Hello friends.

I’m writing just off the back of an exam that took about 6 hours of work. I have a new appreciation for the benefit I get from my employer giving me paid time off to do the thing: another member of my cohort is sweating over the paper from a field somewhere.

I’m writing just off the back of an exhibit at a local museum and gallery that asks whether there are better way to run the economy.

I’m writing off the back of realising that I have a whole week stretching ahead of me: a week of learning about a new city and making notes and putting the things I like into a story.

I am wrung out, in the best possible way.

FYI: this is a slightly creepy weeknotes. I want you to imagine it being given by a guy standing on a TED-style stage.

So: next week is holiday time. I am going to be doing as much writing as I can, and that includes postcards: if you should like a postcard from me, let me know where to send it and I shall. I am embarking on this trip like an Edwardian gentleman: my plans are to go to galleries and museums, write, send postcards, and look dashingly handsome.

And while I’m there, I’m going to be thinking about systems and failures. A friend reminded me that yesterday, July 6, was the anniversary of the Piper Alpha disaster. 167 men died, and many of them in the most terrible conditions I can imagine. Simply reading the timeline of the events is absolutely chilling. There is no single person to blame there. There is only a series of decisions. Each decisions made sense at the time. All of those decisions together made the accident inevitable – or, at least, seem to. Of course if the accident hadn’t occurred, then it wouldn’t seem inevitable, because there’d be no story. Nothing is inevitable until it always was.

I ran into some Jehovah’s Witnesses the other day. One of them told me that his faith came from seeing something miraculous. I think that’s interesting, and I think it’s nice. There was a sequence of things that happened in his life, and that sequence of random events have formed the core of his personality. Same as me! From my vantage point it was inevitable that my life would turn out this way. For another me, in a world just like ours, I sit at a table with three children and think about how it was inevitable that I would end up here (or…there?).

In another world again, I am alone and I am surrounded by bottles and I curse the fact that it was inevitable I would end up here.

Each decision that leads to an inevitability is really just something that changes the odds a little. You don’t have to have the inevitable upfront, at least in human systems: just decisions that put a feather on the scale, one way or the other. I think my challenge now, in terms of writing characters and in terms of working with others, is figuring out how to make it easier for folks to make the decisions that lead to good inevitabilities. Or, alternatively, make it feel like the only decision to take is one that shortens the odds of the bad inevitability.

In 1633 the Inquisition of the Catholic Church condemned Galileo for his teaching of heliocentrism: that the sun is the centre of our solar system. We might argue that they failed. But consider that, the very same year, Rene Descartes abandoned the publication of his Treatise on the World in the aftermath. In the context, that was a decision that made sense. In a climate of fear and uncertainty, it’s easy to see how doing nothing was rational. It was the only decision that could be taken.

Nobody is truly rational, but everybody is rational within their bounded contexts. These boundaries come from education, and culture, and self-belief, and finance, and psychology, and so on.

Now I’ve just got to figure out where to put them. And where mine are.

And where yours are.