The Journal
Honest reflections, travel stories, physical challenges, creative experiments and the occasional realisation that I had no idea what I was doing. Updated regularly. No polish.
The honest answer is that doing it privately hasn't worked. I've started and stopped more times than I can count. So this time, I'm making it harder to quit by making it visible. Accountability through exposure. Uncomfortable? Yes. That's the point.
Nine months at a five-star resort in Koh Samui. The things I learned about hospitality, people and myself couldn't have come from a lecture theatre. Some of it was brilliant. Some of it was genuinely hard. All of it was worth it.
Perfectionism dressed up as high standards. I've been waiting to be ready for years. Turns out ready is a feeling that never quite arrives — so you have to go without it. This is me going without it.
I used to be fitter than this. That's fine. You start where you are, not where you used to be. First proper session in a while. My legs are still complaining. Progress is progress.
It's not the skills on your CV. It's the patience, the reading of people, the ability to stay calm when everything is going wrong and someone is complaining about the temperature of their soup. That stuff is genuinely useful.
Hot. Very hot. Everyone is friendly in a way that takes some getting used to when you're British. The coffee is different. The portions are enormous. I'm learning a lot already.
I picked it up expecting something dry and ended up reading it in two sittings. It reframed the way I think about decisions, uncertainty and why most people play it too safe. Notes and reflections inside.
There's a whole genre of books about slowing down, staying longer, going deeper. Some of it is pretentious. Some of it is genuinely useful. Here's what I've taken from the best of it and how it's shaped the way I want to travel and work.
I've spent time going through academic papers, memoirs and journalism on gambling harm. Not as a research project — as someone trying to understand my own experience. Some of it was uncomfortable. Most of it was clarifying.
Every morning at the resort, the same ritual. Mise en place, timing, temperature, presentation. It sounds simple until you're doing it for 200 covers before 10am. The standards were relentless — and I learned more from that than I expected.
Not the hotel restaurants. Not the tourist strip. The places the staff ate on their days off — a plastic-chair noodle shop near the market, a woman who sold pad kra pao from a cart at 7am. That's where the real food was.
You can read about a culture. You can visit its landmarks. But sit down and eat what people actually eat — the cheap stuff, the comfort food, the thing they make for family — and you understand something that guidebooks can't give you.