Fishing in the Rivers of Life

Category: Rivers of Life

  • The Arsenal Trilogy – Dig Baby Dig

    Dig Baby Dig, the third and final part of The Arsenal Trilogy. A work of fiction composed entirely of real facts. Four people. One Uber. One lockup. One van. Six minutes. This is the story of what happens when thirty years of quietly selling off Britain’s defence infrastructure meets one single point of failure.

  • The Arsenal Trilogy – Peace Off

    The second part of The Arsenal Trilogy, Peace Off traces how Britain built a vast, dispersed underground ammunition network and then quietly dismantled almost all of it. From Chilmark to Kineton, this is the story of how a nation engineered resilience, sold it off, and left itself with a single point of failure.

  • The Arsenal Trilogy – Death by a Thousand Moths

    Millions of square feet of tanks, vehicles and equipment sit ready for war, or do they? The first part of The Arsenal Trilogy explores how capability dies long before the hardware disappears.

  • The New Lie

    From the stabbing spears of the Zulu to the AI-driven drone swarms of 2026, the nature of sacrifice has fundamentally shifted. As automatic draft registration returns, the moment where human bravery becomes a tactical liability and the “Old Lie” of glorious death is replaced by a cold, algorithmic error correction.

  • Here’s Hoping

    A rambling meditation on the blank page, sourdough, a father’s sayings and the strange optimism baked into both writing and breadmaking.

  • Frogger

    The creatives went first. The photographers followed. If you think you are safe, you are already in the road with the traffic coming.

  • The Unreliable Pub Physicist

    A night in the pub with old friends becomes something stranger and more beautiful as memories pull us back through time and youth briefly returns.

  • Who killed Bambi

    Like a deer caught in headlights, the government sees the crisis coming but cannot choose a direction, and the impact will be felt by those with the least.

  • Big Boys’ Toys

    Britain built aircraft carriers to look like a superpower but forgot to build the navy that makes them useful. The result is prestige without capability.

  • The curse of good enough

    Forty years in journalism and now my own blog is being devoured by bots that learn from me for free. It feels like digging my own professional grave.

  • The Six-Foot War: Why Air Superiority is a 20th-Century Myth

    A memory from Basra and a warning about how war has changed. The next battle will not look like the last one, and those who forget that are walking into a kill zone.

  • Under Siege: Why Tabloid Journalism is Handing Bad Actors a Script

    Some journalism informs the public. Some journalism endangers it. This piece is about the moment a newspaper crossed that line.

  • The Elephant in the Lift: Why the Superpower is Impotent

    The world is lurching toward an economic and military crisis driven by strategic miscalculation, and the consequences are far larger than one decision or one leader.

  • What Has War Ever Done For Us? (Aside from Nigel Farage)

    War has always driven change, often in ways no one expects. This piece looks at how today’s crisis risks unleashing consequences far beyond the battlefield.

  • The rhythm of life

    A short tribute to a life well lived, a meditation on time, memory and the silence that follows loss.