such stresses. Only Peter Sagan seems to pose a serious threat to the Belgian, and even that will rely on him besting the man who last year won stages on Mont Ventoux, the Arc de Triomphe, and the humble stopwatch. Van Aert is a man capable of consoling himself. Reliant on extrapolating conclusions from

Tonight was supposed to be a night to stay in, to rest up ahead of a short camping trip to Wales, but circumstance dictated otherwise. Or rather, I decided otherwise. Notified by a parent of Wolfgang Flür playing up the road in Kings Heath, I adjusted what formative plans I had, and headed up said street. Of the four key Kraftwerk members, Flür was the one that bailed first, and has been out of their orbit the longest. His departure wasn’t clean. Having not been credited on his last two albums with the group, he was likely already ostracised within the group. Feelings further soured when remaining members sued him to prevent the release of his autobiography, aptly titled ‘I was a Robot’.  Subsequently, there has been a reinvention of sorts, from Robot to Music Soldier. He lent on his robotic past heavily, the screen behind showing intimate photos of Kraftwerk outside the studio in civvies - occasionally even smiling. Yet this soldier was distinct, actively promoting the difference betw

I’ve  written before about Thomas De Gendt , in what retrospectively seems like a terrible piece of work. But today, he deserves a brief revisit. We mythologise our heroes and icons, creating narratives around them that fit what we want to believe. The nearest example to hand is the portrait of Robert the Bruce in my wallet, a symbol of Scottish resistance to English tyranny. The myth goes that after repeated defeats in battle, it was the sight of a spider persevering to rebuild its web that galvanised him into commanding the Scots army to victory. The myth is exactly that, but has succeeded in projecting an image of Scotland as proud and defiant in who they are. In Thomas De Gendt I built up this myth of a man in control of his destiny. A man who existed for the nuance and inefficiencies of bike racing. A man who focused on different finish lines to everyone else, and could make everyone else suffer the consequences of his desires.  At the Giro d’Italia ten years ago, when he ripped u

There is something almost ludicrous about starting a travel review before having travelled, yet in the spirit of a vaguely gripping narrative arc, it feels worth setting the scene... It was the point in the semester where days begins to merge together, each drowning in a sort of mediocrity punctuated only by the occasional birthday party or sports society event. Essays creep ever closer, never suddenly but with just enough of a vague hint of menace, prowling your calendar in the knowledge that they could disrupt next year's plans in the faraway land Vic and Bob once titled 'abroad'. In this incredibly tepid scene comes a most delightfully vivid of eavesdrops. By which, a flatmate's friend was politely conversing with those of us with nowhere better to be on a Sunday night than in the kitchen on our phones. The newsflash was immediately eye-brow raising, heart fluttering, screen locking for it offered a respite, an escape from the blandness of library and lectures. Fligh

This has been a strange week, one that echoes the privileged position I and so many others are in. As war in Europe continues to rain down on the people of Ukraine, we are lucky enough to be able to switch off and think about matters less existential. We can go out, meet people, greet people, witness love and marriage and all the things that don't constitute living but make up what we know as life. In this context, it feels slightly silly - almost meaningless - to be writing about a hill and a concert among other things, aware that far more pressing, urgent issues lie beyond the Edinburgh ring road. But I want to make a point, it's just one that will take a few paragraphs. I returned to Edinburgh on Tuesday, fresh from witnessing the certification of love into marriage, an archaic yet charmingly intense bond of commitment binding beloveds as tightly to each other as they wish to embrace. There was a somewhat surreal moment where, on the stag do before the wedding, fresh from an

During the first lockdown, nearly two years ago now, I stumbled upon  an article  by the BBC’s then Arts Editor Will Gompertz which sung the praises of EM Forster’s 1909 short story ‘The Machine Stops’ and its immense prescience for our current predicament. Impressed by his review, I added it to my wish list and thought little else about it until this Christmas, when the least tech savvy of all my grandparents ordered it as a present for me. Suffice to say, I’d almost forgotten about it.  The story concerns a woman - Vashti - living in a never ending network of tunnels and pods below the Earth’s surface, not only disconnected from her home, but disconcertingly uninterested in it. Instead, to the disgust of her son Kuno, she begins to worship ‘The Machine’, seeing it as not just an omnipotent tool of God, but God itself, responsible for all the innovation and ‘advances’ humanity has seemingly made whilst trapped underground. Her son, in turn, is restless with this imprisonment and vows