The Tepid Take

1.   PROLOGUE / TAKE YOUR HEADPHONES OFF YOU SOD  I had gotten out of the habit of taking long walks.       Or maybe I had just gotten out of the habit of other habits that would lead me to take long walks.      Truthfully, that 28 mile long journey through Suffolk the summer before was an outlier; I'd grown far keener on long cycles with friends than long walks alone. But I was inspired by Sebald, Sinclair and Self to see what I could get out of my mind if I allowed it to wander.      There is a song by Fleet Foxes that I like, it’s called Battery Kinzie.       I tell a lie; it’s not a special favourite of mine but it just came on the stereo as I am writing now. I don’t know why the song’s called Battery Kinzie and I’m not sure if it would make a relevant anecdote for this piece if I did. I’m just keen to hold onto the following line from it:      "do not wander, do not wander, do not wa...

The spring breeze has beckoned a lighter lockdown, and now there's murmurs of a post-crisis politics. Here's the lay of the land: air pollution had reduced drastically worldwide, to the extent that it is visible from satellite. People are being encouraged to live their lives more locally than before and the aviation industry is suffering historic lows in passenger numbers. All this, says the optimist, points to a decisive environmental moment where we can take action to create a new status quo, a new normal where these behaviours are maintained. While I don’t disagree that the above would be a positive, seismic change, it is arguably a mischaracterisation of the ideological status quo. Leaving this crisis with a message that is all about climate, a la ExtinctionRebellion , is missing the point around how people have really experienced the COVID-19 pandemic. I am looking to clarify here why economic behaviours, and not environmental ones, are the ones likely to be most accep...

We all fall into lockdown habits. Creating an abundance of toast out of grieving bread, polishing the proverbial pearl with almost arthritic hands. One of my habits is circular, self-indulgent: considering the nature of these habits. How we spend our time away from the world as we knew it. How we choose to grieve the lives we can no longer live. Allow me to attempt a soliloquy, then, as that’s all speeches can be now, aiming to offer the impossibility of a novel conception of the pandemic that has been thought so thoroughly and so openly throughout the magical aether of cyberspace. I am going to argue that we are incapable of benefitting from isolation in the same way that we could before this era of late capitalism, or above all, consumerism, kicked into force. And I am going to open with some ill-advised satire. The article opens with a reference to a book or authority, symbolically flagging the greater intellectual cache that qualifies the writer to deliver on some absurdly ...

Obsidian Games had struck gold. They would tie up, with the utmost subtlety, the link between their new IP – The Outer Worlds, released in the November games rush of 2019 – and the postmodern classic Fallout: New Vegas. It would be mentioned in the publicity but it wouldn’t be pushed . “The team that brought you…” and little more. A piecemeal callout to Bethesda and then, mouths shut tight. In the wake of Fallout 76 and increasingly low expectations for their space-faring Skyrim-alike Starfield, Bethesda were in hot water, and it was exactly the right time for Obsidian to crawl out of the woodwork and bum-rush the big boys. The Outer Worlds was destined to be the western RPG that western RPG fans had been waiting for ever since western RPG Fallout: New Vegas set a new standard for branching gameplay, thoughtful motif, worldbuilding expertise and western RPG-ing generally. The Outer Worlds would pay homage to that tradition while issuing the long-distance telegram of a middle fing...

This piece was originally published in CityMetric in 2020. I’m walking through a lush river valley, home to cows, sheep, and even baby Shetland ponies. I can see the surprisingly steep banks of the River Chess ahead, formed when the owner of Latimer House chose to enhance the natural beauty of his rear view with an unexpectedly wide lake. This is the Chess Valley, on the borders of Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire, and it’s totally perplexing that this 15-mile long stretch of rural land, totally outside anything resembling London, gets a good six stations on the Tube map. This is the outermost part of the Metropolitan Line. As the first railway to tunnel under London, it gave birth to the Underground, but it never really stopped being a bit like a heavy-rail train – so once it’s in the Home Counties, the line feels a lot less like rapid transit and a lot more like commuter rail. The Metropolitan Line bore a child, and that child was Metroland: a hugely ambitious attempt to encourage ...

     The night heat was on slow burn. I imagined a lucid path through a forest, a series of heaths, the back end of Ipswich, and a motorway from the future. I had decided that I would wake up the following morning and walk 28 miles in the space of a single Thursday. It had been a dream of mine for a month, a series of mapping sessions, rationalising trespassing, building a rapport with the land before I’d even touched it. I’d walk from Suffolk’s county town of Ipswich to Orford, a village 20 miles up the coast as the crow flies, with a route off the beaten footpath. I had eschewed the glowing blue dots of the map apps keeping track and printed out an eight-page A4 route instead of reaching for the Ordnance Survey. Yielding to authority here wouldn’t spark my imagination. Surveying all the options would never make me brilliant in the head.      Here I have cobbled together a series of audionotes I kept along the way, in the long stretches when I was a...

In Life Between Buildings, urban designer Jan Gehl explains how incremental changes to an urban environment can gradually make it more welcoming to its inhabitants; not just to those that live in it, but to those too that flow through it. Gehl distinguishes between necessary activities in the public realm and those that are more “social”, arguing that social activities – such as stopping to talk, read, or simply think – are far more common in the spaces that have good urban design. People rush through poorly designed places, engaging with them at a bare minimum. As Lauren Elkin once described the act of walking, they are far less likely to “toss in their chips” to the public realm.      Haringey Passage is an alleyway loaded with dichotomies. At one end lies Turnpike Lane, the grime of Hornsey Park and the seedy underbelly of Wood Green. At the other lies Haringey Park, Railway Fields, pretty primary schools; Finsbury Park beckons and brightest London beyond. Two side...