[ 15:23 sunday 13 august – sandhurst,  gloucestershire ]

i’m with mum and dad for the weekend, perched in the sitting room   with the garden a mass of lively greens against the overcast sky. mum   remedying my botched efforts turning up a pair of linen trousers i   bought from chieko’s stall at spitalfiends. on the radio the bach  cello suites are being played in a curious transcription for guitar.

yesterday we all went canoeing on the river wye, mum and dad together  in an open canoe and me in a bright yellow kayak. we did an eight  mile stretch around the symonds yat gorge in the middle of the forest  of dean, a gorgeous and mysterious landscape. we saw salmon jumping,  buzzards wheeling overhead and even a kingfisher darting azure across  the water. the river was very low and at several points the water  formed races over the stony bed. at one such race i made an idiot of  myself and succeeded in capsizing, to the amusement of mum and dad.  the water was so deliciously warm that when we’d finished the journey  and hauled the canoes out of the water i found a secluded spot and  went for a swim.

for the past month or two i’ve been looking for a house to buy in  london but truth be told i’m ambivalent about the whole exercise. one  of my experiments from 1998 to 2003 involved trying to avoid owning  things and it left me with a strong sense that the less i owned the  happier i was. so long as i have access to necessary things and  services i have no desire to own them. people usually talk about the  feelings of security that come with ownership but in my experience  there is much more sense of burden and restriction.

a house is probably the pinnacle of the ownership malaise, surrounded  as it is by long-term financial obligations and a multitude of  complex maintenance requirements. i have no interest in a house as an  investment, which seems to have become a primary motivator for many  people. i just want somewhere to live.

the thing that started me thinking about buying somewhere was the  realisation that there are a hundred things i’d like to change in the  flat where i live, but because i rent it i’m not able to do it. the  bathroom and kitchen need refitting, the roof needs strengthening and  given proper access, the brickwork on the western wall needs sealing  so rainwater doesn’t seep in, more storage needs building in. all  these things would make a difference to my daily life.

of course i don’t really like living in london, which further  diminishes my enthusiasm for buying a house here. when i returned  from stromboli in 2003 i sincerely believed it would be possible to  set up trampoline and be on my way again after six months. three  years later this looks somewhat naive, but i’m glad i made the choice  and i doubt i’d have done so had i realised how long it would take,  so that original naivety was a blessing. the company’s at a point now  where i expect to be able to start spending a portion of my time  working remotely before long. but i’ll still be spending a lot of my  time in london for the next few years so it makes sense to sort out a  living environment in which i feel comfortable.

amongst the many odious aspects of house-hunting there’s been one  real pleasure. in the process of determining which areas i’d like to  live in i’ve spent hours cycling round unfamiliar areas of hackney,  islington highbury, haggerston and canonbury. this has given me a  much richer sense of where the mediaeval village centres were and of  the explosive waves of residential development during the second half  of the nineteenth century. a bicycle is a wonderful aid to  understanding a city’s development and topography.

: c :

[ 20:05 friday 14 april – sandhurst, gloucestershire ]

here i am at mum and dad’s where i arrived last night. today we went walking in the malvern hills. soft air, trees bursting with bud, the sun warm against our faces. as i write mum’s in the kitchen preparing supper and dad’s taking advantage of the last moments of light to finish his labours in the garden.

last week i lost a friend, or rather several thousand of them, which was a sad experience. some months ago i acquired a magnificent bamboo tree for the office from plant-seller friends on brick lane. it’s fifteen feet tall and some of the stems are as thick as my arm. it looks just wonderful. shortly after the bamboo’s arrival we noticed a couple of ants crawling around the floor. a few days later a column turned up to harvest biscuit crumbs from jan’s table. it seemed we had some new residents and it didn’t take great deductive skills to link them with the enormous tub in which the bamboo was planted. since then the ants have been our constant companions in the office.

living on stromboli there were always ants around the house. in a way i came to appreciate their company. whether i was working, reading, cooking or whatever i’d be subliminally aware of where they were and what they were up to day by day. individually their behaviour is monotonous but collectively it’s incredibly varied. i remember one time on the terrace talking with gustl whilst a double column of ants tracked up and down a fig tree beside us. all at once the ants froze, every single one of them, and remained motionless as we watched in wonder. there had been no external trigger that we could discern but somehow the decision to stop moving had communicated itself instantaneously through the whole column. i rapped on the tree trunk but the ants remained completely still. then after several minutes they all tentatively wiggled their antennae and a few seconds later the entire column was back in motion.

when the ants appeared in the office i suppose i felt a kind of nostalgia to have this familiar presence in my environment once more. previously the office ecosystem was inhabited only by plants and humans. the ants added a rich and unpredictable element to the mix that secretly delighted me. each day they would be doing something different. sometimes a week or two passed without any trace of them. anyone leaving food in their workspace was liable to find ants crawling all over their computer and up their arms. i’m sorry to say my associates didn’t always share my appreciation of their presence.

it all continued in a sort of strained harmony until last week when the ants made the unfortunate decision to swarm. they had obviously been building up their forces, really i had no idea they’d become so numerous. our neighbours’ offices were crawling with them. the walls of the kitchen were a seething mass. the atrium was criss-crossed with ant-motorways. i can’t say it was popular with the other tenants. the man from rentokil arrived to deal with the general situation and it was made clear to me that i should really do something about the bamboo.

thus, with a heavy heart, i found myself pouring five litres of a potent liquid pesticide into the bamboo tub last friday evening after everyone else had gone home. i will miss my six-legged friends.

by way of conclusion, we’ve just taken possession of a powerful new production server and needed to think of a suitable name for it. therefore, unbeknownst to our clients, some of our hosted systems will henceforth be running on a machine called “formik”. i hope this gives lots of little ant-souls cause to smile. their memory liveth.

: c :

[ 19:20 sunday 27 march – sandhurst, gloucestershire ]

easter day. the great pagan festival of fertility and life converted so ingeniously by the christian church into its number one celebration of agony and death. this is what you call progress. industrial society got the last laugh though, rendering down the christian festival into today’s riot of gluttony and tv specials, just as it has rendered down every other festival. the modern tagline for christmas and easter exorts us that these are times “for the family”, an implicit recognition that the remaining 364 days of the year are not for the family. the triumph of individualism seems to be the right to ignore blood relations for most of the time.

yesterday i helped dad cut down a fir tree in the garden which had been planted a few years after we moved to the house in 1987. over the years i’d seen it grow to be a substantial tree, perhaps twenty-five feet high. but its size had started to suffocate other plants in its vicinity and disturb the harmony of the garden. hence my parents decided it was time to remove it. killing a mature tree is a little tragedy but it’s what mum and dad wanted and i was glad to be useful. it made me think how long i’ve known this patch of land, how much it’s changed from the bare field of eighteen years ago, how many memories are associated with each corner and plant. it made me think about the slow cycles of life, of beginnings and ends, births and deaths.

in a similar vein, the pool family has been living opposite the house as long as we’ve been here, farming the surrounding land as their parents farmed it before them. now they’re giving up farming and moving out, having reached the conclusion that it’s no longer a viable business. they’ve already sold their livestock and yesterday people came from far and wide as their machinery was put to auction. here too there’s a sense of witnessing a point of transition in a cycle as the energy and intelligence of british rural society seeps away from agriculture after millennia during which it provided the foundation.

returning to my previous despatch on britain’s inventive new prevention of terrorism bill, the process continued well into friday evening. this is the longest period a bill has bounced around between the two houses since records began. mr blair continued to give the chamber a wide berth, preferring to make uncompromising statements to tv cameras in the opposition-free comfort of downing street. these statements were obligingly aired on all the news programmes and will thus have formed the basis of viewers’ understanding of what was going on, though they had almost no bearing on the passionate debate raging quarter of a mile away.

when the bill bounced back to the house of lords for the fifth time, with the clauses the lords had repeatedly removed re-inserted yet again by the commons, my noble friends stuck their hands in the air and gave up. within an hour the queen had signed the act and it passed into law. within three hours the home secretary had signed the first ten of the new control orders, impatient to try out the shiny new toy delivered to his hands by a parliament entirely impotent to stop or modify the legislation.

what did the parliamentary process achieve? the three primary demands raised in the commons and lords were that judges should issue the orders, not politicians, that the legislation should terminate after a period of between six and twelve months and that the standard of proof should be “balance of probability” rather than “reasonable suspicion”. not one of these amendments was secured. on the first point the government conceded that a court would have to examine orders issued by the home secretary within seven days, and if there was clear evidence that the home secretary’s reasoning was “substantially flawed” they could change the terms of the order. under all other circumstances the court is required to let the order stand. on the second point the government graciously agreed that parliament would be given the opportunity to discuss the legislation sometime next year. there is nothing in the act specifying this, it is purely an assurance from the government that it will make time and take notice of what parliament says. on the third point there was no concession at all.

in all points of substance, therefore, the government got precisely the bill it had put forward. yet anyone watching the tv news or reading the papers in the succeeding days would think something entirely different had occurred. opposition leaders proclaimed that the final bill was “almost unrecognisable” from the one originally presented, that the government had “caved in” on crucial demands and that the lords had achieved a great victory for parliamentary democracy. indeed this was the narrative that had played out in parliament, if not the substance of what took place. i surmise the government put forward the bill with several elements it fully planned to jettison in order to give an appearance of making concessions and offering opponents a way to claim victory without ever materially altering the bill. the art was to appear serious about defending clauses which were always destined to be amended, and ensure that opposition remained focused on these points. the word for this is “theatre”. a form of entertainment. a distraction from actuality.

and this, it appears, is what we have allowed our democracies to become. one day we may wish we’d paid more attention.

: c :

[ 09:20 tuesday 1 july – train leaving central palermo ]

i spent much of sunday night reorganising my chattels and carrying boxes to gustl and valerie’s magazzino on the beach at scalo dei balordi, assisted greatly by sergio. leonardo came by with his taxi at eleven forty and conveyed me to the port where we shared a last bottle of water. at quarter past twelve i was on the hydrofoil to messina. from there i took the four o’clock coach to palermo, where i met some friends. we had some truly excellent pizza together, followed by some of the best ice cream in palermo (and therefore the world). the gelsi nero is exquisite at the moment. after supper we drove a little way out of palermo to the east and had a swim with the plankton sparkling around us. now i am on my way to the airport for a flight to london.

this first chapter of my life on stromboli is now complete. for the next six months i will be based in london. leaving the island isn’t something i particularly want to do, but it’s clear this is what trampoline needs from me at this stage. for the final week i lived once again in paolo’s house above the beach where i spent my first six months on stromboli. on wednesday evening i held a dinner party for 15 of my closest friends on the island, around a long table amongst the mesumbryanthemums, lit by candles and the stars.

in the last few days the volcano has started making its familiar grumbling noises again. the islanders greet this much as anxious parents greet the renewed crying of a baby that has been silenced awhile by a fever.

: c***

[ 23:30 tuesday 24 december – sandhurst, gloucestershire ]

three weeks since i landed in london. my plan was to whistle through some meetings there then race back to stromboli. but warren came over from san francisco and craig arrived from norway and we had so much to do and every day a new lead came up for someone else i needed to talk to. i wouldn’t admit to myself that i’d abandoned my escape to stromboli but i suspect i made the decision within a few days of arriving. it was all very productive and i was able to see a lot of friends but i’ve been pining for the sea and the ravens and the ever-changing silence. i have dreamed about the island several times. from september 2001 to october 2002 i was never away from stromboli longer that two weeks. it’s already two months since i left there bound for america. i doubt i’ll get back before the middle of january.

last week i tried to do some “christmas shopping”. i took a tube into central london and walked into one shop then another. i wandered through the relentless shelves of cheerful, pointless objects; trying to evaluate each one in relation to people i love. but after an hour i had bought nothing and was feeling nauseated. i walked out onto tottenham court road, put down my backpack in the middle of the pavement and remained perfectly still as the mass of shoppers streamed around me. almost immediately a sense of well-being and freedom sprang up inside me. i stood there for a long time, breathing slowly and smiling. from time to time someone would catch my eye and there would be a fleeting expression of puzzlement as they hurried onward. nobody smiled back at me.

i arrived here at mum and dad’s house a couple of days ago. it has been raining a lot. the fields are very muddy. yesterday i cycled into gloucester and got wet.

now it is nearly midnight, nearly christmas. the people scatter platitudes of peace and goodwill whilst an unneeded war is kindled in their name. everything grows dark and complex. my parents are at church. they were worried i would put too much garlic in the supper.

to my friends, the readers of this inadequate journal, in australia, malaysia, new zealand, brazil, italy, the united states, spain, germany, finland, china, norway, canada, ghana, japan, india and the united kingdom of great britain and northern ireland:

i bid you a merry christmas

: c

00:54 thursday 8 june – sandhurst , gloucestershire

the desk at the end of my parents’ sitting room . mum asleep upstairs . dad away in salisbury .

my powerbook sits amidst evidence of several weeks of my habitation . piled letters and documents . boxes of slides . a quarz-banded pebble from cornwall . a left-over ten dollar note from australia . were it not for these signs i wonder if i would believe in my travel , my activity .

this has been the longest interval between despatches since i began them sixteen months ago . several have been started and abandoned . i am not even certain as i write this that it will be completed and transmitted , but i hope both will be achieved .

perhaps i grow more self-conscious ? all the time i am over-brimming with thoughts and observations , things i yearn to share . yet i remain silent . impotent .

since my last words i have not been static . in cornwall i celebrated my sister’s birthday , met with warren langley and ann tonkin , walked gloriously free of my crutches . in glasgow i attended the launch of the latest school for social entrepreneurs and was newly inspired . in london i planned the next steps for the sse learning web and the circus organisation , caught up with friends old and new . in cambridge i discussed my potential involvement with virt-u , a project to develop a european virtual university . i also dropped in on ray jobling , my old tutor at st john’s , and on ann cotton , a fellow-student from the sse who runs a charity working to increase educational opportunities in sub-saharan africa . ann’s charity , camfed , is funding me to spend a month setting up a project in northern ghana .

indeed , i should have departed for ghana on 6 may . but my project is reliant on a stable electricity supply and that in turn is dependent on the completion of a new building . work on this building is somewhat behind schedule and the rainy season arrived before its roof did . consequently my project cannot begin until october .

it is odd how unsettling this shift has been . i have grown comfortable living with almost complete uncertainty about where i will be and what i shall be doing from month to month . but it threw me off balance to have something which i had regarded as certain suddenly become fluid .

the new timetable is a blessing , though . apart from my ongoing commitments most of my attention is now wrapped up in trampoline and there is a lot of work to do over the coming months. progress seems agonisingly slow , but probably my perspective is distorted . i am typically impatient . the truth is i feel greatly intimidated by the hurdles which lie before me . most of my weaknesses will be exposed by the kinds of task i face : distilling a set of concrete proposals from my maelstrom of ideas , expressing these proposals in a succint and accessible fashion , constructing simple financial models , undertaking structured market research . i have another mountain to climb in my learning about venture finance and investment . somewhere in the midst of this i must try to keep hold of the ideas which sparked the whole thing off . i am unquantifiably grateful to warren langley , james smith and everyone else who’s helping me proceed .

for the months before i leave for ghana i’ve been thinking about taking a house in cornwall , though i’m also considering spending the summer in milan . i’ve scarcely seen my friend bobo since he returned to his roots there and i’ve wanted to learn italian for ages .

in the meantime i’ve been very glad to spend these weeks here in gloucestershire with mum and dad . it’s a long time since i saw so much of them and i certainly don’t remember it ever being so harmonious in the past . the last year hasn’t been easy for them and they had some news from me about my sexuality just before i left for australia . so all in all it was a good time to be with them .

this feels complete so i shall send it before any second thoughts creep in
. i doubt it’ll be such a long time before the next one .

: cH

18:17 friday 24 december – gable end , sandhurst

the eve of christmas . my parents’ house . gusts of wind hurl hard rain against the glass and the floodwaters rise all about . by tomorrow the village may be cut off and once more i shall find myself on an island .

i made it to the mainland without hindrance . the seas were not too steep to reach st mary’s and the wind decreased sufficiently to permit flight to newquay . i was the sole passenger on the twenty-seat twin otter , heavily outnumbered by the three pilots . all the customary announcements were made but ” ladies and gentlemen ” was replaced rather self-consciously with ” sir ” . the view along the north cornwall coastline was tremendous , surf crashing on granite .

from the airport , a bleak semi-military concrete bunker , i was driven to truro by a cornishman who spent the journey berating london and its government . how remote , how arrogant , how uninterested in life outside the metropolis . i sat in uncharacteristic silence mumbling assent where it was required . there had been time only for three hours’ sleep , sufficient to dull even my sense of injustice .

the little website on which i’ve spent so many hours is at http://www.simplyscilly.co.uk . the text was written by the council’s tourism officer and only the three photos of st agnes are of my taking .

then london . my final week as a student with the school for social entrepreneurs . i spent the whole period feeling fatigued , sensing how much the previous month’s labours had cost me . i withdrew myself from the closing presentations and sat , a little ashamed , with my cameras . amongst the students there was a sense of beginning as much as ending . sometimes i hardly felt as if i were there .

there were other liaisons besides , friends and accomplices , many glad reunions . but i wanted nothing so much as to rest . by the time i left london , three days ago , i had the beginnings of the chest infection which remains with me now . i have slept almost constantly these last days .

yesterday i went to buy christmas presents for my family . the prospect repelled me but less so than the knowledge of the hurt which would be caused if i did not . this year of solitude has left me more fervently anti-consumerist than i reckoned . shop after shop sent me reeling with nausea from its piles of brazenly worthless trash , fighting for breath amidst the gleefully purchasing hordes . the solitary oasis was a sparsely-stocked interiors place where i spent quarter of an hour talking about travel with its young sri lankan owner .

london . what can i say of london ? the fever is at full flood . one friend commented ” it is germany in the thirties … everyone is clinging onto what they can ” . there is a relentless pre-occupation with trivia , a dangerously indiscriminate desperation for belief , a wilful abandonment of civilisation . but for all this there is hope too .

the scillonia digital wokshop was founded last saturday in my absence . fate determined it would be so . perhaps this was appropriate in any case . another association will come into being in the closing minute of this year , the votes to constitute it cast electronically . this the seas cannot interrupt .

i wish the world joy .

: cH