It’s coming up for three years since I started this Uncivil Savant, and for the first time in many months, I have been taking a look through some of the pieces from the years before I opened this particular writing space. The space before this one was letters and emails to my dear friends and trusted colleagues. Thinking in conversation. It’s still a joy, but with so many of my gang of friends now writing, both here and in our books, I find I miss the daily and weekly typed missives, punctuated with the occasional phone call.

At least fifty such fragments, filed away on my laptop, have found their way into the pieces here over the years. Each month I share one of my favourite archive pieces, and there’ll be one later this month. For now, you can investigate my whole archive here and all my recorded voiceovers in my podcast here. This week’s podcast contains writing from the last few years, I hope you enjoy it.

This podcast was first published with full transcript, footnotes, images and links here on Substack on 11th August 2025. I don’t use AI to make my writing or art.

The function of the Machine is onslaught

The oil that allows its gears to turn is provided by your mind.

The mill which expresses the oil from your mind is precisely calibrated to extract the maximum levels of anxiety from your thoughts, as, like the industrially mined and finely micronized graphite additive in engine oil, your raised cortisol and adrenaline levels greatly aid the smooth functioning of the Machine.

The large and small gaps in the onrushing overwhelm of information, provided by family, community, happenstance, weather, geography, responsibility, religion and work have been abolished by the One Device.

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This podcast was first published here on Substack on 4th August 2025 with full transcript, footnotes, links and images.

The oaks bear it. The brunt of the sun. Turn their bitterness to acorn and gall. Buddleia is wilting, the weight of the butterflies barely registers. Whispering - ‘Remember how to be gentle before the burning time’.

The forest always goes past at 80 miles an hour. My eyes are impatient lovers, the purple bruise of heather spreading under my proprietorial gaze. Yet the shimmering heath renders beauty, even unto seizure.

I walked here two weeks ago, deliberately stamping so that the adders could make their excuses and go elsewhere to bask in peace. Some diamonds should not be seen; reptiles spurn the recognition gemstones seek.

(This week’s recording has the ambient sounds of the pigeons and other birds of dusk in balmy south London, as it was too hot to close the windows at my brother’s house, before the storm broke.)

All the writing, audio, video and art at Uncivil Savant is available to all with no financial barrier to access. Please support me if you can by becoming a subscriber whether for a month or a year. Thanks so much.

This podcast was originally published here on Substack July 28th 2025, with full transcript, photos, links and footnotes.

In a time of the unsayable not only being said, but being enacted, I have withdrawn into speaking less. I haven’t been calling people, (my generation still phone each other), only leaving occasional short voice messages, like my younger friends. I love to talk with people, but I feel a time of silence is needed, so by the time you read this, I will have had three days quiet time with the sea and the horizon. There is something about opening my heart up to that impossible line which slows down the jumpiness, the teetering verticality, of head-first thinking. There are many other ways of working with words.

One of the ways of working I love best is to be asked to find words for music, for art, for a moment, as in improvisation, or for something more long lasting. Collaboration is a discipline I missed hugely after pausing my music life. For a while I poured that desire for connection into my books and teaching, finding a great editor and colleagues. But still…

Last month, it was good to be asked to spend some time finding the words to respond to contemporary artist Nicky Hirst’s sculptures in the current show PLAYTIME also featuring Giulia Ricci and Ian Dawson, at Ubicua Gallery, 85 Charlotte Street, London W1T 4PS.

Ubiqua says, ‘This exhibition of three artists blurs the boundary between image and instruction within a performative language, working with sculptures and drawings that have the possibility of being visually ‘played’. The works can all be viewed as musical scores and will be interpreted by various musicians. A space for collaboration, translation, and play.’ It is on until 22nd August and I will be performing these spoken word pieces live on the 17th from 6pm. You are welcome to join us if you are in London. Musicians have improvised live in the space but sadly I was not able to attend, as I was in the woods.

You will hear my two audio pieces for the show which include sound settings for spoken word. The text of the pieces is also below. The process of finding these words was more like drawing than writing an essay. I made sketches of phrases, scribbled on paper, while staring intently at photographs of the art in progress. Speaking out the syllables, skirting meaning, allowing words1 to tumble, feeling for the spaces between things, the rhythm of the pauses, until something coalesced that had the right relation to the artworks; a sort of oblique symmetry.

Drawing from a moving life model and improvising lyrics for music or art have some fundamental similarities. There’s a line you are stalking. You must finish before it’s over-worked. If you try to pin everything down and ‘make it make sense’2, it will almost certainly fail.

There needs to be gaps for the reader / listener / observer to leap across. Given the chance, wouldn’t you rather risk hopping the rocks than clomping over the wide bridge, with the crowd? The salmon spotted from atop slippery granite is a gift not seen from behind railings. So close to the water, one is still kin.

This podcast was first published here on Substack on July 14th 2025 with full transcript, footnotes and images.

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I spent most of last week on an art residency. For those of you from other walks of life, this is where you are invited and sometimes paid, to go away from home and make your art, often in response or relation to some aspect of the venue, people or institution that invite you.

Perhaps it's easier to sit a 7-day Zen retreat. My mind, stripped of all stimuli but my body and a blank wall, quickly quits struggling and at least attempts to settle to the task at hand; counting breaths, say. I am in a field, constantly stimulated, yet rebuffed, a whole day here and I am only at the surface, on the grass, looking down from human height.

I'm using my late friend Mark Watson's beautiful book The Plant Pamphlets as a guide and method for being here. Starting last night and finishing this morning I reread his book cover to cover and reminded myself of the simple but effective ‘hanging out with plants’ practice which is found within it. This morning after breakfast, I headed out into the field and walked around until I felt a particular plant calling to me to pay it my undivided attention. If you've never walked around anywhere noticing whether a plant, landform or rock is asking you to communicate, then you'd be forgiven for assuming that it's an outlandish practice and that I am officially woo. But I know you will have stopped to notice a pavement dandelion at some point in your life, the craggy beauty of a winter oak, or the sheer spiky effrontery of a bramble shoot thick as your thumb making its way through a fence, up into the elder tree and back down again, laden with pink flowers of blackberry-promises. You will at least have stopped for a rose.

This week’s podcast was first published here on Substack on Monday 23rd June 2025, with full footnotes, photos, links and extra sections.

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Every six months or so, inspired by thoughtful writing by Ruth Gaskovski , I end up writing a tactile / haptic response or addendum to something rich from School of the Unconformed. In this case Architecture for the Free Mind was the prompt and my desire is to add a little detail to a possible materiality for a free life. I contributed some snaps of my studio areas, full of unmade objects and hand-worked natural materials. For me, these are a source of something almost akin to a vitamin; I receive something lifegiving and nourishing when I work with or use these things.

Much is being written4 about Ultra Processed Foods (UPFs) being a feature of the modern urban diet almost worldwide, causing illness and disease. While I am not here to argue that spending up to 18 hours a day swiping almost frictionless screens or pressing plastic buttons is going to give you heart disease or directly cause obesity, I am suggesting that it is unhealthy, and related to the narrowing of simple, natural dietary and behavioural choices available around here lately.5

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This podcast was first published here on Substack on June 2nd 2025, with full transcript, footnotes, links and images.

This week, glimpses from a week wrestling with good.

The Great Mystery, as I experience it, is in all things and makes itself known hour by hour. We have never had a pugilistic relationship. Instead, I struggle with good, that is, how people, including myself, behave to one another, especially online. Online is where I must sadly spend a large amount of time at the moment to make certain projects that I care about take place. Screen-life can have the effect of hollowing me out. Here are sundry recent Notes and notes from the bone marrow of my soul as I attempt to fill back up after what feels like a puncturing and the sense of having briefly become an uncanny drink to a malign and greedy being.

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This podcast was originally published here on Substack on 12th May 2025 with full transcript, footnotes, links and images.

Thanks to my paid subscribers, I can keep all my writing and this podcast available to all with no financial barrier to access.

You can also…

This week, I’d like to share a film of a recent conversation with Iain. As so often happens with friends, one wishes it were possible to capture the deep, spontaneous conversations that arise around meals or while relaxing. That not being possible, here’s us discussing a little of what we’ve been talking about over the last couple of years since my last visit to Skye in 2023 with Dougald Hine. (You can watch the conversation he had with Iain here).

It’s not possible for me to fully delineate the influence of Iain’s work on both my own thought and practice, as well as that of many people in the T’ai Chi schools of which I have been a part. I go into some details about it in the film we made two years ago, which you can watch here.

I have added links regarding some of the things we mention in conversation. Mostly these relate to points Iain makes. So many of the things I talk about pertain to creaturely knowledge gained over years in an oral tradition, taught week-in, week-out, in a physical environment and understood in an embodied way before any words coalesced around the knowing. They mostly remain ‘unsearchable’ online, but they are nonetheless real. These understandings are possibly the thing I discuss most with my trusted friends; it is rewarding to compare insights gleaned from their particular realms of study and expertise. We see where shafts of light that have percolated through our own unique vessels refract and finally, together, illuminate a tiny portion of the beloved shared table that is our too-brief time on earth together.

I hope that my gestures, analogies and stories go some way to giving you a little insight into my particular area of study and begin to explain why encountering The Master and His Emissary and more recently, The Matter with Things, was so important.

Of course, the real joy is simply knowing Iain, to whom I am profoundly grateful for his time in making this film, for his encouragement, and for his ongoing friendship.

Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. Your generous subscriptions mean I can keep everything available to all with no financial barrier to access, thank you!

I would like to thank my partner Jonny Randall for beautifully shooting and editing the film. We currently have a very good and equitable skill-swap going on (I mend and sew things and he films and photographs things) but if you’d like to show him some extra appreciation, please feel free to:

All tips from the appropriately transformed ‘buy me a coffee’ button will go to Jonny this week! Thank you.

This podcast was first published as a video here on Substack on 5th May 2025 with full show notes, links, footnotes, images and extras.

Selected notes: (h:m:s)

5:00 Newgrange Spiral carvings

5:35 Heartwork, T’ai Chi lineage

9:40 Dōgen finger pointing at the moon

11:20 Ultramarine extraction from lapis lazuli

11:40 ‘The fining pot is for silver, and the furnace for gold: but the Lord trieth the hearts.’ Proverbs 17:v3, Old Testament, KJV Bible

14:44 Keats’ Doctrine of Negative Capability

16:34 Niels Bohr deep and shallow truths

24:25 Dreyfus brothers’ model of acquisition of skill

26:51 Sincerity, Jonathan Monks

32:53 D H Lawrence we are transmitters of life

33:30 Goethe uniting the divided

38:46 Matter and consciousness

41:36 Rabbinical saying ‘you are not tasked with completing the work…’

44:08 Dougald Hine the question that is yours to carry

48:13 Necessary distance

49:38 Henri Bergson time, duration, paradox

50:08 Dōgen If there were no time there would be no mountain

51:28 Zeno’s paradoxes

52:05 Heraclitus Panta rhei / everything flows

53:19 Marcelo Gleiser the same situation cannot occur twice

55:45 The third heart, connexion, longing

56:49 Max Scheler

1:01:15 Paul Kingsnorth Past, People, Place, Prayer from ‘Against The Machine’

1:04:05 Jan Zwicky (also of interest - The Experience of Meaning)

1:05:59 Love Story ‘love means never having to say you’re sorry’

1:06:46 Orangutan rofl

1:07:35 Marcel Theroux ( of interest - In Search of Wabi Sabi)

1:08:24 Commedia dell’Arte

1:09:10 John Cleese

1:13:00 Stewart Lee

1:14:00 Life of Brian, new stage show

This week, four poems. Some take years to find a shape, others arrive fully formed. Their promptness or tardiness to the party, their languishing in my laptop or notebooks in various states of déshabillé - none of these correlates to whether they will be good mixers, or that they’ll skulk in a corner, eyeing the host’s impressive bookshelves morosely.

Also this week, my, what interesting times to be a woman.

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This podcast was first published here on Substack on April 28th 2025 with full transcript, footnotes, links and art.

If you enjoy my work but can’t afford a paid subscription, feel free to buy me a coffee! My paid subscribers allow me to offer everything at Uncivil Savant with no financial barrier to access. Thankyou.

This week, a story gathered fresh from the wild last week about how we unwittingly get caught in serfdom, and how we might walk away free. Some things that seem to be dead can haunt an unwitting culture or even possess it. A way of life as old and long-lived as feudalism, which persisted in diverse forms for centuries in Europe and Japan, and millennia in China, amongst other places, rears its head this week. Before you listen to this piece, first listen to Ursula K LeGuin’s masterful short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.

This podcast was first published here on Substack on 14th April 2025 with full transcript, footnotes and links.