Off the clock
Away from the keyboard, my default state usually involves music and listening. I play the piano and saxophone, and my headphones are rarely quiet, whether I am rotating through Spotify, tuning into the radio, or settling into podcasts and audiobooks. Musical tastes wander comfortably across jazz, alternative rock, electronic, pop, and Latin rhythms. When I am taking a break from sound, I am usually working on my Spanish, planning travel through Europe and beyond, equally happy whether watching the continent unfold from a sleeper train or cruising at altitude, or taking design cues from Scandinavian and Nordic design, where clean lines meet genuine practicality.
Closer to home, I spend plenty of time exploring London on foot. Walking across the city with a camera is the best way to uncover its shifting layers, from quiet streets to its cultural corners and transport history. Whenever there is a free weekend, I head for spaces like the Design Museum, Tate Modern, the delightfully curious Wellcome Collection and the London Museum, and dive into the subterranean secrets revealed by the London Transport Museum’s Hidden London.
That curiosity extends naturally to railways. Whilst not claiming to be a train spotter, the choreography and engineering that keeps thousands of moving parts running smoothly across the country is endlessly engaging, whether tracked online through the Signalbox live national train map or experienced up close at a heritage railway or museum like the London Museum of Water & Steam. The preserved St Albans South Signal Box is another brilliant example of that mechanical ingenuity in action.
On screen I like things sharp and dry: the uncomfortable brilliance of Peep Show and Severance, the gentle craft of Detectorists, the political comedy of The Thick of It, Veep and Parks and Recreation, or the calculated chaos of The Traitors and Nathan Fielder. Alongside Douglas Adams on the bookshelf, I still have a soft spot for the early web absurdity of Homestar Runner and Weebl’s Stuff.
It all comes back to the same habit: work out how something fits together and it becomes infinitely more fun, whether that is a complex transport interchange, a piece of photography, or a deadpan punchline.
Rabbit holes, tools and curiosities
A few practical tools, dashboards, and digital corners worth a look:
- Signalbox Live Train Map: A fluid, real-time geographic map of Great Britain’s rail network showing live train positions, destinations, and timetable status.
- goblin.tools: A neat collection of low-friction, single-task tools, such as breaking down to-do lists and estimating timings.
- St Albans South Signal Box: The largest preserved Midland Railway signal box, where you can still see the original 44-lever mechanical locking frame in operation right beside the Midland Main Line.
- London Museum: Chronicling the capital’s 450,000-year history across millions of objects, from Roman archaeology to modern social history.
- Wellcome Collection: A museum and library on Euston Road exploring health, medicine, and what it means to be human through intriguing and unusual exhibitions.
- Tate Modern: Industrial architecture turned modern and contemporary powerhouse, from monumental Turbine Hall commissions to quiet visual studies.
- Every Noise at Once: An algorithmically generated scatter-plot map of thousands of musical micro-genres with instant audio snippets.
- Hidden London (LTM): Archive tours and research exploring London’s disused stations, deep-level shelters, and subterranean spaces.
- xkcd: A long-running webcomic of stick figures, science, maths and sarcasm.
- Neal.fun: A fantastic repository of interactive digital experiments, data visualisations, and visual toys.
- Nebulous: Graham Duff’s BBC Radio 4 science fiction spoof, in which Professor Nebulous and his crew of misfits save a post-apocalypse Earth from highly unlikely catastrophes with no budget and little common sense.