Performative Latte
15 September 2025
Sitting on the train back from Leeds and watching white lines. I’m half a world away from home but it feels like I’ve taken it with me. There’s a certain sense of guilt going away like this.
My sister woke me up in the middle of the night yesterday with a call, wanting to get my mum on the phone to help with Grandpa. He couldn’t walk across his room properly, and stood still, confused. Half-asleep I took the phone over to my mum’s room and let her hold court with my sister and 2 phones, checking the video-camera while talking my sister through it. I just stood there not really knowing what to do. I’m feeling like this trip was a bad idea, but I can’t do anything about it.
During the day I can feel my mum wanting to make this holiday count for her, everything she has to document and take photos of. I know why she’s doing it but can’t help but be the asshole I am. I wish I had a bit more patience.
Other parts of my life are a mess - and being away doesn’t change any of that. It just feels like I’ve let a lot of people down. I know I’m only passing out pieces of me but its hard to pass out more.
I met a friend of a friend in Leeds. They showed me around the town and we talked, had some food and watched a Jarman movie; and for the first time, in a long time, I got to forget about things for a moment.
I’m watching the raindrops flit perfectly horizontally across the train window. Against the night outside, the droplets look like travelling stars to me. Racing their way to the end of the LNER windowpane. It’s late tonight now, trying to find my way to the bus at Wallington, past all the kebab shops and tobacco stores.
England is exactly what I thought it would be, maybe a little less. But as I’m seeing the last of it now, I feel like I’ll miss it.
Earthgreen
6 September 2025
Pigeons are the same here in Hong Kong.
The air’s a little heavier, and the heat cloaks you like an unwanted blanket. The city smells different too. Sometimes bad, sometimes good. But even the bad is good to me, because it’s different. And um, it smells Chinese.
I love it. So similar to the world I know but old, aged, and occupied with a kind of weird Chinese sense of scale. As it’s being redeveloped and rebuilt into a more modernised Hong Kong, at this point in time, at this stage of my life, and on this day, I’m glad it exists the way it does now. People who live here probably don’t even bat an eye anymore as they walk across Shanghai Street or go up the Central escalators. But it’s aces to me.
I went to a place called Cheung Chau. It’s one of Hong Kong’s outlier islands and a lot of tourists go. As soon as you get off the ferry you’re confronted with the golden arches and a rush of seaside restaurants waiting for you to pay for overpriced food. But inside the island, past the tourist strips and in the neighbourhoods I saw an older kind of Hong Kong. Glimpses inside people’s homes you can see the cramped spaces with peeling paint and on their balconies, a quaint greenery. There’s a certain strangeness, maybe incongruity, that separates the tourists and the locals. I felt it in Shek O too. The too-perfect golf course and aging Copacabana tell you so much. Then again, I suppose Sydney’s not so different.
Someone once told me there’s a word in Mandarin, xiāngyù. It means, roughly, ‘a meeting, by chance’. I think about that word a lot, and about the person who said it to me. It means to me so many things, at different points of my life. In a sense there’s an irreducibility to it. Right now though, it’s a quiet regret of things I once thought best unsaid in those chance moments. Being in Hong Kong, it’s seemingly always at the back of my mind.
Everyone’s looking for some kind of human connection. It’s kind of meaningless to say because it’s such a truism. We probably go through a hundred chance encounters every day hoping for that one meeting which’ll change things. But waiting around in that hope, I guess you miss the other ninety-nine. Better luck tomorrow, maybe.
Mildly Confusing
19 August 2025
It feels like I’ve come to the end of something. I became a lawyer the other day, which is honestly as meaningless as getting any other lie. But as I sat there in the court, it felt wrong to me. As if I had joined the freemasons or some strange cult. I guess everybody else probably has the same thought, but goes ahead with it anyway.
The week-old risotto I’m pecking away at isn’t helping my throbbing headache. It doesn’t seem to have left me alone for weeks.
Some days I really do wander aimlessly through the city - walking as if I had somewhere to be but that somewhere is always indistinct in my mind. The office I work in has barely any natural light and I feel like not only is my time being wasted, but it’s actively stealing something from me. At home, my shower drip is back. Or at least has been for half a year, maybe more. I don’t want to get someone to fix it because I know I can, but never seem to get around to doing it.
I heard about a country in Latin America where buying lottery tickets was a popular custom. Every Monday they’d buy the tickets, and check them on Fridays to see if they’d won. Once, they tried to introduce scratch cards. Nobody bought them. What they realised was that scratch cards gave people instant gratification, but the lottery tickets gave them something more. They were buying hope for the workweek.
Turkish Coffee
3 August 2025
I've had something stuck in my ear canal for a week or two. I can hear it rattle every now and again when I move my head in a certain way, but I can't get it out. It just sits there like an annoying piece of shit.
It’s been raining so much recently that I’m beginning to forget what the sun feels like.
They say that it takes eight minutes for light to get from the Sun to Earth. I think about that a lot. A ray of warm light travels millions of kilometres across the galaxy, just for some jackass cloud to block it in its final stretch before it hits me. There's probably some kind of metaphor there.
Whenever I go see my grandpa, the first couple of seconds always make me anxious. He's old and in the throes of an undiagnosed dementia, so I'm anxious that he might not recognise me. Time and time again he does though. Even if it takes him a moment. But that shift on his face from a furrowed confusion to a toothless smile makes my day. Every time.
One of my friends' grandmas died this week. After someone dies, Hindus have 13 days for mourning. He invited me to come along to a prayer. I was a little late when I walked in and sat beside him. I stared into space as the prayers were said and passages were read. They played music too, on drums and an Indian accordion. I didn't understand a word, but when music started playing I felt like I understood the moment, even if it was just for a split second.
Anyway, I can't hear that piece of wax in my ear anymore. I'm not sure if its because it fell out or I just stopped worrying about it.
Airport Tunnels
27 July 2025
I’m getting bad at texting…
Driving back to my apartment tonight, I got a little lost in the daze of the highway. That auto-pilot feeling where your brain says you’ll probably die if you don’t pay attention, but you don’t anyway (maybe that’s how Diana’s driver felt). I get that feeling all the time, but by the time I hit the airport tunnels with the bleary-eyed flashes I wake up again. They hit like little pebbles of warm, rousing light. It’s giving me an existential crisis on a Sunday night.
I banged my toe on my shower door railing the other day. It bled a lot. I always had the passing thought - “When you get older, you’re gonna hit yourself on that damn railing” - I guess I’m already older now. I’m 24, so I say that only as ironically as I can get away with.
I’ve been getting into multivitamins too… Thinking if I take enough I’ll see the face of god.
It’s strange after all these years, now feeling a sense of inertia. I haven’t done a whole lot except worry about my job. Now all of a sudden I don’t care so much.
I’ve got to think about Hong Kong soon.