This is a now page — what I’m actually doing at the moment, rather than a biography. Last updated August 2026.
Where
Porto, in the flat with the bad window. It is the tail end of a long summer, which means the afternoons are unusable and the mornings are perfect.
Working on
- An index for a 400-page monograph on colonial-era cartography. Due end of September. Dense, and I am behind.
- Rewriting the Albania chapter of The Overland Notebook, which has been wrong for about a year.
- Trying to publish here weekly again after a thin spring.
Reading
- The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd — third time. It gets better and shorter every time.
- Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott — slowly, about twenty pages a week.
- Abandoned: a novel I will not name, at page 90. Life is short.
Not doing
Not travelling until November. Not taking new indexing clients until the monograph ships. Not on any social platform, and increasingly relieved about it.