Thoughts for the Weekend & this Week’s Links

Life is a Lasagna.

I’m on the motorway. Cruise control on. 62mph. Sitting steady in the inside lane.

It’s busy. All lanes. Both directions. 9am.

I spot a tractor driving slowly over one of those bridges, built where a small lane once crossed this land.

I’m listening to Senator Rand Paul talk about automation. How, historically, it’s created more jobs and enabled an abundance of cheap shirts.

Then that RDS thing kicks in for the travel update. Congestion. M25 junction blah blah. It doesn’t switch back to the podcast, and I get an earful of some inane, media-pleasing drivel from Starmer.

All that in less than two minutes.

It got me thinking about strata and networks.

As we whizz around, that farmer is treading a well-worn local path. One that his grandfather likely walked. I have a fascination with the layers of time and history. Geology, you know — laid down over millions of years in rock formations. Each layer holding the stories of its time. And as physical form, shaping the land we move over. Defining our own journeys.

I’ve come to think that this layer idea applies to our social and cultural lives.

That farmer moves on his own local layer. Crossing from field to field, we get a brief glimpse into his world. Most people probably miss it. He’s likely not looking at us. The novelty and inconvenience long gone.

Another layer intrudes: Starmer, dropping into my space, doing the thing politicians do. Staying on message. Winning the argument. Desperately trying not to give the media anything they can turn into a bad headline.

We often hear that politicians are detached from reality. Some truly are. But most are fairly regular folk. The issue isn’t privilege or personality — it’s their total immersion in a particular game. A game where the only other team is the media.

The people they purport to serve are reduced to spectators. Why anyone keeps watching is beyond me.

An abundance of cheap shirts, milk, cars and plastic windows is presented as a good news story.

An abundance of great sleep, strong families and real community togetherness is not.

Words like craft and local get co-opted as sales slogans. They know we care about these things, but they don’t care enough to really believe in them. They just say the words louder than we can. Loud enough that we begin to doubt anything outside the big-brand version. Loud enough that reliability becomes confused with uniformity.

“I know a Travelodge isn’t great,” she said.
“So why do you use it?” he said.
“Coz I know what I’m getting. You just never know with an independent.”

Optimised for mediocrity. No surprises. Good or bad. A kind of comfort in sameness. Like a job for life.

I’ve started to think that if we turned down the volume — and quietly stepped away from some of the louder layers of society — we might all be better off. Like the idealised farmer crossing the bridge, just going about his business.

In my head, life is a lasagna. I want to stay in the base layer, where the rich meat-and-tomato ragù sits quietly, holding everything else up. Presidents, PMs, big tech and media firms can have the layers above. They can swim about in the cheese sauce to their heart’s content. Just as the farmer sees a bit of motorway, I might get a bit of pasta from time to time.

But most of the time, I’m down here — in the warm, quiet depths of life — with you and the farmer.

Just being.

All the best

This Week’s Links:

Effortless dipping.

I found this interview about who runs the world interesting if a bit hard going in places

A colourful cottage in Kent

A cabin in Chile

Brown butter roasted squash with chilli, honey and sage – tasty.

Main Image credit: You don’t have to live at the loudest level. (ChatGPT)