Month Notes, September 2025

I’ve just returned from a fortnight-long holiday in Greece—a long weekend in Athens, followed by ten days on the island of Naxos—and I’m feeling fully relaxed for the first time in as long as I can remember.

Reading the interminably terrible news while I was away I thought of several blog posts I could write, but every new event that transpired rendered the previous blog post idea stale and pointless.

I was going to write something here about the political situation in the UK, and the even worse one in the US, but honestly—whether it’s Trump & co. or Farage & Yaxley-Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson)—it’s the standard fascist playbook, and you’ve probably read enough commentary on it already over the past couple of weeks, and I got nothing to say I ain’t said before.

I’ve got a couple of ideas for minor acts of community-building over the last few months of this year, one of which, together with Scott Wood of the London Fortean Society and Reweirding, is to set up a quarterly “Weird Hastings” (encompassing Hastings, St Leonards, Bexhill, Eastbourne, and sundry nearby towns) meet-up in a nearby pub.

Initially this will be for artists, writers, musicians, etc in the areas from Hastings to Eastbourne as a mutual support/interest group for “The Weird”, especially as a tool to resist the far right within the arts, but it will probably eventually open up to all those interested in “The Weird”, rather than just practitioners. I’ll post more about this in the future.

I also scribbled down a few new ideas for artwork while I was lazing around in Greek beach-side tavernas, along with the perennial resolution to try to put more of my time aside for artwork rather than succumbing to post-day-job exhaustion.