I still carry a small mark on my finger from a bread round with my dad when I was four. Over the years I’ve come to think of it less as a scar than a reminder: our wounds do not only mark what happened to us. Sometimes they become the place from which understanding grows.

Living with those marks, I used to think uncertainty meant I was tied to the past, as if not knowing the future were a kind of failure. Age has loosened that idea. The present isn’t a gap between two mistakes. It’s a strange, shimmering place you actually inhabit.

Nothing repeats. A sunset, a wave breaking below the cliffs, a falcon lifting on the wind. Each arrives slightly altered, slightly mysterious. Existence isn’t something you solve. It’s a riddle you live inside.

I think often about the people the world overlooks, those who don’t read or think in the sanctioned ways. The ones dismissed as having “nothing between their ears”. I used to accept that judgement in small, unexamined ways. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe they have nothing to prove. Maybe they’re simply witnessing the same riddle, asking the questions no one can answer.

If anything I write matters, it’s because it reflects that mystery, like the figure in The Fool on the Hill, watching the world turn without needing to explain it.

This is the work I’m doing here.