According to my mum, my dad is the only person in the world who ever taught himself to drive by reading a book. I don’t know that this is true, or that she’d stand by the claim now I’ve gone and put it in writing; it has that quality of loving exaggeration tinged with exasperation which I recognise as part of the story-cloth from which long-haul partnerships are made.

I told this story in yesterday’s Substack essay – and my dad turned up in the comments to confirm that it is true and that he still has the book.

The lesson here is: NEVER DOUBT YOUR MUM!

dougald.substack.com/p/stirring-t...

Stirring the Pot A story about learning to go on stage without a script

"It’s a powerful thing to stand in front of a roomful of people and have all that attention trained on you. I have an image of attention as a material you can work with: a pliable material, somewhere between clay and thread."

Here's a new essay about learning to go on stage without a script.

Massive 2009-era Twitter nostalgia, stumbling onto here and straight into old friends like @lloyddavis.bsky.social & @solobasssteve.bsky.social. And remembering the guy on the original Twitter dev team who told me they almost restricted it to 140-followers as well as 140-chars. #dunbarnumber

I figured the Swedish-language intro would put people off, but this is getting more views than anything I've shared in ages. It's a talk I gave to the Transition Network here about the slow journey of arriving in a small place and what it's been teaching me. (And the bits in Swedish have subtitles.)

Sitting at my desk in the old shoe shop. From the window, I see a sky that's decidedly grey. But thanks to @blakeyfrench.bsky.social for brightening the October horizon with a prompt to visit this corner of the internet.