The sky is pink as we drive back from Peebles, gently racing the sunset to avoid navigating country roads in the crisp twilight of the first of January.

“That’s definitely snow, isn’t it?” Anisa observes from the passenger seat. She reaches back to point this out to the kids but notices everyone else is asleep. She chuckles and goes back to staring happily out of the window, wondering aloud what it means when sheep lie down in the fields.

“Probably that they wanted to lie down” I muse, a smile on my face.

2026 is off to a good start. We’re full of steak pie and fresh air after a brisk family walk in the chill of the Tweed valley with Anisa’s mum, heading home now to settle in to a warm winter evening in front of the fire, working steadily through the small mountain of chocolate we’ve accumulated over the festive period.

We round a bend into my favourite stretch of road out of the borders: the long straight just before the approach to Penicuik, where the country opens out to wide skies, surrounded by hills but with enough space to truly feel “empty”.

Big sky country, a space to breathe.

This whole year just gone was “space to breathe”, but not always in a comfortable way. First, space came from being signed off, unable to do much but sit and reflect thanks to my illness. Then, space came from being laid off, privileged to find myself in the opposite situation: free to do whatever I wanted for a spell, fortunate enough to have runway to really think about what to do next.

Both were ultimately terrifying, and could easily have resulted in my being written off due to a case of mistaken identity.

The road cuts left now, narrowing, then veers right into a bend that I usually underestimate and take a little too fast without meaning to. Not this time, though: I have a van close behind me so have been keeping my speed down, to encourage the driver either to pass or to back off. It seems to be working as we come to the junction and I slow, dropping a gear before the turnoff to the right, and feeling the satisfying bite as I put on the power to take us up the hill. The van behind shoots off along the main road to Penicuik, as happy to part ways with me as I am with them.

The road ahead climbs into the hills and will pass through a few villages before rejoining the main road in about twenty minutes, a mix of fast stretches and slower residential patches. It’s a pleasant drive, with an undulating aspect that keeps things interesting without being too hairy. I know the road well enough that it’s easy to have fun along it without taking risks.

I return to my thoughts about mistaken identity as I let the road lead us home. The identity I had mistaken was my own, and I must have been making the mistake for decades. It took a conversation with a career coach (part of my redundancy package) to bring this into sharp focus. We were digging into my values, in order to try to “make the most” of this career break while I still had a bit of time to do so.

“I want to make an observation” she said, after I’d rattled off a list of things I enjoy, things I’m good at, things that give me energy and all those usual things that get brought up during any sort of personal growth conversation. “Every time you mention something you’re good at, you qualify it by saying that you’ve been told you’re good at it. Everything you say you enjoy is something that gives value to others. You take energy from how you make others feel.

“What do you do for you?”

I feel like she has asked me what the colour green sounds like. The words make sense, the question is clear and easily parsed, and I have no idea how to even begin to answer it. A huge, empty space opens inside me as I take the tissue she’s handed me. I notice I’m crying.

What do I do for me? I… doomscroll? Watch shitty YouTube videos? Drink coffee? These are suddenly seen for what they are: things that I do to avoid doing anything for me.

I meditate… does that count? It feels close, but incomplete. Meditating is like filling the car with fuel, or taking it to the wash. It keeps the car in good order, but it doesn’t tell you where to drive it.

What do I do for me?

The emptiness rears up again and I find myself not crying this time but panicking. My coach explains, reassuringly, that this is quite common, and that it’s often referred to as a void, but the reality is that there’s always something there. It’s just something I’m not seeing, something I’ve forgotten about, or I’m dismissing because it seems too obvious or trite.

The panic subsides a little and I find myself staring no longer into the void, but into a cave: a dark recess but one which has dimension, echo, signifiers of an interior world that is currently obscured by darkness, but to which I can feel my eyes adjusting.

I agree to see my coach again in a week, and to gently, kindly, explore this cave a little more in the meantime. I find myself wondering who’s in there, waiting for me to discover them.

The sky is still bright but the road is starting to blend in with the surrounding hills and fields. I bump the car’s headlamps on as we leave the last village, approaching the dual carriageway and final roundabout before we hit the ring road around Edinburgh. Oncoming cars blind with their own lights but we’re just coming back to street lights and so the dazzle is only temporary. I stop at a red light and notice that I’ve been leaning forward in my seat, peering, holding my breath. I take my hands off the wheel, stretch them one at a time, and sit back, exhaling and inhaling slow and steady.

It’s only a matter of hours into my week of exploration before I figure out who’s sitting in that cave. Recounting the coaching session to Anisa, I’m suddenly hit by a clear picture, like someone has found the light switch to the cave and thrown it. It takes a moment for the shock to die down, but there he is. Sitting at a typewriter, a stack of books to one side of him, a pile of articles, strategies, pitches, reports, journal entries, short stories, and notes to the other. Every single thing he’s ever read or written. A storyteller. He looks up and smiles.

The rest of the road home is pretty plain sailing. The snow comes to nothing, and the sky continues to churn through various hues of red and purple before settling down to an even dark blue from horizon to horizon. Once we cross the bypass it’s a straight shot back to our front door, and our snoozing passengers wake up just as we turn into our road. I ask Anisa if she can take everyone up to the house while I sit for a moment to decompress. She smiles and retrieves the family from the back.

The car is empty, quiet. I sit with myself, happy to have let 2025 tell me its story, and glad to have captured it for myself. 2026 brings a new job, new challenges, new stories, but for right now I just sit in my cave, watching the new year’s first light fade from the sky, truly content with my own company for the first time in years.

Imagine if libraries had been invented just recently: all of human knowledge, way more than any one person could consume in a lifetime, in a single building. There’s no index yet, and you need special knowledge to access the building, but inside, every book, journal, article you could ever hope to imagine.

Overwhelming, but exciting. There’s no way you’ll be able to read everything, so you just dive in, reading whatever you like, following authors and their references to find new books, or picking random ones from the shelves. Exhilarating!

Then, someone invents the index. Now, if you know the right incantations, you can be much more specific in your search for knowledge, your creation of wisdom. Or not! You can still just grab a book from a random stack and dive in.

The point is that you now have options. New ways to interact: browsing, or searching.

Then someone else invents the standard library card. Suddenly, the majority of people in most countries in the world have complete, unfettered access to the library. They browse, find authors they like, find recommendations by those authors, or by friends.

You see where this is going. Some smart person realises that there’s money to be made, and starts selling advertising space in the indexes. It can be targeted too, since they know what you’re looking for, so can make advertising cards that sit alongside the categories.

Soon it’s hard to figure out what books are being “recommended” by the index vs those that are genuinely what you’re looking for.

Someone else realises that they can use the overwhelming feeling that the library generates as a way to make money. They set up a shop next door to the library that gives you the first chapter of any book to see if you like it. You read it and go back for more, and hey, there’s the second chapter. You go back again, but this time it’s the first chapter of a second book. Then the first chapter of a third book. They’re all good, so you go back and wow, there’s the third chapter of that first book! The next chapter is the first of a fourth book but you don’t like it.

But you go back the next day to see if you get the fourth chapter of that first book. Or maybe the second chapter of those other books you like. This time it’s an advert. But after the advert you get the second chapter of the second book and feel like you’ve won a prize.

You go back the next day. And the day after that. You don’t mind the adverts so much because sometimes they have pictures of cats. And you really like it when you get a new chapter of that book.

Meanwhile, fewer and fewer people are going to the library. The index maintainer decides to get in on the “curation” act and now offers a new service. You just ask a person at the front desk of the library what you want to know, and they tell you. You don’t even need to read the books any more, as this person read them all (mostly, kinda skimmed them to be honest), but you get the answer straight away. And boy does it sound compelling and authoritative. So much so that you feel authoritative too.

Nobody reads any more. They just pull levers on the slot machine, or ask questions and accept the answers and pat themselves on the back for being so well informed about the world.

The library is still there. Nobody has locked the doors or barred the entrances (though the world’s richest man seems to be paying angry people to stand outside with placards for… some reason?), but reading is hard and takes effort and who has the time to do that? Especially with so many cute cat pictures to look at, and you kinda get the information anyway.

The library is still there, but somehow, somewhere along the way, it stopped being for you.

Thank goodness we’re all too smart to have let that happen. The libraries are still there, all human knowledge at our fingertips. And we’re still reading.

Right?

When we arrive, there’s a crowd of people milling around in the entrance hall, nobody looking too sure what to do. An official-looking person with a lanyard and some sort of scanner looks around the room. “Anyone else for the five thirty viewing?”

I look over at Anisa and we quickly glance around to see if we’re skipping ahead of anyone else. When nobody else moves, we shuffle towards the official, me frantically trying to make sure the QR codes on our tickets are visible on my phone screen.

“Thank you” he smiles after scanning our tickets. “The exhibition is on two levels, and starts just up these stairs.” We thank him and are on our way. Oddly, nobody else seems to be heading up the stairs, preferring to mill around and cause confusion for newcomers.

I wonder if this is part of the exhibit. It would be cool if it was, somehow.

The stone steps up to the first hall have a runner spilling down the centre, clearly sheepskin or clipped wool, with pink and blue dyes from the sheep still on it. I wonder what the evening will have in store.

I knew very little about Andy Goldsworthy before I attended the exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland, a retrospective of fifty years of his work. Anisa had said a few times that she really wanted to go, and we had both then promptly forgotten about it. I had been reminded that week that this was the last weekend, and had booked tickets as a surprise. She had been thrilled.

I was curious, but no more than that. I assumed I would definitely be a “plus one” to this event, happy mainly to watch Anisa get excited about things. I always feel out of my depth at exhibitions, especially for people who are well known. I become painfully aware of how much I don’t know, and it has a tendency to distract me.

All of that ended when I got to the top of the stairs.

Barricading our way from one side of the hall to the other was what looked like a loosely-knitted wall, stretched from one pillar to another. The wall was all sorts of autumnal hues, red, orange, some green, some grey, some yellow. It looked very inviting to the touch, despite the signs strongly advising against this.

I moved closer, and realised that this was no wall of yarn. I felt myself drawn even closer, right to where the material was wound around the pillar, then connected back with itself to form the wall.

It was barbed wire. Miles of it, intricately wound, entwined, and then stretched across the hall. The whole thing was likely four metres high, perhaps eight across. The colours were completely natural, being the rusted and worn parts of the wire.

The whole thing demanded consideration of the craft of the construction. How had this been installed? It was a true installation, too, recruiting the extant pillars of the gallery to its cause. This was not something constructed elsewhere and then imported. The art had been created here, by hands.

I winced at the obvious injury that must have been sustained during its construction.

“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” a gallery employee was standing next to me. I realised that my nose was maybe a couple of inches from the barbs, my glasses off so that I could see more closely (my age being now advanced to the curse of constantly removing and replacing my glasses as the situation demands). I mumbled some awed “Yes, I was convinced it was wool…”.

“We get a lot of that. I got to watch the team installing this, and I still have no idea how they worked it. I’m sure there was a full health and safety inspection, but still…”

He trailed off, then started pointing out various details: the tufts of wool still caught in the barbs from unfortunate sheep who had strayed too close (much as I was doing now), the fact that the lines did not all go straight from one pillar to the other, but meandered, straying from their lanes to provide the occasional diagonal, connecting threads.

But throughout it all, I found myself disappointed. A team had produced this. Not an artist, but a group. And this was the first thing we saw? How connected was this Andy Goldsworthy to his art? Was he simply an art director, taking credit for the graft of others?

As I would learn, in a way yes, but if so, he had earned it.

We moved to the next rooms: a dark room filled with broken stones, which had been displaced from the ground when graves had been dug. This room was lit by a skylight during the day, but being the night time (Edinburgh in November rarely sees sunlight after 4pm) torches had been provided. The whole thing was oddly insistent, demanding that I see past the fact that it was “just a room full of stones” and instead grapple with the practicality of it. They had been moved, lifted, placed. They looked evenly laid out, still natural, but clearly this was not a natural occurrence. The artifice of nature in a gallery room, brought here at great effort, all to evoke… something. These had been displaced by humans after their lives had ended, and now were exhibited.

The art was impossible to engage with fully without the knowledge of the construction. I was starting to see a theme here even though I assumed another team had been employed here as well.

The next room was a collection of reeds suspended from the ceiling. Again, these were four metres tall at least, impossibly long for reeds, and arranged in a maze around the perimeter of the skylight (this room was the twin of the previous one with the stones). In pitch darkness, we were provided torches, the light from those walking through the maze casting moving shadows like bar-codes on the walls. My vertigo kicked in and I had to leave Anisa to explore alone while I steadied myself on the back wall, listening to another gallery staff member explaining that there was no fixtures to keep the reeds in place. They were jammed into a shelf at the ceiling level, and then subsequent reeds were jammed into the hollow ends of the ones above, leading to the surprising height. There they dangled, free-floating. When some fell, they would be carefully replaced before the next showing.

I found the patterns on the wall mesmerising, not just because of the vertigo they induced. I found myself jealous of being unable to explore the maze myself.

The next room featured a wall taken up by dried mud, a vibrant red colour and cracked from the baking heat of the sun. Four by four metres, at least, and mounted vertically so that the viewer felt they were looking down on the ground. Cracks regular to the sides divided the otherwise random breaks into almost perfect squares, making me wonder what mechanism caused such regularity. Was the surface prepared in some way to force this regularity, or was there some underlying crystal structure to the mud? The plaque (much like the rest) offered no such information, only the raw details of what I was looking at. Meaning and understanding were something the viewer was clearly invited to bring themselves.

Another wall showed pieces made from a dead hare whose carcass had been filled with snow and allowed to drain on to parchment. As gruesome as this sounded, the results were stunningly beautiful, black and red and white ink-blot tests upon which to project your own ideas. Prior to being told the method of creation for these pieces, one had revealed to me the image of a dancing hare or rabbit, feet outstretched, ears high above its head as it whirled like a top.

Onward, we moved to the centrepiece, an oak “walkway” along the length of the next room. Wind-fallen branches of oak trees arranged in two rows along the floor, from the outside looking simply like piles, but from either end of the path between, the edges resolved to sharp, crisp lines. Walking the path, it was clear that like the reeds, there was nothing holding these pieces of wood in place other than the tangle of the other branches themselves. And yet regularity emerged from the chaos.

By this point I had ceased caring about how many or how few people had been involved in these creations, and was simply allowing them to flow through me as experiences. There was something mystical about the colocation of such natural, seemingly randomly assembled materials and the harsh, mechanical regularity that demanded attention be paid to the assembly.

The room after was the one that broke me. Photograph after photograph of scenes in forests. A felled tree with an interesting crack in its bark, but with vividly golden leaves applied to the edge of the crack, then darker and darker hues applied further out, till the crack seemed a black void surrounded by glowing light. The same effect achieved with the same crack, but this time using fallen snow and judicious clearing of the snow in layers to highlight the crack as though cut through sprinkled icing sugar. In another photograph, a particular branch in a pile of branches was chosen to be covered in bright yellow leaves, plastered down to give the effect that the branch itself had been painted.

Another picture showed snow cleared from a succession of fallen branches to give the impression that a dark path had been cut across them all, a jarring negative space in the snow-covered dell.

On and on these photographs went, one optical illusion after another, gently snapping my brain.

I had to leave the room before it became too much. I’m still unsure how to name the feeling that I had. Overwhelm, perhaps, mixed with awe, mixed with some dissonance arising from trying to square the natural setting and materials with the artifice.

We moved on, downstairs now to his earlier work.

Up till now, the rooms themselves had been compounding somewhat. As I moved between the pieces, I found that each new piece made me review the last in new light, such that I had a distinct impression of carrying an increasing “load” as the rooms progressed. I suspect this is what lead to that last room overwhelming me in some way, the common threads of the work all colliding and giving me a glimpse of an overarching… what? Not narrative. I did not feel that he had been trying to tell a cohesive story with these pieces. It was more that each piece had come from a common source, a drive, a need to express… something.

It was downstairs that this something started to make sense. There were only three rooms downstairs, with a more intimate, restrained feeling. This was clearly his earlier work, and gave more of an impression of the artist himself. Here he is, hauling himself through twisted trees and filming the endeavour on super-8 film. Another, he’s walking through frozen ground barefoot, the ice breaking under his weight as we watch his feet, blue and muddy, plunge into the freezing bog below. Each step making itself felt in my own feet, the artist’s silence with each step as impressive as any of the works upstairs.

Then here he is spitting into the air, or at least here are some photographs of him trying to capture it, failing most of the time but in one frame, there he is, time frozen at just the right moment. Yet more of him trying to capture a bundle of sticks thrown into the air. These shots are all taken on film, meaning that nobody had any idea whether any of them would be workable till after the film was developed.

Now he’s trying to capture a rainbow by hitting a pool with a stick, and photographing as the droplets hit the sun. Two or three successful shots, but how long had all this taken? How many rolls of film discarded, how many visits to the pond to try again, how many days where the light wasn’t right?

Then finally, the earliest work, but echoing into the future: split stones arranged such that each gap aligns, rendering the viewer unable to unsee the single, unified crack through the stones. Or a perfect circle of golden leaves on green, made by ripping leaves and sticking them to matching ones and arranging to create the illusion.

All through, this striving to shock us into seeing… what? I came away with a profound sense of humans as being a part of nature, and of our difficulty in seeing this. We dismiss as “unnatural” anything we create, but are any of these pieces “unnatural”? Any more than an inexplicable boulder in an otherwise empty plain, deposited aeons prior by some wandering glacier? Or the Giant’s Causeway of Fingal’s Cave, once thought so unnaturally regular as to be clear evidence of construction, but now understood to simply be a result of the way lava cools?

I left the exhibition somewhat stunned, feeling both apart from and a part of the natural world, sad that I could not immediately return to see the initial works with these fresh eyes (given that this was the last day of the exhibition), but also quite sure that part of this impermanence was the point. We are all our own creations, in many ways, and the biggest revelation to me was that the creation is as much in what we choose to see around us, what we pay attention to, as in how we choose to respond to it.

Now that we’re firmly in the depths of Decorative Gourd Season, it’s time to crack out my hot chocolate recipe. I say “my” hot chocolate recipe as the kids usually begin a campaign around November for the return of “Dad’s hot chocolate”, but in truth it’s a simplified version of a Babish recipe.

Which itself is an imagining of Flanders’s recipe from The Simpson’s Movie.

So I guess it’s interpretation all the way down.

Anyway, I’m not going to duplicate it here. Go and watch Babish’s video and create your own interpretation, since that seems to be the tradition. One word of warning, though: this shit is rich. It’s pretty good in a keep cup when out on an autumnal walk, but if drinking at home, do not plan on doing much after the first mug. Maybe just lying on the couch to recover.

It also works very well as a vehicle for rum, if you are so inclined. Apparently.

When was the last time you answered a greeting question without thinking? The kind of thing I mean is this:

How are you doing today?

It’s a standard opening, which essentially means “I acknowledge your presence with my words”. The actual words themselves are rarely important, and one of the key agreed norms here is that the person initiating the greeting rarely actually wants to know the answer to the question. There’s a reason why the following exchange reads as comedy:

How are you doing today?

Oh well, you know. The bus was early to the stop which frustratingly made me late as I was on time, just in time to see the bus leave. And then the school called to ask me to come and pick up one of the kids as they were sick in class, so I had to bail back home, get the car keys. That said, after that I decided that we should make the most of the morning together so I called in a family support day at work and we watched some movies snuggled under a blanket on the sofa. Then she was sick again, so that ended that. How are you?

…

But the insidious thing I notice, at least around where I live, is that the answer really does hold a message, even when it’s terse. It’s often something like one of the following:

Oh, not too bad

Getting there

Could be worse

Surviving

Mustn’t grumble

All of these clearly position the default answer as being some form of “bad”, and so they seek to reassure the asker that things are not quite as bad as they would expect them to be.

Think about that. I know negativity bias is a thing, but think about how many times we engage in this exchange in a month, or week, or even day. How many times we repeat the mantra, implicitly reminding ourselves that the best we could hope for is a neutral day, and that in most cases, we’re happy to settle for somewhere slightly north of “the worst things could possibly be”.

What effect does this have on our view of the world?

And what if we could flip it. What if, instead of the default “better than disaster” answer or the long rambling life story, we said something like:

Actually, my day’s going pretty well thanks. How about you?

If we said that enough, might we start to believe it? And if we start to believe it, might our brains (hard-wired as they are for confirmation bias) start looking for evidence to support it?

I mean, it might be worth a try.

So yes, I’m definitely doing better than fine. I’m pretty damn good right now, thanks. How about you?