EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS

International members of the Readership may have noticed their British friends complaining with more than usual intensity about the weather this week—in particular how following a lovely warm spell temperatures have plummeted and rainstorms swept the country in a most unseasonable manner.

Turns out, a cold snap in the second week of May is entirely predictable. People have griped about it for hundreds of years. No-one quite knows why it happens, and it seems to catch us by surprise every single time. Traditionally, though, this has been the week of The Ice Saints. Flag it in your calendar for next year, particularly if you’re a gardener with tender seedlings ready to go out. Maybe give it another week.

Wherever you are, whenever you are, however you are, welcome to The Swipe.

Continue reading The Swipe Volume 4 Chapter 18

We have a bee’s nest in the garden. It looks like we had one hidden in the base of an old raised bed that a badger or fox discovered and dug out (badgers looooove bee larvae). An emergency evacuation took place. The ball of bee potential (presumably with the queen snug in the middle) was moved out wholesale and relocated to a sheltered corner between the back of the house and the fence. The new colony is busy rebuilding, weaving a new structure out of vegetable matter. It’s fascinating to watch.

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If undisturbed, white-tailed bumblebees are completely harmless and will move on by the end of the summer. We’ve moved some pots around to give them a bit more privacy—although it’s impossible to resist a peek in the mornings. We’re delighted and honoured they chose to share our garden. Hello, little frens.

Wherever you are, whenever you are, however you are, welcome to The Swipe.

Continue reading The Swipe Volume 4 Chapter 17

I learned an important lesson this week about anger.

Just before I was heading into work one morning, I spotted a message on internal comms which unfairly accused me of a mistake I hadn’t made. This filled me with rage. As I drove in, I built up a narrative of what had been said and how I should respond. On the approach to our facility, the car suddenly pinged up a low fuel warning, and I realised I had planned to take a slight detour to be able to fill up at the cheapest place in town (no secrets here, it’s Costco). I’d completely bypassed that, so had to refuel on a much more expensive forecourt.

In this case, then, anger had a genuine real world monetary cost, apart from the added stress and general bad mood. As I watched the gauge on the fuel pump tick up, I knew I had been taught something valuable, and I couldn’t help but smile.

The work thing? Turned out to be no big deal at all.

Wherever you are, whenever you are, however you are, welcome to The Swipe.

Continue reading The Swipe Volume 4 Chapter 16

It’s become clear to me as I slip towards The Big Birthday that nothing is more important than the pursuit and discovery of joy. Even in the simplest of moments, I find myself aware of how every moment holds the capability to bring a tiny glimmer of wonder.

With that intention at the forefront of my mind, joy seems to present itself more easily. Like when you’re buying a car and suddenly you see the make and model you want on every turning. Finding joy can easily be like that. Seeing the way sunlight kindles the inner glow of a flower. The scent of woodsmoke or charcoal when you light a barbecue. Even the tapping of a keyboard on a bright April morning, with the sun just above my eye line.

Yeah, I know, all a bit woo, but I never said I didn’t have hippie tendencies.

Yesterday brought us to Oxford, to a joyous union with friends old and new, under dreaming spires and a flawless blue sky. It was a moment which could have been tinged with sadness, but instead was an utterly beautiful day. A celebration, an affirmation of life’s endless capacity for delight.

This chapter of The Swipe is dedicated to Kate and Bryan. Onwards and upwards, my darlings. Joy awaits.

Wherever you are, whenever you are, however you find joy, welcome to The Swipe.

Continue reading The Swipe Volume 4 Chapter 15

It’s early. House Beast Millie was not taking no for an answer when it came to rousing one of us to get her breakfast—at 5am she was stomping up and down the bed, shoving her nose in our faces. I tried a bait-and-switch, getting up so she’d rush out of the bedroom giving me a moment to shut the door behind her. By then, of course, I’m just awake enough to make any attempt at renewed slumber a doomed exercise. So I’m up, dang it. Millie has eaten her pouch of Bozita, a posh Swedish cat food which she absolutely does not deserve and is now sitting on the desk next to me in the office, purring her face off, waiting for an opportunity to zip onto the chair she feels is hers by right while head-butting the iPad.

With all these distractions, it’s amazing I manage to get any Swipery out to you at all.

Wherever you are, whenever you are, however you are, welcome to The Swipe.

Continue reading The Swipe Volume 4 Chapter 14

A strange week in the news cycle. On one loop, the crazy king of Orangetown brought us to within 90 minutes of Armageddon before realizing it was Taco Tuesday and perhaps declaring global thermonuclear war wasn’t the best way to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Meanwhile, mankind’s greatest endeavor went off without a hitch as a diverse and skillful group of our finest went further into the cosmos than ever before. On the way they showed us the wonders of our translunar backyard, gave us a moment of beauty and sorrow as the mission commander named a bright crater after his wife and hell, generally made space travel cool again. I know I’ve dunked on the notion of humanity’s exploits in the void recently—it’s no secret that everything outside our fragile atmosphere is lethal. But I couldn’t help but get a joyful chill at some the images Artemis sent back, and felt I could allow myself to dream again.

With all the crap going on down here, perhaps it’s better to look to the stars again.

Wherever you are, whenever you are, however you are, welcome to The Swipe.

Continue reading The Swipe Volume 4 Chapter 13

I ascribe to no religion, have no faith other than the sure and certain belief in the essential goodness of humanity—yes, even in the face of all evidence to the contrary. However, I’ll embrace a religious holiday like Easter with cheer and jollity. No honking about the separation of church and state in these quarters. As long as I’m not expected to actually attend a mass then hey, screw it, four days off is good for me.

There’s precedent for building your own celebration. You don’t have to stick to the state-approved baseline. Most of the western world’s modern religious festivals are closely tied to pagan calendar markers for the change in season, pre-Christian celebrations of rebirth and fertility, pledging fealty to the goddess Eostre. Go nuts with the symbolism. Praise the egg-laying bunnies of yore. Cook how you want, eat how you choose, be with the people you love. Or spend some quiet time alone if you’d rather, welcoming the new season with a smile.

Wherever you are, whenever you are, however you celebrate, welcome to The Swipe.

Continue reading The Swipe Volume 4 Chapter 12

We’ve turned a corner, Readership. The Spring Equinox was on the 20th, while the 25th was Lady Day, in old calendars the starting point of the New Year. Our windowsills are filled with seed trays, with a cluster of Cosmos already poking snouts above the surface. The cherry tree’s in bud, and our Geum Totally Tangerine is already popping up bright and cheery. Easter’s round the corner, so the garden furniture is getting a dust-off and airing. It’s quite likely the first barbecue of the year will happen next weekend, too. I love this time of year, full of promise and portent. There’s a lot of stupidity and venal bullshit floating around right now. In a spring garden, you can at least get a moment of respite and just—breathe.

Wherever you are, whenever you are, however you are, welcome to The Swipe.

Continue reading The Swipe Volume 4 Chapter 11

It feels like everywhere you turn, service providers are jamming AI into your crevices and expecting you to be happy about it. Grammarly were caught in shenanigans this week with the whole author mimicry clusterfukc — a move which led me to finally delete the preachy, unadventurous spell-checking app off my writing vectors.

Meanwhile WordPress.com has introduced machine learning into their hosted services—somewhat annoying as that’s how I get Excuses And Half Truths out to you every week. I’m happy to report that the agentic side is switched off by default. For me, and more crucially for you, that’s how it’ll stay. Anything you read here is handcrafted, the product of one slightly skew-whiff human mind. It may be a bit awkward, subject to weird swerves in tone and mood, but I like to think—to hope—the material herein is reflective of the fella what wrote it.

For honesty’s sake, I admit to poking around with some AI requests out of idle curiosity. I don’t want to come across as a knee-jerk reactionary who won’t use a car when a horse is available. Every single time I’ve pointed a task at ChatGPT or Gemini, the result has needed extensive rewrites and fact checks. Machine learning continues to add time and effort to my work. Why on earth would I embrace that?

Wherever you are, whenever you are, however you are, welcome to The Swipe.

Continue reading The Swipe Volume 4 Chapter 10