You are not a number.

I wonder if you felt like this too, but, when you were leaving university, or maybe when you left school or college, you were suddenly faced with the rest of your life. It didn’t look like an intricate forest, an ant’s nest of pathways, spidering out before you. It was a highway, an electric power […]

Dandelion: A 2020 story.

Exhausting, isn’t it? The world, I mean. The upcoming election in America this November is giving me paranoid fever dreams that, somehow, some way, Trump will finagle a win out of the American election system. The fear of that happening, I think, will be the breaking point for America. It’ll either intensify the protesting into […]

War is Hell: Steam communities are a cruel nightmare.

Picture the scene: You’re hunkered down in a foxhole – a ramshackle affair, held up by dirt and logs. Americans line the fox hole, hunched over like rats in a cage. But their attentions turn to the skies – Aircraft on the horizon. The craft dip their noses towards your position and begin to strafe […]

Emotional Cartography: Self-loathing in the age of hyper-confidence.

I have never been confident. Actually, it’s the one thing I can say with true confidence. This dominates every aspect of your life without you even realizing it. It’s ruined opportunities for me before I even took them seriously. It’s allowed people close to me to treat me like dirt because I never stood up […]

How could I be wrong when others have been so bad?

When I was a kid, I told my dad I fancied someone at primary school. He used to walk me to the gates sometimes. He was a giant in the playground; Well over 6 foot – intimidatingly massive, and he never smiled. I would walk beside him in silence and people would part like the […]

Derelict/immaculate: A story about the illusion of meritocracy in a pandemic.

How many months have you spent at home now? It felt like limbo at first. My schedule was about to become a yawning, couch-based loungeathon, something that, if I’m being completely honest, was almost a thrilling prospect. But it didn’t take long for it to become an empty boredom. A numbness in the back of […]

Ex PC Gamer Blues

I’ve absconded from the PC.

Fear and Loathing in West Surrey

It’s lunchtime at the Bourne Business Park in Weybridge. I’m here for a training course in a brightly lit and vacuously decorated corporate office, here with a classroom of all men – IT types who are professional but distinctly laddy. Business-like yet some vain shreds of masculinity manage to creep past the curtain. At lunch, […]

Eyes Wide Open – How the Internet made people kinkier

A cold phone booth sits on Lewisham high street in the late 90’s. Stepping inside that phone booth was like entering some enshrined defiled womb; The door would shut tight behind you and seal you inside, tuning out the sound of nearby traffic until it became a distant murmur. The overpowering smell of stale piss would […]

A 31-year-old man attempts online dating: A cautionary tale.

Its 2am here and Brixton from my bed is as silent as anything. Outside, distant cars create an echoey soundscape and the penetrating light of my phone swallows up my face like a flood light. Its a sleepless night tonight. Just me and the disillusioned glow of a dating app to keep me company. Faces […]