How was it for you?

Or a week in retrospect.

on Raasay, Scotland, September 2025

On the sign-in screen of my computer and on a piece of A4 pinned to the noticeboard near my desk, the words “show up, dig deep, do the work”. I can’t exactly remember the source, but I’m pretty sure they came from someone on Substack. They’re designed to be less than an aide memoire and more a poke in the ribs.

And on the whole — in the world of showing, digging and doing — it’s not been too bad a week:

• around four hours on regular stuff like competitions, updating my old website, Coverstory books’ business, promoting New Contexts and the Contextual reading events;

• over six hours (plus the time it takes to write this) on Substack-related work;

• a little time processing entries for New Contexts: 9;

• nearly four hours finishing edit number 3 or 4 (I can’t remember which) for a new collection of short stories probably out in the Autumn (I have the 284 pages already printed out for the next edit);

• over four hours drafting new pieces for a collection of poetry that will see the light of day next year (assuming I finish it);

• and a little time putting the finishing touches to Sensitive Information, a debut collection of poetry I’m publishing for a friend.

I offer that detail not in any way as a boast, but rather to give you a flavour of what my weeks tend to look like. I was also supposed to attend a Society of Authors on-line event, but forgot and so missed it.

And next week? More of the same I expect.

Even so, I’m wrestling with disquiet — and on a number of fronts. Other than the poetry mentioned above, I have no other new work on the go (i.e. no new drafting), probably something that has seen a little extra focus on Substack as a result: slightly revised layout, new masthead. And I’m wondering about re-introducing paid subscriptions too. But that’s all tinkering at the edges when my real concern is why I’m not getting the traction here I’d hoped for; my subscriber volume has remained pretty much static for the last twelve months or so. I know I shouldn’t care, but… Time to try out some new ideas maybe?

And earlier this week I was unable to get an incident from my past out of my head; another source of disquiet. You know the kind of thing: that moment when you turn right and you should have turned left, and then the opportunity is lost forever and you’re left torturing yourself with ‘what if?’…

Then — and more universally — frustration with how our disfunctional world works today, and how a few power-crazed egomaniacs have a hold over us, our lives in their hands, and how we’re powerless to do anything about it. How the world could be so much a better place if it wasn’t populated by ignorance and bigotry. And how whatever I write makes no difference to the status quo at all — not where it really matters.

But then I guess that’s a boat we’re all pretty much in. We do what we can do, and the world? Well, it is what it is…

Though no matter how inevitable that may be, such resignation is simply not good enough, is it?

So next week? More of the same in terms of work, and probably ditto when it comes to the world at large; so the same frustrations, and angst, and being tortured both by memory — and by knowing that time’s leaking away.

“Show up, dig deep, do the work.” Indeed.

Increasingly I feel the acute sense that each day should be marked by something novel, or exceptional, or different, however small. That living — if you’re doing it right — should always be that way. But we can only achieve such a goal in arenas where we have control and influence and agency. For writers I guess that’s our writing — and maybe that simply means each day should be graced by something new, our putting our stamp on it, proving “I was here” — even if it’s only in our little closeted slice of the universe.

Maybe all that teases at some part of the meaning behind my poem “From the Lighthouse” (written decades ago and shared below). Or maybe not. All I know is that it was written by that younger version of myself who had yet to learn the lessons about turning right or left — and the pain that can be attendant with the road not taken…

From the Lighthouse

So that was it,
the journey of a lifetime,
resolution of the myth.
There was no romance
only solitude in the echoes
on the dark stone stairway;
only discomfort in the harsh salt-spray.
Who could want this disappointment,
the looking back over the shoulder
at nothing in particular?

Perhaps it’s only here we attain
some understanding
of the soaring of a gull
upon the grey-white winds,
between the lighthouse and the land.

Perhaps.

But who can explain
why unsaved ships still blindly steer
onto waiting rocks?

If it were no more than dream
the lighthouse would be gone,
our search for meaning satisfied,
the intrusion relieved.
Looking back over the shoulder
at nothing in particular,
the lighthouse is there still.

Published in Selected Poems: 1976-2022.

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