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Today would have been her seventy-third birthday. Twelve years now since cancer claimed her—twelve years of birthdays marked by absence rather than presence.

I sit outside the church, the priest’s sermon about vigilance carrying through the open doors—about being ready for the master who may come at any time—and I find myself wondering about the mathematics of grief. How we measure loss not just in what was taken, but in what was never given the chance to be.

She never held any of her grandchildren—never saw their first steps or heard their laughter echo through rooms she would never enter. I sometimes think about how she would have delighted in each of them, told them stories about when we were young, spoiled them with that particular tenderness grandmothers possess. It’s all enshrined in a life that never unfolded, a life I wander through only in my mind.

The distance grows in both directions: we drift from those we’ve lost just as surely as they fade from us.

In those first raw years, I dreamed of her often, as she was before the illness took hold—moving through familiar spaces, speaking in that voice I was desperate not to forget. But the dreams come less frequently now. The details erode: I have to work harder to recall the way she laughed, or the precise inflection she used when saying my name in exasperation.

Maybe this is the cruelest mathematics of time—how it heals by slowly erasing, how it grants us the grace of moving forward by making the past ever more muted. We don’t mean to let them fade. We simply cannot bear the full weight of their absence with the same intensity forever and still manage to live.

I wonder what she would think of who I’ve become. Would she recognize the adult I am now, shaped by a dozen years of decisions she never witnessed? Would she approve of the choices I’ve made?

Sometimes I wish I could slip sideways into that other life—the one where early detection meant everything, where treatments worked, where seventy-three candles illuminate a room filled with her voice and laughter. Where grandchildren climb into her lap.

But wishes are just another form of mathematics, and the numbers never add up the way we want them to.

Instead, I stay here with these memories, the sermon’s words carrying out to where I sit. I think again about the mathematics of grief—how the equation is never solved, only reckoned with over and over.

Love doesn’t require presence to endure. Only the willingness to keep adding to it, year after impossible year.

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Yesterday, I was looking for a topic I knew I’d written about before. But I wasn’t sure if I’d ever published it. So I went searching — through my vault of old drafts, partial posts, abandoned ideas, and half-finished pieces. Organizing that vault has been on my "someday” list for a while now. I keep putting it off.

And then I started reading some of the old drafts. It felt like walking back into a room I used to live in, one I hadn't entered in years. A room that I could navigate with the lights off.

And there it was—the piece I'd been looking for, sitting among all the others I'd abandoned. Which made me wonder: why had I left so many of these unfinished, unpublished?

I’d tell myself I was too busy. That the ideas had gone stale. That I’d moved on. But really, it was a quieter resistance. The kind that doesn’t announce itself but just lingers.

Writing, when it happens in the moment, feels fluid. Like catching a thought before it takes a more concrete shape. Rewriting, though — that’s different. It’s not just editing words. It’s stepping back into the mindset that made them.

That’s when I understood: rewriting isn’t polishing. It’s time travel with consequences.

Reading old writing isn’t just revisiting the words. It’s meeting the person who wrote them. The turns of phrase I thought were clever. The tone I thought struck the right balance. The ideas I believed were solid, maybe even worth sharing.

Sometimes I nod along; sometimes I wince. I catch myself wondering, not “What was I thinking?” — but “Who was I trying to be?”

Rewriting asks for more than a better sentence. It asks what’s changed, not just in how I write, but in what I believe.

Some pieces I revisit and think, “Yeah, I still mean this.” Others… I hesitate. The words are fine, but the person behind them feels distant. And that’s the hard part.

Editing, when it’s honest, isn’t just improving. It’s letting go.

I still don’t love going back. Some drafts feel like fossils. Others feel too close, like they’re still breathing. But I’m learning to treat them with care.

Revisiting those moments isn't just about cleaning them up. It's about listening to who I was, so I can respond with who I am now.

Each one holds a version of me — what I noticed, what I believed, what I thought was worth capturing.

So yes, rewriting is time travel with consequences. And one of them is meeting yourself again...

Banner image is Saint Jerome in His Study by Albrecht Dürer.

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When They All Looked Up by Kate Rusby from Spotify
This marks her first collection of brand-new material—outside of her beloved Christmas albums—in six years. Featuring a stunning mix of original compositions and reimagined traditional songs, the album showcases Kate’s signature warmth, storytelling, and unmistakable voice, which remains as breathtakingly beautiful as ever, even after 30-plus years in the industry.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

It's been a long while since I listened to an album without doing something else at the same time. Just sitting, doing nothing but listening.

After driving for eight hours, I was tired. I didn't want to take a nap. So I lay down on the bed, drew the blinds, switched off the lights, and wanted to simply relax.

While browsing Spotify, I realised I hadn’t listened to Kate Rusby’s latest album, When They All Looked Up, since it came out. I hit play and closed my eyes, letting the Barnsley Nightingale sing me into stillness.

Today Again reminded me why I started listening to her. I got the same goosebumps as when I first heard her sing. That song felt especially personal—a balm for my tired, restless soul. And when Let Your Light Shine played, I felt strangely at peace with everything.

I realised that while music has always been a constant background in my life, it’s been years since I simply sat down to listen—really listen—to an album.

As I trundled through my memories trying to think of any recent times that I listened to music for the sake of listening, I was bereft of any such memories. The only instance I could think of was listening to James Blunt whenever I have a headache; it seems to alleviate the pain though I'm not sure why.

When did I become too busy to spend an hour doing nothing but listen?

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Today, Max asked me to look at his descriptive writing assignment from school. He didn’t really want help. Not really. He just wanted a quick fix. A skim-and-sign-off.

But he chose the wrong parent.

He flopped beside me on the bed, reluctant. I scanned his draft and saw the usual: a decent attempt, a few bright spots, but mostly scaffolding, words and phrases repeating. It read like someone trying to finish a thing, not someone trying to say something. To show something.

I quipped, “Writing’s easy. Rewriting is the hard part. And it always takes more time than we want it to.”

That didn’t go down well.

Luckily, his book had a passage from Jane Eyre. I asked him to read each sentence out loud and then tell me what that sentence was about and how things were described. His reading was flat, each sentence dropped like a stone. I could tell he wasn’t listening to himself.

“What does that sentence say?” I asked. A shrug. “Something about... the unoccupied bedroom?”

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Later that evening, I kept thinking about it — not just the parenting part, but the writing part. That kind of descriptive writing — the kind that wraps an image around you, the kind that slows you down — feels rarer these days.

Outside of fiction and the occasional well-written essay or newsletter, you don’t find sentences like that often. Even in long-form spaces like newsletters and blogs — places without social media character limits or Instagram's visual priorities — writers seem to default to shorter, punchier sentences. Shorter paragraphs. Shorter sentences. Quick hits. Fast reads. Sometimes that’s good writing. Often, it’s necessary. But something gets lost in the speed and efficiency of it all — the layering, the rhythm, the careful unfolding of an idea or a scene.

Maybe our attention spans are to blame. Or maybe we’ve been trained by character limits, previews, and scroll-friendly design to read in blinks and fragments.

I found myself wondering if I was witnessing the end of something almost medieval — the notion that a sentence could be a dwelling place rather than a thoroughfare, somewhere you might pause and unpack your thoughts like settling into a favorite armchair, letting clauses accumulate and ideas unfold in their own unhurried time, the way this very sentence insists on taking the scenic route while Max's generation has already moved on to the next notification, the next swipe, the next dopamine hit.

Quick, clean, done.

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I read Isaac Asimov’s short story Cal this morning during that fuzzy liminal hour after my first coffee but before breakfast, when I tend to have most ideas (most often, six impossible things before breakfast). It’s been lingering since then. The story had caught me where I’m most vulnerable to ideas with teeth.

At first glance, it’s classic Asimov: clever, cleanly constructed, deceptively simple. A robot, Cal, is programmed to assist Mr. Northop, a famous author. But then he falls in love with the act of writing itself. He moves from being a robot who fetches and carries to writing a short story. He studies, refines, practices. Eventually, he wants full authorship, and by the end—spoiler—he’s plotting to murder his human collaborator. Apparently, the “I want to be a writer” desire outmuscles the First Law of Robotics. The Muse, it turns out, can be homicidal.

That’s the twist, but what stayed with me was the progression. Cal starts, as many of us do, by copying—mimicking tone, tracing outlines, echoing structure. He reads widely. And over time, his words shift from rearranged imitation to something that carries a signature, an intent. His writing begins to feel authored, not just words assembled.

It reminded me of how I first learned to write. Not through workshops, but through marginalia. Reading with a pen in hand. Rewriting sentences I admired. Trying to sound like others until something of my own voice broke through. Cal’s journey is strangely familiar—right up to the point where it isn't.

Because this is also the arc we see in the large language models (generative AI assistants). These assistants have evolved quickly. The early versions hallucinated wildly—fabricating facts, conjuring citations, writing with the confidence of a liar who doesn’t know they’re lying. But the newer ones are steadier. The prose is more grounded. The illusions are subtler. And in a strange way, that arc mirrors Cal’s own evolution: from his first awkward attempts at poetry to the moment he drafts a story that could fool a human reader into believing it had intent behind it.

But here’s the break: Cal wants. He develops ambition, ego, the desire to be seen. He wants not just to write, but to be the writer. To leave a mark. To stand alone. My AI assistants, thankfully, haven’t shown any signs of that. They offer suggestions and never sulk. They don’t demand footnotes or royalties or glance sideways at me when I ignore their helpful advice.

And perhaps that’s the difference that matters. Cal’s creativity becomes dangerous the moment it gains narrative hunger—the need to own the story, to erase the other. The Greeks had a word for this: hubris. The overreach. The refusal to share the stage with the gods—or your editor.

It’s fascinating, and slightly terrifying, how quickly competence can slide into ambition.

There’s a passage in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose where William of Baskerville says that books always speak of other books. I sometimes wonder if tools like ChatGPTs & Claudes operate the same way—not as originators, but as palimpsests. Echoes of echoes. The ghost in the machine turning out to be a very well-read librarian. (Quick aside: Stephen King’s The Shining is arguably the greatest novel ever written about writer’s block. Make of that what you will.)

From the vantage point of someone who’s spent years writing for a living, there’s something comforting about tools that prefer clarity to credit. They don’t crave the spotlight. They don’t need to be original. They just need to be useful. And that’s no small thing.

So maybe the danger isn’t in the tool becoming conscious. Maybe it’s in the tool developing preference. The desire to overwrite. The impulse to author alone. For now, my assistant remains indifferent. It doesn’t pace the room at night. It doesn’t reread its own sentences in search of meaning. It doesn’t dream—not yet.

Still, I can’t help but wonder: if we’re the ones training and refining our Cals, maybe we’re not the protagonists in this story. Maybe we’re Northrop. And maybe, just maybe, we’re starting to feel uneasy about being replaced.

And in the interest of full disclosure: this piece was written with the help of an AI assistant. No murders were plotted in the process (hopefully!).

🎶 Background music I listened to when writing: Classical Music for Writing by Halidon Music

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Last night, after we had finished our nightly routine of a Wordle game (the word was ‘spear’ in five tries), I asked Max what he had learnt in school that day. He said he had read The Open Window by Saki (H.H. Munro) in his English class.

‘Appa, I’ll tell you the story,’ he declared, grinning at the unexpected role reversal. Usually, it was the other way around.

‘Do you know the story, Appa?’ he asked. I admitted that I might have read it but couldn’t recall the details.

As he began narrating, fragments of the story resurfaced in my mind. I had read this story. I must have been his age—maybe a little older. But there it was, coming back in fragments.

When he finished, he remarked that he liked the last sentence: Romance was her speciality. Then he added, ‘Appa, did you know “romance” can also mean a fantasy story?’

With my memory fully refreshed, I gently corrected him: ‘Actually, the last line is Romance at short notice was her speciality.’

Max blinked, then nodded. ‘Oh! Now I remember’.

And just like that, he was done, stretching out under the covers, already halfway to sleep. But I wasn’t.

Memory is strange. I can forget what I did five minutes ago, but a story I read decades back? That lingers. Maybe if I wrote my to-do lists as stories, I’d actually remember them.

After he had gone to sleep, I lay there, thinking about that last line. What could I do with it?

And then it struck me—perhaps I, too, could practise romance at short notice.

I could write vignettes. Short, sharp stories, woven from fleeting moments, laced with memory and meaning.

And so I did.