Personal Blogs

Let’s Escape This Life for a Day

In 1999, I lived for a time in Stavanger, Norway. Most mornings, leaving Randaberg and heading into the city, I stopped at a filling station for a freshly made skolebolle—a school bun. I can still taste the custard, coconut, and sweetness. I miss them still.

Sometimes, in the private cinema of my imagination, I step into a time machine and escape this life for a single day. Don’t tell me you’ve never entertained the thought. One press of a button and I’m in a 17th-century Japanese village, mist curling like silk above the paddies, sandals shuffling across the earth. Another press and I’m wandering an Indian night market, the air alive with cumin and cardamom, the chatter of merchants and buyers weaving a living symphony. Or perhaps I’d go further still—away from humanity altogether—and find myself alone in the Rockies, a bag of skoleboller somehow beamed away while the coffee brewed. I’d pitch my tent beneath a midnight sky brimming with stars and listen to a silence so complete it feels as though the earth itself is holding its breath.

But then the dream fades. I blink, and here I am—back in Scotland on a Saturday evening. Nothing extraordinary. Just reality humming along.

And in those quiet returns, the questions arrive. What’s it all about? Why are we here at all? Are we only a passing arrangement of atoms—chance evolution—replicating ourselves until we vanish? Some are content with that explanation. I’m not. Because the world does not behave as though it’s meaningless.

Think about it. Flowers bloom in colours that surpass function. Birds sing songs more elaborate than survival requires. We, too, hunger for what is unnecessary. We write poetry. We compose music. We fall in love with paintings, with stories, with the way sunlight filters through a late-afternoon window. None of this is needed to stay alive. Yet without it, are we truly living? The unnecessary becomes essential.

And then there’s time. We grow older. Doors begin to close one by one. Torschlusspanik, the Germans call it—the panic of gates shutting as opportunities slip away. Suddenly, we cling to life with a desperation we never knew was in us. Few are ready to say, “Tomorrow is enough.” We bargain for more time, more seasons, more chances. Why? Because something deep within whispers that life ought not to end.

My sister once spoke with an old man who stood weeping at the sight of the countryside. When she asked if he was alright, he said, “I see all this beauty, and I don’t have much longer to live. But I want to stay.” His tears were the language of eternity. He wanted more not because he was greedy, but because he was human.

The writer of Ecclesiastes put it plainly: God has “set eternity in the human heart.” That single thought explains much of our restless longing. It explains why sunsets undo us, why we fear the final curtain, why we ask questions that biology cannot satisfy. It tells us that our hunger for permanence is not a flaw but a clue.

The Garden of Eden was a template for what the whole earth was meant to be. Our first parents were told to spread out and cultivate the land. Imagine it—the whole earth filled with Rockies, Japanese gardens, skoleboller, and the rich delights of every age and culture. And here is the point: with eternity in your lap, there is no need to beam about. There is no hurry. Build a boat, sail to the Orkneys, then to the Faroes, and on to Norway. Ride a horse to Stavanger. Kult! as the Norwegians say.

“Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
— Luke 23:43 (NIV)

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I Confess, The Addiction is Called Tsunsho

I was wandering through Waterstones on Argyle Street, Glasgow, when my eye was caught by a bookshelf I swear had never been there before. It was as though it had sprouted overnight like a mushroom after rain. And what a mushroom—an entire shelf dedicated to writers’ notebooks. Every possible shape, colour, and size. Some even masqueraded as Victorian novels, the sort you expect to smell faintly of dust and old libraries.

Naturally, I was helpless. I picked one up, then another, stroking the covers like some Victorian opium-eater handling forbidden goods. They all looked so dignified, so promising. I could almost hear them whispering: Buy me, and your great novel will practically write itself.

But here’s the rub: at home I already have a drawer full of these things. All pristine. All untouched. A silent mausoleum of ambition.

The Japanese, with their flair for naming life’s quirks, have a word for buying books and never reading them: tsundoku. It's about stacking them up so they radiate intelligence while the owner remain exactly the same.

But what of notebooks? Where’s the term for compulsively buying blank pages, as though the very act of possession might infuse you with genius? Tsundoku may be noble neglect, but my vice is more tragic. A notebook bought, and never written in, feels like adopting a pet and then refusing to feed it.

Tsunsho a neologism suggested by ChatGPT sounds as good a name for this addiction as any:

Tsunsho (積ん書) made up from 積ん (tsun) : “to pile up, accumulate” and 書 (sho) : “writing, book, document”

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The Drug Dealer’s Nemesis

“What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”
— Mark 8:36

We have heard the stories that circulate. Drug  dealers using child runners and giving them free drugs to to deliver them into addiction. 

When I walk through towns near me, like Glasgow, I see the painful legacy of drugs woven into the fabric of society. Addiction devastates lives, families, and communities. Yet in the world of drug dealing, the lines blur—because both the victim and the dealer are, in truth, victims.

Consider this thought experiment. A button sits before you. You have two choices: walk away and leave life unchanged or press it—and instantly receive untold riches. Houses, cars, holidays, bank accounts overflowing. Every comfort the world can offer.

But there is a cost. Somewhere, a stranger falls down dead. It could be a Bedouin shepherd, a Filipino rice farmer or a fisherman on the high seas.  You’ll never meet them, never know their name, never see their family’s grief. Their absence will ripple through the lives of others, but you will remain rich and  apparently untouched.

The brutal question is: would you press the button?

Drug dealers press it daily—not by machine, but by choice. They exchange the lives of others for wealth and status. Their fortunes are built on broken homes, ruined bodies, and prison cells. In their world, another’s destruction is merely the price of their gain. The button is already pressed, again and again.

Yet this experiment is not only about them, it also exposes us. If the offer were laid before us, anonymous and guaranteed, would we resist? It is easy to say, “I would never press it,” but temptation whispers more seductively than principle when the stakes are high.

Here lies the truth: the button is never anonymous. You are seen. You are known. The Creator weighs not only the deed but the intent. To press the button is not just to harm another, it is to wound yourself. For what is gained if you win the whole world but lose your soul?

We live in an age full of invisible buttons. Choices to exploit or to serve. To profit from others’ suffering or to show compassion. To look away in blindness, or to look with love. The riches such choices promise are an illusion, a gilded snare. But the judgment of the Creator is not.

To walk away—to let the button gather dust—is to choose life. Life not only for the unseen stranger, but for your own soul. Your eternal life. And go ponder, many addicts are finding God and Jesus and gaining the power of God's spirit to overcome this evil. 

If you know a drug dealer, show them this. They may need reminding that their greatest enemy is not the law, not rival gangs, not even the police. Their true nemesis is the button they press—and the soul they forfeit with each press.

My Body is a Wave. My Soul is the Sea.

In a metaphorical sense, we are like the ancient paradox of the ship of Theseus. We are being renewed plank by plank, which raises the mystery: Am I still me? Are you still you?

Every seven to ten years, I am a different man. My blood is not the same blood. My skin is not the same skin. Even the heart that beats within me, though it has worked faithfully since my first breath, has shed much of its substance, cell by cell. I am remade in silence, without asking for it, without noticing. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once wrote, We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.

And yet, I remain myself.

This continuity astonishes me. If I am no longer the sum of the parts I once was, then what exactly endures? When I look in the mirror, I see a face etched by time and illness. The man staring back is not the boy who once gazed at the stars in wonder, nor the young husband with laughter at the corners of his mouth. Yet he is not a stranger. Something binds all these selves into one story: mine.

Perhaps we are not things but patterns, woven again into new material. Like a melody carried across shifting instruments, the notes remain though the sound changes. Our bodies are the violins, the cellos, the flutes. But the tune persists.

Science tells me my atoms will one day return to the soil, the sea, and the stars. Faith tells me that I, the I that cannot be weighed or measured, will not vanish with them. The continuity of my body is fragile, fleeting. The continuity of my soul is another matter. When Stephen, the first Christian martyr, was stoned to death, he cried out, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Something continued to exist beyond his broken body.

And here lies the surprising comfort. If I am more than flesh and memory, then life is not a desperate clinging to what slips away but an anticipation of what endures. The pattern is not yet finished.

When I walk the shoreline in the morning, I sometimes think of the waves. Each one breaks and dissolves, yet the sea remains. My body is a wave. My soul is the sea.

Under My Northern Sky

I was talking recently with a man who came to do some work in my house. Our conversations were brief, but in them we found much in common. Both of us had lost our parents as teenagers. That fact alone bound us in silent understanding. Grief is never tidy; it shifts and grows with us, like a shadow. We agreed on one truth: the loss strikes deeper as the years pass. The older we become, the more acutely we feel the gap where a parent should be. And in both our cases, it was death, not estrangement, that caused the absence.

That conversation carried me back to the mid-1990s, when I was crossing from Newcastle to Gothenburg on the Princess of Scandinavia. Late at night, I left the bar after a vodka and made my way up to the top deck to steady myself in the cold air. Above me stretched the Northern sky, clear, sharp, endless. Every star shone in a silence so complete it was almost deafening. Alone, I felt they belonged to me, arranged in a constellation no one else would ever see in quite the same way.

Under that infinite canopy, the helplessness of loss rose within me. Like Ingmar Bergman in The Magic Lantern, haunted by his demons, I muffled my cry in silence. I was thinking of my adopted father, gone since I was twelve. That wound, though decades old, still throbbed as though fresh. Out of that lonely communion with the heavens came a fragment of verse, whispered to myself:

Meet me amidst the ocean
Under my Northern sky
To the light of constellations
As our restless stars pass by.

It is moments like this that make me value the Swedish word sambovict. To me it speaks of resilience, of standing upright. It captures something essential about what it means to be human: to carry grief, and yet to endure.

Too many children today grow up without one of their parents, often the father. I pray for them. They may not yet feel the full weight of that absence, but in time they will. Happiness, in the truest sense, begins with stability. Children flourish in the soil of secure, long-term, trusting relationships—not only for the sake of the parents, but for the children born of that union.

When my father closed his eyes for the last time, I was twelve. I learned too soon the pain of absence. He wasn’t perfect, but he demonstrated his love in many ways. I longed for his voice, his daily guidance, his bedtime stories that stretched imagination into wonder. Those stories shape us. They are what make us human. I can still see him, book in hand, reading aloud David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Pinocchio. His voice carried those worlds into mine, binding us together in ways I didn’t yet understand.

Many single mothers and fathers rise to the challenge, doing their utmost. But the pressures are heavy—keeping a household together, paying bills, sustaining hope, while bearing the emotional aftershocks of divorce or bereavement. No one carries that load without cost.

Children need both parents, not only to say, Well done, but also to speak the truth in love when change is needed. They need a mother’s embrace and a father’s hand on the shoulder. When one voice falls silent, a child grows up with a quiet ache, a loneliness that lingers, a sense that something vital is missing.

I have carried that emptiness through my life. It surfaces in unexpected moments: a conversation with a tradesman in my living room, a solitary night on the deck of a ferry bound for Gothenburg. Yet even in that emptiness, I see something of our humanity. To love, to lose, to long, and to hope again—that is what it means to live under our Northern sky.

A Compass Beyond Ourselves

People have long argued about where morality comes from. Is it something societies invent to keep order, or is it written into life itself by a higher power? While philosophers debate, the answer often shows itself in the ordinary moments of our lives.

Think of how deeply we care about fairness. It runs through most stories. In David Copperfield, Dickens closes with love, justice, and redemption: David marries Agnes, who embodies quiet devotion; Uriah Heep is exposed; Steerforth perishes at sea; and others find new beginnings. Such endings echo our instinct that wrongs must be set right.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, the resolution comes after Bob Ewell attacks Scout and Jem, and Boo Radley saves them by killing Ewell. The conflict between good and evil in Maycomb ends with Boo stepping out of the shadows, proving himself to be the protector the children once feared. Scout finally meets him and walks him home, standing on his porch and seeing the world from his perspective, fulfilling Atticus’s lesson that true understanding comes from “climbing into another person’s skin and walking around in it.” Justice arrives in an unexpected form; Scout gains maturity and empathy; and Boo Radley’s humanity is quietly honoured.

This same instinct for fairness surfaces in everyday life. When someone cuts in line, we bristle with frustration. Why? Because deep down we believe there is a right order to things. That sense of justice crosses cultures and generations. On a larger scale, it drives people across the world to rise against corruption, violence, and discrimination. No single nation or culture owns this cry for justice—it runs through all of humanity.

For those who believe in God, this shared moral conscience points to more than human opinion. It suggests a moral lawgiver, a divine source who has written into our hearts not only the ability to recognize injustice but also the desire to resist it. William Wilberforce wrote, "You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know." Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, "The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"

If morality were merely a matter of taste or custom, there would be little agreement. Yet across time and place, people continue to wrestle with the same questions of right and wrong, good and evil. The core remains steady, even when traditions shift.

This tells us morality is not an invention, but a truth built into our being. It is both universal and eternal. Whether in the irritation of a queue-jumper or in the global demand for justice, the same message comes through: we are made for fairness. And in that longing, we glimpse something beyond ourselves; a compass pointing us toward the eternal.

“They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts,

their consciences also bearing witness.”

Romans 2:15

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The Eternal Whisper That All is Well

The consultant stared at me across the desk and asked, almost hesitantly, “Are you getting this?” He had just told me that cancer had taken root in three of my organs. Perhaps he expected me to collapse under the weight of the words. But I did not.

I answered him with something that seemed to rise from a place deeper than myself: “There’s a young man inside me. My body is old and decaying, yes—but the young man is alive and full of life.”

Call him the soul, the psyche, or whatever name feels fitting. To me he is the undeniable core of who I am, and he convinces me, even in this hour, that there is eternal life for those deemed worthy. The young man inside me leans on that promise. He whispers that decay is only skin-deep, only temporary. He reminds me that the soul does not crumble with the body.

And yet, with this promise comes another reality, one expressed in a word borrowed from another tongue. The Portuguese speak of saudade, a deep longing for something absent. But they also have a quieter cousin of the word—saudoso—less spoken of, more haunting. It carries the awareness that what we long for may never return. An ache built into the very sound of the word.

I feel both. I live with saudade for the strength and vigour of my younger years, for the smooth-running body that once carried me easily across mountains and seas. But I also live with saudoso—the haunting knowledge that these things may not return in this life. It is an existential ache; the human condition distilled in language.

And yet, the young man inside me insists there is more. That one day the ache will be stilled. That life, eternal and unspoiled, will rise where now only frailty remains.

Christ’s words echo in me: “Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out” (John 5:28–29).

What Inspires My Writing

I’ve been reading Light the Dark, edited by Joe Fassler, where each chapter presents a writer describing what inspires their work. As I turned its pages, I found myself asking the same question: What inspires mine?

I have an ache; I feel it every time I witness selfishness, indifference, greed, arguing, gossiping, slander, lies, or pettiness. These things erode the fabric of human community. I look at the West and see it drifting into dystopia. Really. It’s not just coming; it’s already here.

That ache is best named by a word coined by John Koenig in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows,  Anthrodyniathe: The  exhaustion that comes from witnessing how cruel people can be to one another.

Yet sometimes, a small act of kindness breaks through, reminding me that not all humans subscribe to this cruelty. Sometimes, there is still brightness in the village.

On Friday,  I wandered back to the town where I had spent my mid-to-late teens. Fifty years have slipped by, yet as I walked its streets, it felt as though nothing had changed. I’d heard that an old neighbour still lived nearby, and curiosity tugged at me to see if I could find him. Such moments anchor us to the past Someone pointed me toward a café come restaurant with the name JOANNE ‘A’ MUNCH.

     “Ask for so-and-so,” they said. “He’ll know where your old neighbour is.”

But when I arrived, the man I was told to seek out knew nothing of my old football playmate. Still, I had come this far, and a warm brew felt like a good consolation.

     “Do you take credit cards?” I asked Johanne, the owner.
     “No,” she replied. “What is it you want?”
     “I’ve no cash.”
     “Never mind. What do you want?”
     “Just a cup of tea. If you give me your bank details, I can transfer the money online.”
She shook her head with a smile. “Forget it.”

Her words carried more than hospitality. They carried kindness—simple, unmeasured kindness. Joyful. Unjudging. Against the backdrop of human harshness, even the smallest acts of grace shine all the brighter.

The stranger’s response was a reminder that kindness still exists—in the cracks and corners of life, where we least expect it.

Some years ago, I experienced another such moment in Sweden. Every time I hear Rednex singing Wish You Were Here, I think of it. We had taken a family trip to Gothenburg, and I was reading Moberg’s The Emigrants. Inspired, we decided to visit the Emigrant Museum in Växjö.

When we arrived in that charming town on a bright July morning, I spotted you. Approaching with a smile, I asked, “Excuse me, can I park here?”
     “Sure, welcome! It’s fine to park here,” you replied warmly.
Then, with a curious look, you asked, “You are from where?”
     “Scotland,” I said.
     “Oh!” you exclaimed, nodding approvingly.

Later, as my family and I wandered through the town, you reappeared, apologetic. You explained that you had made a mistake—the spot wasn’t ideal for parking after all. But you didn’t leave it at that. You kindly guided us to another location, assuring us it would be better. I thanked you, touched by the gesture. For a moment, it seemed as though you wanted to linger, even join us. Looking back, I wish I’d invited you to walk with us. But as the saying goes, the owl of Minerva flies at dusk—wisdom often comes too late.

After exploring the museum, we stopped at a café for snacks and drinks. When I went to pay, the waitress smiled and said, “Your friend paid a little while ago.”
     “Sorry?” I asked, startled.
     “Your friend paid it a little while ago.”
     “Did he have a moustache and a light-blue striped shirt?”
     “Sure.”

Moments like these rise unbidden in memory, like the Northern Lights. They shimmer silently in the soul. Unfinished, like the cadence of an A-minor hymn. They whisper this, too, is humanity.

I have many such memories. They interrupt life’s plot. They are not planned. They simply happen.

And that is exactly how they are meant to be.

Where the Small Names Sleep

I walked through the Glasgow Necropolis as I often have. It was one of those bright Scottish mornings that softens even the hardest thoughts. The Necropolis, that city of the dead perched above Mother Glasgow; the city of the living, where space not only for memory but for quiet conversation with time itself exists. 

As I made my way among the gravestones, I found myself counting years, not just my own sixty plus but those etched into stone: the tiny, abbreviated lifespans of children lost long ago in a Dickensian age to epidemics like cholera, diphtheria, typhus. Names barely had time to settle and establish into the world before they were carved in stones suggesting they were here.

It’s a strange thing to be old in a place filled with the young who died. I felt not so much survivor’s guilt as survivor’s wonder. I’ve had decades of travel, of reading, of walking beaches at sundown, of writing, of grieving and healing, of faith evaluated and restored. What would any one of these children have become with even half of my years?

My cancer, in that moment, seemed less like an ending and more like a milestone. I don’t know how many more years are allotted to me, but I know now how many I’ve already been given, and I know what a privilege it is to reach an age where you look both forward and back.

The graves made me think of God’s purpose—not as a tidy doctrine, but as a question folded into every name worn smooth by wind, moss, and rain. What becomes of children who never had a chance to choose faith, to assess goodness, to wrestle with meaning? Where are they in the great scheme of things?

Jesus once said, “Let the little children come to me... for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” I must believe that children taken early are held in a mercy deeper than we can grasp. They are not forgotten; they are not lost to God . If anything, it is we who are still lost, walking among headstones trying to make sense of the living and the dead.

There’s a sobering democracy in cemeteries. All names are equal here, whether child or elder, rich, or poor, known, or unknown. We all close our eyes and rest with our forebears. And yet, those of us still walking have something the dead do not: time. Time to reflect, to forgive, to change. Time to be grateful. My cancer has made me aware of time—not just its scarcity, but its richness.

So, I keep walking, not just through the Necropolis, but through each day, carrying with me the invisible company of children who never saw their coming-of-age birthdays or perceived  the invisible grace of a God.

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The Strange Allure of Darkness

“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
— Romans 12:21 (NIV)

If you're new here, welcome to A Writer’s Notebook: What It Means to Be Human. This blog offers small extracts from longer essays I’m drafting for a book by the same name. A common thread runs through every post: the question of what it means to be human. And if you're among the daily visitors, I believe we share something important, a love for what is good, a value that quietly permeates this space.

There’s a moment in The Hunchback of Notre Dame when Judge Claude Frollo, Disney’s most complex villain, stands alone in the cathedral, tormented by lust disguised as piety. He gazes into the fire and sings of sin, damnation, and desire. The scene is unforgettable, artistically brilliant, yet deeply unsettling. Not because it lacked truth, but because it so completely surrendered to darkness.

As a writer, I try  to write  about what is good and has human value. Not because I’m naïve or blind to suffering. On the contrary, I see it too clearly. But goodness needs a louder voice. Evil already has a press team with wide circulation. 

Why do we glorify the grotesque? What strange thrill do we find in the demonic, the deranged, the depraved? I recall as a teenager going to see a movie that featured the occult. There was something unnerving, uncomfortable when I left the movie theatre that day. I still have grotesque images in my head half a century later There’s something disconcerting about how easily we engage with darkness even celebrate it. It’s in travel documentaries where a rural village is shown not through its music or harvests but its masks, macabre, skeletal, fearful. Why do such images dominate, as though the heart of a people could be summed up in the sinister? Who decided the grotesque was more “authentic” than the gentle, the spiritual, the existential and the good in the human family?

Perhaps it’s because evil shocks—and shock makes us feel alive, like a slap of cold water waking us from numbness. Or maybe we no longer believe in goodness as something real. We treat it like sentiment, like child's play, while evil is seen as complex, sophisticated, even artful.

In literature, the villain is often more deeply drawn than the hero. In film, darkness wins the awards. In conversation, we’re quicker to dissect corruption than to celebrate integrity.

But this fascination with darkness isn’t just aesthetic; it’s spiritual.

C.S. Lewis observed that evil is always a parasite. It has no life of its own. It feeds on the good, twisting and deforming it. That’s why evil is so theatrical, it must draw attention to itself because it has no substance apart from what it corrupts. The Devil is in the details.

What, then, is evil? At its core, it is the rejection of love. It’s the wilful distortion of what is true, good, and beautiful. It’s Cain raising his hand against his brother. Pharaoh hardening his heart. Judas betraying a friend with a kiss.

Sometimes it’s loud and brutal. Sometimes it’s just the slow erosion of compassion, the muting of conscience.

So why do I write what is good? Because I believe the world is aching for it. I believe beauty restores the soul. I believe kindness is radical. I believe that the light still shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. When I write about a gentle act, a word of forgiveness, a glimmer of grace, I’m not ignoring the shadows or my shadows ; I’m defying them. There is courage in joy. There is rebellion in hope. In an age that glorifies cynicism and darkness, to write the good is a kind of revolution.

And I want to be part of that.

My Life as a Dog by Reidar Jonsson

The Sensitive Boy

It was a nice evening today and I sat round the back reading a book that’s been in my library for some years but never got round to reading it. Somehow, I began to think I was missing something. I had saw the movie many years back, but books are always better. 

In My Life as a Dog, Ingemar, the young protagonist is growing up in 1950s Sweden. He retreats into comparisons with others who suffer more. He thinks of Laika, the Russian dog launched into orbit, circling the earth alone until her death. A boy should not have to console himself with the fate of a dog abandoned among the stars. Yet Ingemar does, because he feels too much, and the world gives him too little.

I think of the sensitive child, not unlike myself, who grew up in a home where life did not seem ideal. There were shadows in the corners of the room, arguments, silences, absences. A boy like that finds survival not in strength but in imagination. He tells himself stories. He compares his suffering to others’. He says, “It could be worse.”

But he feels everything. A harsh word doesn’t brush off him like dust from a jacket. It lingers. He reads the tension in a room, the disappointment in a parent’s face, the grief behind a closed door. He learns to be quiet, because sensitivity, in such a world, is mistaken for weakness. And yet, secretly, it is the only thing keeping him human.

What Ingemar teaches us is that sensitivity is not a flaw but a form of endurance. The sensitive child bears what others cannot because he feels what others refuse to notice. He grows into a man who understands sorrow, who can weep for Laika the dog, who can pity the neglected and defend the voiceless.

Juxtapose the two boys—the Swedish child in a rural town, and the child from any other city or home where love was never quite enough. Both had to make do with what was given, piecing together hope from scraps. Both learned to find perspective: one in the fate of a dog, the other perhaps in the quiet knowledge that the world, though cruel, is not without moments of unexpected kindness.

The moral, then, is not simply that we survive hardship, but that sensitivity, so often despised, is the very gift that allows us to survive with our souls intact. For what kind of life would it be if we could not weep for a dog sent into space, or for a child who grew up where life was less than ideal?

“They shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid”

Micah 4:4

There's Something About a Tree

Yesterday in Glasgow, I met a man from Gambia. We stood talking for a while, and as usual, I find writing inspiration in the people I meet. In most cases the language of their homeland can be culturally revealing in a wholesome way. Although English is the national tongue, Bantaba, in the Mandinka language also spoken in Gambia means a large tree, often a silk-cotton tree under whose shade the community gathers. There they talk, share news, resolve disputes, or simply rest together in the cool of the day. It is a place and an act, a shared ritual that says: we belong to one another.

The image stayed with me as I wandered into sleep last night. Many years ago, I had read a book about Danish housing planners who designed neighbourhoods to encourage social interaction—doorsteps that faced each other, small courtyards that drew neighbours into conversation, benches placed just so, where a passer-by might pause and become a friend. Their aim was to make spaces that nourished human connection.

I thought of how the Bantaba needs no architect, no government policy, no concrete poured in tidy lines. It is as old as the land itself, a tree in the village square, a gift of shade and shelter, patient through seasons of rain and harmattan dust. Its roots hold the earth together; its branches hold the community together.

There is something deeply becoming about the custom. In an age where connection often flickers through pixels on a screen, the Bantaba reminds us that fellowship is best experienced in the flesh; our voices mingling in the open air, our faces visible in the changing light.

It suggested the words of the prophet Micah, speaking of the future peace to come: “They shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid” (Micah 4:4). The imagery is rich, each person in the safety of their own shade, yet part of a larger, harmonious whole. No one left out. No one threatened. A life where conversation flows as naturally as water in a stream.

Perhaps the Bantaba is a glimpse of that promise, a fragment of the way things were always meant to be. A world where we gather under something living, and in its shelter, we find shelter in one another.

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Some bad news came to my ears. I wish it hadn’t.
A lady, someone’s wife, someone’s daughter, maybe someone’s mother, was driving home from work, probably thinking of what she might make for dinner, or of the warm cup of tea. She didn’t make it. A boy racer, reckless and impatient, overtook another at the brow of a hill on our quiet country road. There was no chance. No time. No coming back. The lady never made it home. Not that evening, never.

I found myself thinking, almost immediately, of Gwendolyn Brooks’ haunting poem We Real Cool. I’ve read it many times, marvelling at its brevity, its jazz rhythm, its chilling final line:

We
Die soon.

We Real Cool | The Poetry Foundation

That line feels different when it finds a home in real life. When it leaves the page and appears in front of you in the broken glass, the stillness of flashing lights, the sobs of neighbours gathered at the hedgerow. It is one thing to read about death: it’s another to smell it on your own road.

Brooks wrote about the bravado of young men, posturing in pool halls, skipping school, staying out late, swaggering in their temporary cool. We know them. We’ve seen them. Not always in pool halls now, but behind tinted windows, in engines tuned to snarl, on roads never meant for speed.

There’s something timeless and tragic about the syndrome: young men daring death, not believing it will ever collect. As if speed were immortality. As if adrenaline were purpose.

And yet—we die soon Brooks wrote.
So soon, that a good woman on her way home from work didn’t see it coming. Her life was exchanged for a moment of male bravado. For a second of “I’ll pass him now.” For the ancient, tragic game of I dare you.

It angers me. It grieves me. And it scares me. Because somewhere along the way, we have raised generations of boys who confuse recklessness with strength, who mistake risk for manhood. We have confused loudness for identity. We have let the music of warning be drowned out by the rev of an engine.

But Brooks knew better. With prophetic simplicity, she showed us that behind the swagger is a terrible fragility. These boys who drive late, ne'er straight, tempt fate,  know—deep down—that the game doesn’t end well. 

When I walked the road that night, I saw the broken fence, the skid marks, the flowers already laid. I prayed for the family. 

So many of our problems today come from a denial of death. We pretend it doesn’t exist. We mock it in memes and movies. But death is real, and often, far too soon. The woman who died had likely lived a life of quiet duty. She had gone to work, perhaps tired, perhaps hopeful, but no doubt expecting to be home by tea. She didn’t sign up to be a headline. But she has become one.

Let us not romanticize the rebels who burn out fast and leave ruins behind. Let us not glamorize foolishness just because it’s loud. Let us instead honour the quiet lives, the faithful, the responsible, the ones who go home instead of go fast. Let us remember that dignity neither struts, but walks softly.

Brooks’ poem is only eight lines long. So was the life of this moment. A few seconds. A few choices. An end.

And for all of us, a reminder.