Love Saves The Day: Selected Works from 2016

7 min readJan 6, 2017

Personal highlights from my published output over the last twelve months.

It’s just under a year since I started writing full time for a living. Coming from a branding background as opposed to a journalistic one, I was perhaps better equipped than I would otherwise have been for what Writing Full Time For A Living actually means in 2016. I understood that it was unlikely impassioned 10,000 word features in the great American tradition were going to be my bread and butter (at least, not if I wanted to continue paying the rent on my Stoke Newington flat). I embraced the ‘branded content’ and copywriting jobs that came my way. Not purely as a necessary evil but as a challenge of sorts to both myself and my clients: how to find those interstitial pockets of illumination that exist in the cracks between the personal and the promotion? I have been lucky enough, in most cases, to be working with agencies and brands (from blue-chip to start-up) who recognise this approach is in itself of value when trying to stand out and speak to new audiences. It’s rewarding and enjoyable in very specific ways.

This round-up is not about that work though. Below are some of the pieces I am most proud of from the past year that were created in a purely editorial context (I say ‘purely’ though the spectre of corporate sponsorship looms — silently, I should add — over a couple of pieces and one editor did veer into the realms of heavy-handed satire when referring to my copy not as articles or features, but as ‘ancillary content modules’).

After some years in the wilderness, I do not possess the words to properly communicate how much the below pieces mean to me: to be earning a living on my own terms, to be unequivocally proud of the work I’m creating; to meet so, so many inspiring, wonderful people along the way — from interview subjects to editors to collaborators to friends and anyone who ever got in touch to say they’d enjoyed something I’d written. If you’re reading this and that applies to you then thank you so much (also apologies, because it likely means I’ve been spamming you with links to my work already this past eleven months).

My year ended with an invitation to moderate The Sooner Now, an all-day ‘creative conference’ for Freunde Von Freunden in Berlin. Completely out of my comfort zone (there must be a reason, one surmises, that writers choose to communicate via words on the page rather than from their garble-inclined mouths), it turned out to be an empowering, inspiring experience. My New Year’s Resolution is to say yes to more opportunities that take me away from my living-room-cum-office, to get out into the world more. Meeting people, forging connections: it feels like the increasingly hostile world we traverse demands that from us more than ever.

(Gonna try and be vegetarian for like the fifth year in a row also.)

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Weaving Worlds Beyond Words: The unspoken meaning behind Amy Revier’s sculptural garments (Freunde Von Freunden)

“You can see why Amy loves the Heath so much: a great flattening of time and space and ideas woven across 700 acres; a cross-section of ponds, lakes, stately homes, gnarled old woodland, architectural oddities, people and not-people and finally — as the last of the daylight sunshine disappears — a great thunderclap of glorious, torrential rain that speaks to the place louder than any words.”

Love Saves The Day: A Soundtrack For Transcending This Terrible, Terrible Year (Thump/Vice)

“Make no mistake: the intention is not for you to read a few depressing words and then forget about them for a few minutes while a euphoric disco track plays in the background. It’s also not another variation on the “well, we just have to make compromises and work with the terrible people we disagree with and things will be better in a few years” line that countless (almost exclusively white, male, heterosexual) people are trotting out at the moment.

This is about focusing your mind on the lay of the land as we all naturally do when the year is drawing to a close. It’s about gathering your loved ones around you — people who might be feeling scared and vulnerable, desperate and helpless. It’s about losing yourself in the righteous emotions that somehow are best expressed through dancing, together. It’s about maybe, just maybe, you and your loved ones capturing that energy in a way that lasts beyond the final fading horn blasts of “Love Is The Message.” Harnessing, channelling and transforming that energy into actions small and large that can actually affect change.”

The Age Of Minimal Branding (Protein)

“The heritage boom that engulfed all manner of brands around the turn of the decade was the result of history finally catching up with an a-historical generation. In 1998, the British sociologist Anthony Giddens described our society as one that is “increasingly preoccupied with the future,” which was all well and good until exactly ten years later when the projections and pre-suppositions that propped up the global financial markets crashed down around us. The freedom we experienced in living on the surface of the present suddenly began to feel very, very fragile…”

Inclusive communities and continuous collaboration: An approach to future living from architect Asif Khan (Freunde Von Freunden)

“Integration, inclusion… These are themes that Asif returns to time and again, drawn from his personal experiences and manifested to varying degrees across his impressive body of work. “I have no time for exclusion,” he says, weaving through a procession of Afro-Caribbean ladies en-route to church, their explosively colourful dress lighting up the concrete greys between Homerton and Victoria Park. “Maybe it’s because my parents are social workers, so I gained their values. They are compassionate people and in turn they made me feel empathetic. It’s that burden of understanding or responsibility [in both social work and architecture].””

It’s Time For Us to Praise the Godfathers of Gospel Disco (Thump/Vice)

“For our generation that can sound like an almost scary thing: our whole lives are built for skipping along the surface of things, disregarding supposedly concrete things like religion and history and True Essential Love. All of the things that kept our parents and grandparents in check. In other words, our lives are supposed to be fragile. That’s what is supposed to allow us to reinvent ourselves to varying degrees, to transgress borders both physical or otherwise with such ease. Fragility can be thrilling, liberating even — but it can also be fucking terrifying. Safety nets like a higher power don’t seem so bad when in actuality your experience of the adult world has been defined to date by global financial crashes, the ruthless ideology of austerity and the existential malaise of post-Brexit, pre-Trump politics.”

Architect Simon Astridge On Creating Homes With An Emphasis On Everyday Experience (Freunde Von Freunden)

“Beautiful ideas are at the heart of Simon’s work: the elegant and considered aesthetic pleasures of his finished projects belie the philosophical musings and conceptual frameworks from which they sprung. At one point he begins to talk enthusiastically of Heidegger and the phenomenological philosophers of 19th and 20th century Europe. From others, this might come across as academic showboating far removed from the bricks and mortar of his actual work. Taken as part of Simon’s overarching approach however, you begin to trace a route back to the origins of his ‘verbs over nouns’ approach to architecture — a beautiful idea if ever there was one.”

Where Next For Heritage Wear? (i-D Magazine)

“Now though, designers like Nicholas and John seem liberated: boldly revelling in the perfect storm of creativity they have conjured. Forward-facing design instincts fused to old-world quality craftsmanship in a way that stretches far beyond the tropes of an appealing marketing campaign. Just as we were in 2008 when the bottom fell out of the banks, it feels like we’re again entering unprecedentedly uncertain times socio-politically. Designers that bridge the personal and the cultural, who fuse a globally informed mindset to preciously localised industries, who refuse to accept that our golden age exists only in the past… Designers like that, they feel more relevant than ever.”

The Sooner Now Conference In Review (Freunde Von Freunden)

“So often an assembly of like-minded people can descend into a fingers-in-the-ears avoidance of certain issues and how they affect those beyond the artfully mismatched seating and exposed brickwork of the Friends Space. The Sooner Now was striking in the way that all involved seemed eager to acknowledge the increasing, often alarming disconnect between those shaping the discourse of the future and the many more who actually have to live in it. Put another way: the future may look a certain way to you/me/us from the second floor of a meticulously re(de)-constructed event space but it probably looks very different from street level.”