The next 24 hours. [sigh]

Unbidden, you remember that first time you were in NYC and all those bits of 1970s cartoons and cop show - fire hydrants, newspaper vending machines, mail boxes, yellow taxis - were there and real and it felt fucking overwhelming. Dizzy with it, dizzy with the heat and stink, you wanted to scream.

You wanted to scream because America had never seemed quite real to an English working class kid. Not real and not in anyway accessible. And you were there, touching fire hydrants and watching yellow taxis. You’d broken some part of reality and stepped through into TV land and it was all real.

Magnetic North HQ

9/7/26 - nocturn

The heat (still 30ºC), the humid Libeccio, the irresolvable frustration and late night despair: I lie naked in my bunk, in thin moonlight, and listen to death creeping up on me.

The map / clearly shows the road // but never the single figure / walking it. -Thomas Meyer, from “Coromandel”

“Here is another beginning now, so I change beginnings as one changes gear.” —Jacques Derrida

"Six scientists and six crew will travel next month to Kirkenes, a remote Arctic town in Norway near the Russian border...there, they will climb onboard a futuristic, floating laboratory – the French-built Tara polar station." www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Old age is a planet to itself where all those minor psychic and physical bumps and scratches are suddenly disinhibited taking on new and suddenly robust lives of their own. Anything that has been ignored or closeted is now lit like a Noir film, shadows looming over the everyday.

We are *this close* to finalising a long-term lease on an apartment for the first time in eight years (not counting our ill-fated attempt to restore a 16th century stone cottage in Puglia, five years ago). Please, please read our update and if you can, help us. www.gofundme.com/f/a-voyage-i...

No, we do not wish to live in the sterilised world of AI and LLMs. We choose human messiness. Lived-experience. We refuse to be statistically robust models. You can’t convince us this planet-killing, thieving nonsense is the way forward. We are humans and we know bullshit when we see it.

Robert Gardner / still from Forest of Bliss (1986)

"So many things lost in a life, my life, yours. So much left to articulate yearning." – Roger Rosenblatt, from Why Old People Cry www.nytimes.com/2026/06/27/o...

33ºC this afternoon, 34ºC below decks: nothing to do but lie still in our bunks, read, drink lots of water, and every couple of hours, stand in the cockpit and spray ourselves down with the dock hose (taking care to run water through it for a minute or so, otherwise the first blast is scalding).

It was still 30ºC when we got back to the boat at 9.30pm, after walking 1.5kms from a grocery store. Clothes drenched with sweat, I stripped off and took a cold shower naked on the after-deck, with no fucks left to give for the crowd on the terrace of the marina's trendy bistro, 200 feet away.

There’s a famous quotation from John Constable that his art was all about things nobody else thought worth picking up on. It goes deeper than that doesn’t it? Art as a writer is almost entirely bits nobody else thought worth picking up on, largely because they were hidden away inside ourselves.

"In what ways did prison change her? 'I’m not the same. The Mahnaz who went to prison was a different person. When I came out my identity was shattered.' After her release, she spent almost two years at home, barely seeing anyone, supported by a few friends – 'mostly women. I would cook for them.'"

"Some of humanity’s largest emergencies unfold in relative obscurity. History is full of such examples. Entire populations suffer while the rest of us scroll past." Bring Me Your Neglected Crises by Peter Bach (@lyst.bsky.social) www.counterpunch.org/2026/06/25/b...

Late night: all the hatches open, no breeze, 26.5ºC. Even perspiring feels like an effort.

"Ask yourself who benefits from the encouraging the idea that people cannot have expectations that society is capable of managing diverse and complex needs but has to default to corporate and police power in order to survive..." – @andreapitzer.bsky.social degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/turning-th...

Story of my life.

Our latest update to @liznangel3.bsky.social's appeal for us: We have found an affordable apartment, with rooms that, for old people used to the narrow confines of a small, vintage sailboat, feel almost palatial. We just need help and a little luck to secure it. www.gofundme.com/f/a-voyage-i...

Our latest update to @liznangel3.bsky.social's appeal for us: We have found an affordable apartment, with rooms that, for old people used to the narrow confines of a small, vintage sailboat, feel almost palatial. We just need help and a little luck to secure it. www.gofundme.com/f/a-voyage-i...

Pre-dawn reading: The Revolutionists: The Story Of The Extremists Who Hijacked The 1970s by Jason Burke. I'm going through 'a thing' for '60s and '70s counterculture.

Rewilded.

“I am a real minimalist, because I don’t do very much. I know some minimalists who call themselves minimalist but they do loads of minimalism. That is cheating.” - Robert Wyatt

Shit. Highs of 34-36ºC in the late afternoon tomorrow, 36-38ºC on Sunday. I'll be up early tomorrow to tent our coachtop and hatches and do a run for bottled water. Given has already rigged a third electric fan in the forepeak (we have two in the saloon).

here’s where we finally land—the book at first and at last takes up the desire to end the self by the only method known to work… by dying. And, as it transpires, possibly by taking all the other humans along. It’s a dark trip for our dark moment, navigated partly via references to... J.G. Ballard.

We distribute a small haul of fruit (cherries, a watermelon, apples, bananas, small tomatoes) and fresh eggs, bought from a local market, between plastic bowls on Wrack's saloon table and it feels...hedonistic.

Our darling friend @liznangel3.bsky.social lit candles for us in a church in Newport, Co. Mayo, close by the gorgeous stained glass windows designed by the Irish artist and illustrator Harry Clarke (1889-1931). Photos by @liznangel3.bsky.social.

Oh, a pleasant surprise: Dark Mountain has just posted my piece, Unmoored — first published in one of their anthologies, Dark Ocean, in late 2024 — on its new(ish) Substack presence. It occurs to me that I've never actually seen the print version.

Midday: the heat and humidity wraps around your skin like cling-film, unrelieved by the local sea breeze. The sun's squint-inducing, white-hot glare has us pinned down below decks, where cheap, plastic, electric fans stir the air between the bunks and cool it just enough to staunch self-pity.

One of my favorite photographers, Duane Michals, passed away this week, age 94. I came across a postcard print of "This Photograph is My Proof" when I was 18 and decided that the hand-written insistence - "It did happen, she did love me!” was both the height and depth of all love. Safe travels -

For those of you who've followed her story here: After surviving a traumatic, 2-year nightmare in Southern California, our youngest escaped to us in Italy 10 months ago. She returned 'home' to Australia just 2 months ago. Today she was accepted into a four-year Bachelor degree course in nursing.

#RIP South African jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim (a.k.a. Dollar Brand), aged 91.

For king, but not country: "The environmental lobby group alleges the crown estate has driven up costs for wind power developers and boosted its own profits, as well as the royal household’s income, due to the 'aggressive' way it auctions seabed rights."

"Radicality means taking the risk of being invisible, of not being seen at all, of being despised." – Olivier Assayas

"In short: monitoring, understanding and forecasting the Amoc is at risk. Without sustained Amoc observations, we cannot know what lies ahead. An Amoc collapse may be imminent, a century away, or, if we act boldly to limit climate change, it might be averted altogether."

Kurt Schwitters on a boat on the Djupvand, Norway in 1935.

A friend just asked me what my most persistent memory was of Berlin in summer (knowing I'm not a fan of the city): I told them it was watching Turkish fruit-sellers in Wedding quartering watermelons with long knives then wrapping them in cling film in a series of fast, balletic movements.

Again, problems with our electrical system — maybe a second dead battery (we've only just replaced one)? No fans to cool the cabin, no lights, no way to kick-start the engine and alternator, our navigation lights and electronics dead.

A dear friend — superstitious in that way that a lot of lapsed Catholics (like me) are — lit two candles for Given and me in a church in Belfast. We need all the help we can get.

#RIP David Hockney, aged 88.

22.30 in Cagliari and the first gusts of a mistral — force 5 now, maybe 7 by tomorrow afternoon — are finding their way below decks. Wrack rolls gently on a short swell building within the harbour. It'll be less comfortable in a few hours.

Peter Hujar Canal Street Piers: David Wojnarowicz working on Krazy Kat Comic on Wall, 1983

A large dolphin chases a school of flathead mullet, its dorsal fin arcing out of murky shallows close by Wrack's transom. The mullet bump along our hull, and breach in a sudden 'whoosh' of white water, as they make their frantic escape. Overhead, hundreds of flamingoes in loose V-formations.

A long walk across the Cagliari harbour-front, in search of fresh fruit and veg and a replacement power adapter for Wrack's compact vacuum cleaner. Meanwhile, battery problems aboard — not enough power to turn over the engine. Our tiny shore-powered charger is doing its best to save the day.

Sardinian siesta hours (re)reading: Pharmacopoeia, A Dungeness Diary by Derek Jarman (an anthology of sorts, with a foreword by Tilda Swinton).

"The traditional 1950 home came with mature tropical plants in the back and a sprawling grass hillside lawn in front, and it suited them just fine. But as drought and wildfires dragged on in California in recent years, she started to question whether keeping the thirsty lawn made sense."