SO, THE BEAUTIFUL WORLD [542]

“Traveller, where are you… where are you headed too?”

I can now say with authority that if you have chosen to create something an average of once a week, every week, for ten years, without anyone asking you to start, that is now something you are, not just something you do. There may be goals and destinations along the way, but no endgames... only the journey.

Saturday 30th May 2026 marks ten years since the first article on this website was published, and if you have read any of these at any point, you have my thanks, because whatever track I am on, I feel it is the right one.

I wrote about what began this journey when I reached the five-year mark and, at that point, it felt like I reached a checkpoint: I talked about doing more videos instead, meaning the rate at which written pieces appear would decline. That ultimately didn’t happen because making videos became too much of a chore at the time and too prone to compromise, so I gave myself an increasingly long break from it. The only reason I never corrected myself since is because I am finding ways of making the video-making process more fun for me, and because I never stopped having ideas for videos. The point is to keep putting things out there, in any form.

 

Having made enough allusions to travel, I want to talk about a story.

 

In a land of countries separated by landscapes and forests, and known by characteristics very specific to them, a teenage traveller and their talking motorcycle venture to learn what is important about each country, and what makes its people unique. Limiting each stay to three days and two nights, exploration taking priority over thoughts of settlement, the traveller experiences the full range of human experience, from generosity and compassion to oppression and prejudice, even visiting countries to witness these extremes. Acknowledging the worst of the world to appreciate its best more wholeheartedly becomes this story’s theme: “The world is not beautiful, therefore it is.”

 

Rarely am I captivated by a story’s premise as much as by “Kino’s Journey – the Beautiful World”, the 2003 anime adaptation of Keiichi Sigsawa’s light novel series that began in 2000, of which there will be spoilers here. Most of the stories from the novels remain not adapted or translated from the original Japanese, which is a shame, although fan translations of most stories exist online. For me, “Kino’s Journey” is almost the inverse of “The Prisoner”, where Number Six is trapped in one extreme place, one deliberately beyond comprehension. When events and the news threaten to overwhelm you, knocking your sense of place, it turns out I turn to stories of strong-minded, stoic individuals in remarkably specific settings.

 

The land in the story, while fantastic enough to allow for tracts of explored but unclaimed land to exist between countries, appears set during the 20th century, according to the level of technology displayed in the show. The countries portrayed in “Kino’s Journey” feel like our own – indeed, the walled states look very European – but each one invites scrutiny. In one land, all adults conduct their work, whatever it is, with good cheer, because children are mandatorily lobotomised at age twelve to become “perfect” adults. In another, everyone lives far away from each other to avoid hearing or feeling what each other is thinking, an empathetic scientific advancement driving everyone apart because they know too much, the pain of others driving them over the edge. Two countries resolved a decades-long war by turning it into a yearly game where they instead bomb a third. Another country practised the rule of the majority until the last one was sentenced to death. Another country’s ancestors were travellers, who chose to settle for eternity in one place.

 

My favourite episode of the series involved visits to a few countries. In the “Land of Prophecies”, its people are getting ready for the apocalypse to happen the next day, because a priest has proclaimed that a book, which originated from a faraway land, but a “miracle” had sent it to them, had predicted the end of their world. When the sun rises the next day, another priest reinterprets the book to proclaim the apocalypse won’t happen for another thirty years. Passing through another land that ejected its former king and its traditions, unsuccessfully using travellers to test new traditions, like wearing cat ears, Kino and Hermes come across the “Land of Sadness”, where a lament has been recited on a bridge for decades, one that plunged the country into melancholy and withdrawal. It so happens that someone wrote the lament into a book... The episode ends with an army approaching the “Land of Sadness”, a prophecy telling them they must invade it.

 

What I was most struck by was how you are being invited to make up your mind about these events shown alongside the characters – we are passing through as much as they are. Pertinent lines of dialogue will be repeated as text on screen, but the on-screen patterns and sound design suggest a fleeting moment to reflect before cutting back to the scene – observations and realisations are highlighted by a soft bell sound. 

 

Acting as a guide without feeling didactic, the effect created by these decisions, alongside a more muted colour palette than early 2000s digitally-painted anime usually suggests, creates a calming and contemplative feeling in me as I watched. This is also aided by the constant presence of lines across the screen, in imitation of a cathode ray tube television showing us a story from another place, and another time, with its own alphabet.

 

Kino, the traveller, is stoic, straightforward and dispassionate in how he approaches each place he visits, helping if required, but not there to interfere. A quirk of Kino’s character design, barely shared by anyone else in the series, is a slight triangular cut from each pupil to make them look slightly “pie-eyed”, to use the term previously applied to Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop, but giving the impression of someone mentally putting themselves at a distance from what they are seeing. Hermes, the novels and the series using the German “motorrad”, is more a sounding board for Kino than comic relief, and is sympatico with him – one provides speed, the other balance. (Hermes is modelled on a Brough Superior motorcycle, multiple models of which were owned by the explorer T.E. Lawrence.) However, we do not discover this fully in the first episode, your impression of Kino building with time. His level of resourcefulness as a traveller, plus prodigious use of guns and knives – the sound of a “persuader” pistol being drawn is heard many times, Kino continuing to practise their reactive speed – suggest that, if not for Hermes, and indeed the “Master” they supposedly learned under, they would be completely alone.

 

This is because Kino comes from the land where he was expected to have “the operation” at age twelve. The arrival of a traveller at his parents’ hotel led to questioning if they could become an adult simply by being themselves, causing the parents to label him “defective”, and triggering a “right of disposal” – the traveller gets in the way of the father’s knife, killing them, leading to an escape from the country on the motorcycle built during the story, and Kino taking on the name of the traveller who died. Originally, the Kino of our story was a girl whose unsaid name was that of a beautiful flower, which became an insult when one letter was changed. Kino later decided that male pronouns suited them better, during his training with the Master described in the first seventh volume of the light novels, the first published after the TV series aired – perhaps this was a clarification by the author, or one more journey taken.

 

“Kino’s Journey” was a story that made me question my sense of place. I have lived in the same town all my life, but I don’t believe I belong to it – it is by the sea, which always helps, but this may have left something I need to explore, alongside physically leaving its boundaries, if only to work and shop. I am not defined by where I live, but does that mean I could live anywhere? Would I still be the same person if I arrived in another place? Why would it take so long for me to think about that? I have no answers right now, but the series, the stories, and its premise have, intentionally, left me with many questions.

 

Travel has been important to this website over the last ten years: I have written about being caught in the orange sky that descended on New York City in 2023, I have witnessed the work of Hieronymus Bosch in Belgium, and I essentially made a pilgrimage to Liverpool to see the work of Keith Haring. This will continue, and I should continue to make room for opportunities.

 

This may sound silly, but I once had a short trip in 2021, for three days and two nights, to a place that was known to run things its own way, but turned out to be a place where this was tried once, and seemingly never again, due to cost or indifference – it was Milton Keynes. 

 

Perhaps it explains why I have found myself thinking about Milton Keynes since: the grid system, separating pedestrians and cyclists from the roads to a place of wheeled robots and abandoned scooters for hire; buildings and trees kept to a maximum height that has since been abandoned by new developments; a shopping centre so iconic in its design, it has now been preserved as a listed building, unable to develop further. 

 

Indeed, my trip to Milton Keynes was to look at an exhibition of postmodern Memphis furniture. I have joked that I would like a square of Milton Keynes to call my own, but just because it is a place I have visited, doesn’t mean there are other places where I could settle better – Oxford comes close, but again, it is not near the sea.

 

With the twenty-third and latest volume of “Kino’s Journey” published in 2020, I found no information online to confirm if this was the last. Going so far as ordering a copy of it, resolving to use my phone to translate the conclusion for my benefit, volume twenty-four was announced before it arrived, marking its twenty-fifth anniversary. The journey goes on.

 

Once again, thank you for the last ten years – let’s keep going.

I AM BRANDED ON MY FEET [541]

Some decisions make so little sense, you must write about them to understand the situation. Business decisions, I find, make less sense than those which are personal: it is not just that making money can involve surmounting moral ambiguity, making money is the reason to do anything at all. Whatever the implications, the arrangement I am attempting to parse here sounds surreal, if not dubious.

Inevitable derision followed the rebranding of the high street stores of booksellers, stationers and newsagent WH Smith as TG Jones, following the chain’s sale to the private equity group Modella Capital in 2025. WH Smith, whose stores remain in train stations, airports and hospitals, did not include use or licensing of their name in the contracts signed, except in the continued selling of their stationery range. The attempt made to provide continuity with the old brand by choosing initials and a surname that mirror the original enough produce some sort of recognition, remains a bizarre move, but I can’t name a bookshop that doesn’t use someone’s surname.

Modella Capital, approaching a year since the sale, will be able to start closing unprofitable stores, after a moratorium period in the contract ends. In the shops I have visited, only the name above the door has changed, issues about tired decor and cluttered shelves remain unresolved. When the closures were announced, “The Guardian” newspaper reported that TG Jones owes £2.9 million to its owners in licensing fees to use the name “TG Jones”. 

At the time, this was discombobulating. Surely, the chain could have chosen a further name they could use for free: QT Taylor? AB Brown? JD Williams? (The last is a catalogue, now online-based department store, so perhaps not.) Modella Capital had said “the forced name change from WH Smith has also negatively impacted consumer awareness”, but after stepping in to provide “The Guardian” with more context, no actual money is changing hands, and any licensing fees that have appeared on paper would be waived subject to a restructuring deal, to be approved with a lender.

But why do this at all? Why do anything like it? It reminded me of the ownership of record store HMV by another private equity group, Hilco, between 2013-19, which accrued payments to Hilco for operational and licensing purposes. Surely, if you wanted a payment from one of your subsidiaries, you could just mandate it. (I originally wrote “ask for it”, as if it were a benevolent act.)

After HMV fell into administration a further time in 2019, bought out by its current owner for just £883,000, the “His Master’s Voice” brand and Nipper the Dog were just about the only non-stock asset left to it - Hilco’s 2013 purchase of HMV was for £50 million. You want to accuse someone of profiteering, but making a profit remains the name of the game, no matter how it is achieved.

It just so happened that I needed a TG Jones in the last week, knowing they would sell a certain brand of gel pen without resorting to ordering online. It is “that store” for me, the name change being so clumsy it cemented the connection in my mind instead of severing it.

But with the TG Jones name not being there, and with any licensing costs, whether they exist to be paid or not, being linked to profits, is there any incentive to create value in that name, when that will only cost you more in the long run?

I’VE GOT FRIDAY ON MY MIND [540]

So, there was me reaching the Friday before the publication date of my next article, and once more having no idea of what to write about, and reaching an often-considered quandary: what comes to mind next that I haven’t already covered? Do I take the week off? Or do I break the emergency glass and write about the mere act of thinking of a subject, thinking this will be a clever way out of a jam?

It was a nice thought at the time, but it never works in practice. Whoever was the first to say that writing is ninety percent perspiration, and ten percent inspiration, either did well to keep themselves anonymous, or the adage itself was effectively crowdsourced.

Aside from having a social-media based trailer ahead of my next piece each week, I use my Friday to say that, yes, you are writing about this, so you must do it now. Oddly enough, the Tim Burton film “Ed Wood” was the inspiration for this, a film producer showing Wood the poster for a film that he will then make, the promises made on the poster of what the film will be like having been used to raise the money required to make it. This practice was used widely by producers like Samuel Z Arkoff and James H Nicholson of American International Pictures, the purveyors of monster horror movies and teenage beach party films – it was where Roger Corman got started, continuing the practice himself.  American International was also among the first film studios to use focus groups to find out what films their prospective audience wanted them to make, but I don’t need to go that far at this stage.

My process upon reaching my Friday deadline, which I now realise is the first of two deadlines I set myself each week, is to engage in a very literal thought process: what stands out in the street? What open tabs do I have on my phone’s web browser? If I clear my mind, what comes to mind first? Having an innate curiosity about the world around me is something I have often deployed to meet a deadline?

You would by now think that I would have a list of possible subjects ready to go, but that would be terribly convenient. I think I have come to realise that, if having a system was helpful, I would have implemented it years ago.

But, to use a film analogy again, my name is above the title. It is not the subject that is central, it is my observation of it. What comes to mind is what makes the right subject that week. It is not the fact, but the thought.

Should I really do this every week? I am making this sound exhausting. It is not like I will wither and die if I don’t do it, and it is not like people won’t go uninformed. This is when you know you are doing this for yourself, and perhaps only yourself. One million views is just the bonus.

IT'S ALMOST THE DEADLINE [539]

The General Strike of 4th to 12th May 1926 was called by the Trade Union Congress (TUC) in sympathy with British coal miners, whose wages and working conditions had eroded and declined in the years after the First World War. The first day saw an estimated 1.5-1.75 million workers on strike, the TUC had restricted participation to key industries: iron and steel, transport, shipping ports, and printing.

However, as “The Times” reported in its edition of 5th May, “The printing industry is at a standstill, but lithographers have not been withdrawn, and compositors in London have not received instructions to strike.”

I have owned a copy of this issue of “The Times” for years, but never properly scrutinised its bizarre appearance. It is a single sheet of foolscap-sized paper (32 x 20 cm) – I have since discovered this edition is known as “Little Sister”, in comparison with the “Big Brother” of the regular broadsheet – printed on both sides in dense typewriter text, the only picture being King’s coat of arms in the paper’s masthead. 

I had seen similar examples of other newspapers printed during the strike in similarly reduced circumstances – there exists rudimentary editions of the “Daily Mirror”, “Daily Mail” and “The Daily Telegraph” – but with “The Times” being Britain’s (unofficial) newspaper of record, with an unbroken print run since 1785, this was the one to have. My copy now resides in a mylar bag, to prevent decomposition of the fragile newsprint paper, a relic of a moment in time.

As “The Times” recently discussed [link], its 5th May 1926 edition was produced and distributed by volunteers and helpers corralled by John Jacob Astor, the then owner of the paper, having already been made aware at a meeting, of newspaper proprietors with the British Government, that its intention was to publish an official Government newspaper to provide both official news and the Government’s viewpoint during the strike, either as a collective effort with the industry, or by itself. This became “The British Gazette”, published by His Majesty’s Stationery Office from the requisitioned premises of “The Morning Post”, using staff from that paper and the “Daily Express”, and edited by the former journalist and current Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill.

With printing presses unavailable, six “Multigraph” machines were used to print my copy of “The Times”. These table-top devices, more used by offices for printing direct mail and forms, these involved sliding individual letters, spaces and punctuation onto a cylinder, with motorised versions printed six to seven thousand copies an hour. Haste and inexperience with loading sentences backwards explain many spelling errors, most notably the “WEATHER ORECAST” at the top of the front page, but these were apparently fixed for a second edition the same day, so I now know my copy was from the first edition.

The following days’ editions of “The Times” looked more like the regular paper, printed on its regular presses by an amateur team only just shown how to operate the equipment, but with its page count reduced to one broadsheet folded into four pages. This was partly a result of Churchill requesting newsprint stock for printing “The British Gazette” – originally requesting access to their entire stock for an explicitly Government mouthpiece, “The Times” would only relinquish a quarter of it.

In media terms, the legacy of the General Strike is usually the granting of a Royal Charter to the then-private British Broadcasting Company, having maintained its independent and impartial radio broadcasting during the strike in the face of a threat from Churchill to requisition it for Government use in a manner similar to “The British Gazette”, which still published programme listings for BBC stations like it was a regular paper. The “Little Sister” edition of “The Times” is a further reminder that the UK only ever had state media once, a hundred years ago, for less than two weeks.

The 1926 General Strike ended without agreement, with miners continuing to strike for a further few months. Much later, an industrial dispute over modernising work practices at “The Times” and “The Sunday Times” led to Thomson Newspapers, which bought them from the Astor family in 1966, to suspend production of the papers for nearly a year from December 1978, breaking a near two hundred year print run.

I'VE GOT THE KEY TO ANOTHER WAY [538]

Before leaving for work each morning, I check the app for my local bus company, which holds both my pre-paid ticket and their timetables, to see if my bus has left the station. 

I couldn’t have written that sentence before 2020. A byproduct of the COVID-19 pandemic was the need to tell passengers if they had a chance of getting on a bus. Social distancing guidelines following the initial outbreak restricted the maximum number of passengers on my local buses to a quarter of their original number so, I am guessing, the bus company added a global positioning system to the ticket machine on each bus, telling you how many spaces were left as each bus moved closer to your stop. Would you be lucky? Or would the additionally reduced timetables cause you to wait for longer still? You could always walk to the next stop in the meantime.

With restrictions having lifted, the real-time map and capacity figures have remained in place, meaning I can leave home when I know a bus is coming. That said, I have only a notional idea of when it should have left the station: my local bus company also stopped providing books of printed timetables in 2020, which were always easier to find and read than a PDF on your phone.

However, one day last week, I couldn’t even access the valuable app. I had made the mistake of allowing my phone to update apps automatically, so when I went to use it as normal, I unexpectedly had to log in, which I am rarely asked to do. Putting my password this time around, an on-screen message said it was incorrect. My phone fills in the password automatically, and even after accessing the secure place where it was kept, so I could remind myself of it and type it in manually, I was still being told it was incorrect.

Passwords are a tyranny of modern life. Until my phone sprouted a dedicated directory for my passwords, I used to keep them written down in a safe place – ideally, that is something I should continue to do, if something ever happens to the phone.

I realised that the update to the bus company’s app had also changed the requirements made of a password, which must now have a minimum length of twelve characters, one capital letter, one number, and one non-alphanumeric number. These requirements had already been decried in 2017 by the person that came up with them, who instead preferred less often used combinations of words.

However, the use of human reasoning will still get you nowhere, as I found out in a separate incident. Because I had removed an e-mail address that was previously used to send passcodes to log into another e-mail address – yes, I know – the login screen started to ask me if I could match two symbols to the shadows they would cast if they existed in real life, or match a symbol to that which a small man was standing on in a ring of other symbols. These strange tasks, using inscrutable symbols that looked downright unclear on screen were, apart from being time-consuming, were enough to wrong-foot me, someone who used to only have to tick a box to confirm they were not a robot. I was being made to feel like one, so I wound up attaching my personal e-mail account to an authenticator app, which I sign into using my face, having now failed to separate its use from what I need to sign in for at work.

With phones now able to collect biometric information via face and fingerprint scans, with the intention (and hope) that this information never leaves the device, it is no wonder that passkeys are being touted as the way to go. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre unambiguously states that passkeys are safer than passwords, and is as safe, or safer than, two-factor identification. I may well have to move to using more passkeys in future, but it does mean I will dread upgrading my phone in future, having encountered problems at work when I did that last time.

With the password for the bus app no longer meeting two of the new criteria, it was never going to work, and I had never received an e-mail ahead of time to inform me of any changes. By this point, I was on the bus, having paid extra because I couldn’t reach my pre-paid ticket. I had also realised there was no way I could reset my password via the app, resorting to the bus company’s website to change it there.

There was no reason for me to write about any of this except to get it out of my system. If there is a takeaway, it is to be more mindful about your apps, and your passwords, until you can get rid of them.

WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE? [537]

I will start with the facts. As of 8.03am BST on Friday 17^th April 2026, this website, www.leighspence.net, has had one million page views since it went live at midday BST on Saturday 1^st May 2021. Thank you for being one of those viewers. I have never added a page counter to this website, as I think people stopped doing that when GeoCities closed in 2009.

This website was originally found at www.dancingwiththegatekeepers.com from 30th May 2016 – yes, I will be doing something to mark a decade since then – and I regret having not used my name from the start. Before the 2021 switch, I had amassed over 185,000 views, but despite the usual promotion on social media, including reposting new links for everything I had done to that point, it took until July 2016 for the new site to achieve one thousand views. 

Fortunately, the momentum reappeared, feelings about starting from scratch being replaced by the safety of having over three hundred articles already available: ten thousand views were reached by September 2021, and twenty-five thousand by the end of the year. Growth was steady, taking until August 2023 to reach one hundred thousand views, but it only took one more year to double that, and only until May 2025 to double that again to four hundred thousand views. 

This means that www.leighspence.net has been visited over six hundred thousand times in the last year...

This is why I am sceptical about page views for websites: it is not from seeing counters on the sites that do have them, or from media reports about other sites, or claims made to attract advertising, but from having seen the data about my own work, for it appears to be thriving to the extent of having taken on a life of its own.

I can only guess that having written about so many different subjects over nearly ten years means that work will appear in search engine results – the main driver of traffic to the website is Google, followed by itself via links from other sites, with social media in third place. Although I will continue to use social media to promote my work, it may be that I am in a good place to survive any eventual decline in the general use of social media, as people move on to other things – it may be a good opportunity to resurrect GeoCities.

I still have my suspicions about A.I. robots scraping my writing, much as anyone who has created anything and put it on the internet will do, despite all the attempts you have made to mitigate or prevent this. However, it this is simply an evolution of how people are searching for information, no matter my misgivings on checking the veracity of what they are being told, then I am glad to be considered a reliable online presence.

The conclusion I should reach from here is accept the figures, instead of being bemused by them, and don’t question why the numbers are so high. I should take it as a sign that I must be doing something right... and if you’ve read this far, I probably have.

Thanks to all of you again.

ALL I NEED IS HELP FOR A LITTLE WHILE [536]

IBM MT/ST

When the spy thriller writer Len Deigthon died in March 2026, his 1970 novel “Bomber”, about a fictional air raid during World War II, was reportedly the first novel to have been written during the word processor. However, Deighton did not use what we would picture to be one: the IBM MT/ST recorded the keystrokes of an IBM Selectric typewriter onto a magnetic tape drive built into a desk, most devices having at least two drives to allow merging sections together, often onto a third drive. The instruction manual advised users to “Think Tape”, like inputting a program. There was no screen, but it could “play back” its output to the typewriter. 

Introduced in 1964, and intended more for composing mail for businesses, IBM withdrew the MT/ST in 1970, as floppy disc drives and terminals with screens became more commonplace. But Deighton’s reason for using the machine was clear: it eliminated the constant retyping of drafts by his assistant, chapters often being revised dozens of times, gaining the ability to edit something that already existed. The tapes are now considered to be lost, but it may be the first time where the record of a novel-in-progress was held on something other than paper.

Over fifty years since the writing of “Bomber”, it appears I still need to reckon with what I should consider to be a permanent record of my work, and where that should be held.

I have two writing projects to which I attach a “permanent record” status: these articles, and a diary. The former exists, save for written notes, as computer files, each one holding the numerous re-edits made during their writing. The latter is a succession of books, written out longhand, and in many cases, especially from 2012-19, ripped out of other books and kept in folders, with some vague intention of copying them up at some point.

Both approaches carry risks, from the lack of backup made of those computer files, to the corruption of data, to paper getting mislaid or removed, or coming into contact with water – only one incident like that will lead you to writing with semi-permanent ink as a minimum for the rest of your life. But should I print out my articles, or type up my diary in future?

The short answer is to embrace the fact that both options require levels of maintenance in order to attach a notion of permanence to them: computer files need to be backed up, ideally to more than one place, and at regular intervals to avoid data loss through file corruption and the lifespan of the devices on which you hold the data; written works can be copied, either by hand, scanning them or typing them up.

Ideally, I should wean myself off pen and ink, leaning more into typing as where the creative work starts, instead of where it ends. Because I essentially come to the screen with something to finish, I am already less perturbed by the flashing cursor on a blank screen than if I started with it. I should make use of that fact.