I do sometimes wonder what I am, is there something innate or am I just borrowing bits and bobs? As a kid I always wanted to copy something, James Bonds hairstyle, I didn’t know what I wanted to be, and even now I steal looks from Tom Hardy and Paddy Considine or Robert Pattinson as I love the designer from Inception and Tenet.

It’s much less than it used to be. I do know that it is OK to be me, just me and create my own things, even if it is a combo of fucking awful shirts. 

When I stopped believing in God I did think that science was enough and fully took on board the Tim Minchin bit, although he asserts the world is not short of wonder without any sense of the mystical, but my view is changing a bit. I am becoming more interested in folk tales not because I fully believe in them but because they do give a sense of place both physically and contextually. 

I sometimes feel like I am a bit of a shapeshifter, being sensitive to who and what is around me and moderating myself to what they want expect. Again I do it less and less as I get older but I find I do it now mainly around senior folks at work. I often feel a bit dirty afterwards, but I do feel a bit out of my depth

By moderating my behaviour I’ve felt that I have lost the connection with truly feeling something and it makes me well aware how useful it can be to really hurt, reminding us that we do feel. With certain people I have been with I have lamented that loss of feeling and numbness that can arrive and often should have signalled that something was very wrong, but if I “just tried harder” I thought I could fix. The clash between trying harder and wanting to feel swept along by something bigger is a bit of a recurring event. 

I love dance music for that sense of community and “losing it”, I think I used to like alcohol for the same reasons, in that it reduced the inhibitors that stopped me giving over to something. One year at Glastonbury when Dizzee Rascal hit the “drop” on bonkers and it felt like the whole field had given over to something else. Funny that sense of something bigger, other is developed by the relatively very new stone circle built on the hill overlooking the farm. 

I’ve lost myself in music, people, places, even conversations. I realise that feeling is so very good for me, but I often forget to seek it out. In a world that can be very cliched and repetitive there’s a search for the hit of something different, something else, something that touches the sides. 

The hills nearly always do that for me, the minute and  temporal specs of water and carbon trudging through billions of years of history that really do not care about your bad day at work. The see performs a very similar mind squigee. The cold evacuating all thoughts that aren’t related to er being cold. 

I am attracted to the idea of being someone who is part of the elements, despite being born in the burbs, not only connected to the physical geography but also to the history in the way I don’t necessarily feel connected beyond my immediate family. The discovery of the cunning folk of essex and the gradually uncoupling of religious celebrations from the seasonal celebrations is refreshing direction. Capable an’ all that.