I am a 45-year-old descendent of agricultural peasants from Derbyshire. My ancestors stood in barns all day threshing wheat with big sticks until the industrial revolution swallowed them down into the infernal belly of the dark Satanic Mills.

About

My father signed The Official Secrets Act 1911, left our ancestral homelands, and went to work down south at the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston.

I was born in the Winter of Discontent, the same year Margaret Thatcher came to power, and as I grew up she systematically pulled apart any remaining sense of community and togetherness the common people had managed to sustain, such that, in 2023, after the so-called pandemic, I decided to abandon the false promises of the commercial, industrial, capitalist society I found myself in and hit the road with my family instead, cramming two adults and four children into a Mercedes Sprinter. We are still going strong.

Read my words on Substack, where I write as The Rover: subscribe below.

When they change direction, the silver shimmer of their under-wings reflects back the sun like the shining scales of a convulsing fish swimming in the sky. This flurry of light and movement, the inherent animal-freedom of the flying birds, stirs me.