From Soho and skiffle to Australian flat whites, how Britain grew to love coffee.
Photo by Timothy Barlin on Unsplash
Tag: Downtime
Only slightly mixed feelings last Friday as I said farewell to five of my guitars.
I haven’t played properly in a few years and, for most of those years, I had been telling myself, “You’re a writer. You could weave the most compelling story for each and sell them on eBay or Reverb.” Instead, they hung or lounged around my office collecting dust and muttering at me with their dead and unplayed strings.
Then, three things happened. I tidied and redecorated my office, resulting in the instruments huddling all together in one corner, looking at me ever more balefully. They deserved to be played. They deserved a better home.
Then, my old guitar tutor popped up on email. We hadn’t spoken in years and, in the course of the exchange he said “you only need two guitars: an electric and an acoustic.”
Now, in my dreams, once I had started to play again and reached some level of passable competence, I have (not had) always promised myself a 1964 Fender Stratocaster. Not investment grade, a well-loved “player’s” guitar would do as long as it’s original in the important places. So I regularly receive emails from No.Tom Guitars, a vintage specialist on London’s Denmark Street (and, in fact, the shop that features in the TV detective series Strike).
This time, their monthly mail of delicious objects had a footnote: “We want your old guitars.”
The upshot is that I sold five to the very nice Mr No Tom, and kept two; my 1981 Tokai Springy Sound ST-80 (if you know, you know – it’s a dream of a guitar with all the classic Strat bark and jangle) and my Yamaha APX electro-acoustic. What’s more, because I didn’t want to be embarrassed on collection day, I braved the ouchy fingers and managed to pull together a half-passable Sweet Home Alabama, just in case.
And I have new strings.
I feel lighter in every way (except my bank account).
And, if you feel you missed out, four of the guitars are here:
1980 Tokai Springy Sound ST-60
2007 Fender Classic Players 60s Stratocaster
Fascinating. I’ve just finished Execupundit Michael Wade’s new novel, Pilate’s Magician.
Julian Fabius is a prominent Roman lawyer living in self-imposed exile from the Emperor Tiberius. The novel explores the dilemma he faces when summoned to support the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate. How do you make sense of an unlikely local tale? And, how do you tell the powerful prefect an unpalatable truth? A lawyerly mind strips away the impossible to arrive at an unlikely truth.
I suspect the book draws as heavily on Michael’s experience as an adviser on sensitive issues as it does on his extensive research. A fresh and entertaining perspective on a familiar tale.
Happy New Year!
Many of us are scrabbling around assembling and confirming our good intentions for the year; all the things we’re going to do in 2026.
An alternative is to adopt Daily Stoic’s list of eight things to STOP doing (from Instagram, here):
- Stop complaining
- Stop taking things personally
- Stop avoiding discomfort
- Stop hanging out with the wrong people
- Stop wasting the morning
- Stop allowing distractions
- Stop doing the inessential
- Stop comparing yourself to others.
Simple, sound advice for the year ahead.
I discovered this blog, Infatuateur, via Cultural Offering. It’s a curated feast of beauty and style that includes nature & animals, architecture & interiors, food & drink, men’s style and beautiful women.
In the words of its keeper, “I am a man who is bewitched by beauty and smitten with infatuation.”
Worth checking out over an idle hour.
Image: https://infatuateur.tumblr.com/post/802742838748200960
I may be a little late to recommend this as Christmas Eve reading (hopefully not), but Broken Ground, the inaugural collection of short fiction from Uncertain Stories, is superb.
I’ve only read the first two stories so far and they are original, thought-provoking and definitely “uncertain” – as the website promises: “new short stories with a supernatural or speculative edge”.
Also, and always a bonus, the book comes beautifully wrapped.
Along with the single-sheet, super short story, Mark, you can see above, the volume comes a 16-page Little Uncertainty, “small books that we give away for free to help spread the love of short stories.”
What’s not to love?
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, letter to Marcus Terentius Varro
Varro, I learn, was Rome’s leading expert on gardens and agriculture at the time and the literal translation is ““If you have a garden in your library, everything will be complete.”
Photo by Lucas Calloch on Unsplash
Blogs come and go, but some stalwarts remain.
Here are a few that I’ve read daily for years and which still provide valuable insight:
- Cultural Offering – Music, literature, humanity, perspective and more.
- Execupundit.com – Michael Wade’s thoughts on leadership, ethics, management and life. Michael also writes long-form essays on his Substack channel (also highly recommended).
- Hunter Gatherer 21C – Nicholas Bate’s new home: reflections on business, life, balance, The Beatles and his own fiction.
These three are the cornerstone of my morning reading. Also highly recommended are:
- A Layman’s blog – eclectic quotes, insight and music.
- The Hammock Papers – “A forest of things” including art, poetry and music.
And two essentials that I follow on email:
- Steven Pressfield – a writer’s writer with much to say about Resistance, the War of Art and “Putting your ass where your heart wants to be.”
- The Daily Stoic – Ryan Holiday on Stoicism for modern, daily life.
Check them all out. Your lives will be richer for a few minutes’ reading each morning.
Image: Andrew Munro
I’ve been away. I’ve been neglectful. I have been busy, but I’ve also been distracted.
However, I did manage to read some great books. Here’s a selection of loosely relevant books I enjoyed over the past couple of years.
Stoicism
- Marcus Aurelius, The Stoic Emperor by Donald J. Robertson – a fascinating and accessible biography from cognitive-behaviour therapist, writer and Stoic, Donald Robertson.
- The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday – A well-deserved modern classic that’s (apparenty) sold over two million copies and which I should have read years ago. It’s packed with practical insight, quotes and examples. I’ve been lending out my copy ever since I finished it.
- Lives of the Stoics by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman – I had a big birthday. Friends bought me book-related vouchers and I bought books. This is fascinating if you’re interested in where Stoicism came from. It covers the philosophy from its founding by Zeno of Citium up to the time of Marcus, and explores the lives of famous and lesser-known Stoics and near-Stoics including Cicero, Cato the Younger, Seneca and Epictetus.
- Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar – Not altogether Stoic, but a beautifully written fiction purporting to be the memoir that a dying Hadrian wrote for his adoptive heir Marcus Aurelius. It’s both visceral and delicately sensual. Remarkable.
Here’s an interview with Douglas Murray about Roger Scruton and a new edition of Scruton’s Confessions of a Heretic…