Notes from the Resilient Life [575]

Greetings from The Borders...

May 15, 2026

A last minute photo of me using a borrowed log splitter on some softwood. I always struggle to know what to put at the top of the page. This is hardly inspired, but it is what it is.

I’m Christian Payne, autotelic over-sharer. I also take photos, capture audio and write this dispatch. This is where I seek out novelty, ponder where we are going and explore the relations between things.

Thanks for joining in.

#TheAction

The last few days has seen me assembling slides for a workshop I’ve been asked to deliver at the Thinking Digital conference. I’m almost there.

The brief is on their website and if you’re keen to go to the conference, the workshop sessions are free for ticket holders to attend but fill up fast. My workshop will explore what resilience looks like in a world built on fragile infrastructure.

There’s also some standard tickets to the main event which is well worth the money.

I’ve had to take a step back from the day-to-day in order to reframe the short to longterm aims of the life we’d like to have here.

It’s been a year and things are really coming together. The land is being shaped, solar and portable battery storage has grown, as has our arsenal of manual tools. Some back up systems are in place and we have enough fuel to keep us warm for a few years.

We are building our networks and learning from the locals. My Mother in Law (head of vegetable operations and chief grower) is already bringing in a steady flow of produce and the freezer is filling up faster than expected.

The land has its own agenda though and there’s always something. Being resilient does not mean never struggling. It means continuing through disruption with preparation, adaptability, redundancy and community.

As you can see from the top photo I have also acquired a serious log splitter. What was I just saying about community? ;-) A local arborist has kindly loaned it me free of charge for a couple of days. It’s their baby petrol splitter and at 15 ton it’s three times the power of the one I borrowed from a neighbour. Also three times the cost and about 10 times the noise.

I’ll get to grips with it over the weekend and see how it compares to the £400 quid one.

My daughter completed her Duke of Edinburghs Bronze Award. Dead proud.

Personally I’d love to work through Bronze, Silver and Gold today. As a youth I only did the expeditions. I feel it did wonders for my my camp craft and I can still read a map. That said, today my metaphorical compass fails to point in the direction I should be travelling in. The needle is attracted to all the interesting things. And everything is interesting.

Let’s see where this particular journey takes us today.

#TheSeen

This video is 13 years old now but still relevant. Probably more so.

I found it via a blog post by Terrance Eden’s on the unintended consequences of gamification.

And I got my fair share of big screen time in this week… I started with ‘One Battle After Another’.

Lots to enjoy in this. The music, the action, the acting, the plot.

Great movie. 4.5/5

Also watched ‘Fear And Loathing in Aspen’.

It was ok. I managed it all the way through. So that’s something. This story should be definitely be a film, but perhaps not this one.

Fair play for keeping hunter’s memory alive though. 3/5

Finally, speaking of resilience… last night I watched The Punisher: One last Kill. It’s only 50 mins long.

I stumbled upon it and thought it was a fan flick wondering “...how the hell did they get Jon Bernthal!?” Then I realised it was a kind of lead up for an upcoming Spiderman Movie.

Glad it exists, but being a massive fan of the comics I miss Micro(chip). :-) 3/5

#TheWords

Just finished reading Outlaw Journalist about Hunter S. Thompson.

The author William Mckeen tried to see past the drug fuelled mad man and does a pretty good job. He met HST and although doesn’t worship him in this text... he certainly outlined the good the bad and the ugly.

He describes Hunter’s writing strategy and occasional discipline. As well as the manipulation, addiction and cruelty to those around him. Also his final self destruction.

Hunter S Thompson was a troubled man. But where did the persona end and the man actually begin? Even when considering his work now historical, it will offend many. A self proclaimed omni-bigot, he also spent much of his writing life attacking racist political systems, was a staunch anti-authoritarian and could be incredibly kind to fans.

Writer, celebrity, characature and while a difficult human being, I think he was one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century. Perhaps even the godfather of all bloggers who document the act of getting the story and so become the story.

We might also attribute the ‘Mojo’ of mobile Journalism to him. Back in the 70’s and 80’s he’d submit text copy using a precursor to the fax machine called the Xerox Magnafax Telecopier aka (his words) ‘the mojo wire’. Now that’s old school mobile journalism.

“I think it is time for morphine” — D.H Lawrence (Last words)

#TheHeard

On the one day I didn’t have to get up early, I found myself in that blissful place on the edge of sleep. The sun was already up and the birds in full song. The wren, chaffinch, robin, wood pigeon and crow are often among the regulars but then a cuckoo piped up.

The first i’d heard while living in Scotland. I could not resist it. I half opened an eye, reached for my phone and muscle memory opened the app Merlin bird ID. The cuckoo call was feint but I figured that if I put my phone by the open window I’d be able to grab it and add it to my virtual collection.

A list of birds including the wren, robin, wood pigeon, crow,

My half opened eye saw the relatively rare capture populate my screen. But I’m meant to catch a glimpse of it before I can log it. It sounded close.

But it wasn’t. Right then, I heard my eldest, (who’s home on study leave) stomp out of their room to my daughters room (who was doing her Duke of Edinburgh award) and disconnect her alarm clock. That sounds just like a cuckoo.

Ah the cuckoo. A natural imposter in the nests of many birds, didn’t even need to be real to impose upon our sleep and my hopes of a rare capture.

One of my favourite podcasts went someway to comfort me with my decision on how to use AI tools. They agree that the trick is not to use AI chatbots as an answer box… use them as a thinking companion.

The Artificial Human episode: Is AI the future of learning?

There’s a new firmware update for the Zoom H1 essential. They have added input gain adjustment (despite it being 32bit float and not really needing it), ai noise reduction and MP3 recording and export. The latter probably explains the addition of input gain.

#TheConsumed

I thought I’d try this hazy IPA from Lucky Saint. They have rave reviews about their lager.

The can in a hand and the poured good looking beer being held up to the light. Looks lovely, tastes a bit meh.

I think the 0.5% on the can donates the percentage of taste that relates to a hazy IPA. It pours and looks like the business but has all the notes and flavour I imagine you’d experience if licking the yeasty residue from the bottom of the Wilcos brewing tub after bottling your cheap home-brew. I’ll give it a 2/5 as it’s vegan, low calorie, wet and they at least had a go at a hazy IPA and made a brilliant movie prop.

This only came in a four pack costing £6. Someone is making a killing out of this. Also… I just googled to see what others out there thought and in some places it’s been given five stars! WTF. Hold on. I’ll open another can to make sure I’d not been sucking a polo before supping…..

Now I’m getting salty, metallic and dry. Perhaps it’s growing on me, as this tasted far less of yeast dregs. I’ll bump my rating up to 2.1 out of 5

#TheBody

I went on a bit about that beer above and filled up that last section, so am dropping this here…

a screen grab of the roast dinner from the guardian article.

Click the pic above or here to read the article in the Guardian.

If you have the space, grow your own veg. If you don’t have the space, try to find a gardener happy to trade.

#TheFound

I found another free to use phone box. This one was in the village of Cranshaws.

I know they monitor the numbers of calls made per year to see if these phones are worth maintaining, so I had fun phoning a few people while waiting for my daughter. I say use them or loose them!

#TheThings

You may have noticed that my relationship with tools has changed. I still keep an eye out on the latest image and audio gathering tools. I was quite tempted by this film camera from Kodak and this recorder from Zoom. Mics and sensors with more sensitivity will always excite me. But on hovering over the ‘buy button’ I remind myself that I might already have a few devices that will do almost exactly the same. Or at lease come incredibly close.

Now I’m increasingly drawn to tools that can carry, split, dig, hone, grow or repair.

Not just the solar charged battery driven options... Far simpler, tried and tested tech. A blade, an axe, a hammer and more recently a wheelbarrow.

There’s no connectivity or endless updates but they do need maintenance and often promise some kind of optimisation of my workflow. That is in my ability to help me work with the physical world. Reliably. Hopefully for decades.

Both the axe and the wheelbarrow come with a lifetime guarantee. Despite having fully operational cameras decades old in my collection, A lifetime guarantee is not something I’ve ever experienced with all my other precariously held together boxes of components and glass.

A handsome looking wheelbarrow. Two wheels on the front and a 200lt capacity.

This is my latest acquisition. It’s looks like a wheelbarrow but I’m told by the paperwork it’s an Agri Barrow (TM). I think it’s popular for carrying a lot of horse shit but not having any horses I’ve been testing it with logs and wood chip. That’s 50 shovels of chip in the one pictured above.

So much fun.

A gif of me pushing my daughter along in the wheelbarrow.

#TheLinks

I enjoyed reading The Boring Internet - (Via LJ in the Wire Backchannel)
Have you added yourself to the Documentally community map?
Jeez. If I was worried about appearing cringe I would not do and say most things. I certainly would not open up in this newsletter. But apparently Gen Zs big fear is appearing cringe.
There have been a few sites online where you can tag stories to places. I used to ask my friend Richard Mackney to hack together maps where I could tie multimedia to the spots on journeys I was undertaking, or festivals I was attending. This site AMapOf.Us calls itself a collective atlas of human experience.
Should you not feel a certain site is worth subscribing to and desperately need to remove a paywall, then the aptly named https://removepaywalls.com/ has your back. Just paste your link, then work through the option buttons till you can get in. Should you need to bypass the paywalls on my archived posts and audio then click here.
Some of my other places include these… plus Letterboxd for film logging, Strava for documenting exercise, Untappd for new beers I might sample, my audio RSS feed stores recordings, Mastodon for decentralised social oversharing, and LinkedIn is a last resort should no one subscribe to this dispatch, Bluesky occasionally and foto when I remember. Supporting subscribers also get access to a Discord server. Message me for a link. 👍🏽
The last great weed smuggler
Fear simplifies people, anger channels them and curiosity and creativity resists control. The less we imagine, the easier we are to manipulate. Great article from the Next Web that explores how the most radical act in an age of outrage is to play.

#TheThanks

Thank you very much if you support my words and musings here. Especially those supporting subscribers who pay a small amount every month to receive this dispatch and all other content. You really do keep it going. ♥️

This week I’d also like to thank Bee Lilyjones who is a naturalist who writes about people place and nature. She is also my most recent supporting subscriber ,so please go and check out her own publication linked here. Cheers Bee!

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Just got told we are off to the theatre tonight so am rushing to finish. Please remember all errors are sign of life.

This weekend will be all about splinters and rehydration. Next week is a busy one as I head down to Newcastle and Gateshead for the yearly pilgrimage to the Thinking Digital Conference. Hope to see you there.

Thank you for reading. Have a great week!

“Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

No fear.

See you out there.

Over…