Nature is the real deal. Ten minutes jouney from your computer screen is grass (not the Camden variation), an hour from your sofa is blue sky (unless its snowing), a couple of miles from the moment your mobile signal drops you’ll find a track, down that track you will find reserves of strength you never had access to in the office. Through the wide open miles you’ll discover clarity and open-mindedness that would render any bullshit ?Ǭ£400 a day motivational speaker speechless.

Strip your life from concrete and box-rooms, dispel schedules, the lies of politicians and advertisers… its so simple, its so possible.

The world of TV and High-Streets is here to stay, we call it progress – but it seems to me half-baked. We have books and the internet, we know where paradise is (on earth) we call it “the Florida Keys” or “Phuket” but we’re not there. If this global society has discovered these places and shown us how it is – why haven’t we dropped all the bullshit that we built up to make the discovery and got our asses over there.

If society really worked, surely we’d be up for culling a few billion to live the good life on that little island, or in that penthouse. Oh, y’know what? We don’t need to do any culling – nature will do it for us, via Ice Age, Bird Flu, AIDS or Famine, nature knows its balancing point and the equilibrium will be restored. Hopefully the next round will set off from some de-evolutionary starting block; will could devolve* in terms of our grasp of society – if we had less capacity to think about others we’d probably stop starting wars, creating clans – moving on to the next bit of dirt, island or continent. If we had tails it’d be pretty sweet, smaller heads = smaller hats and all that.

Ach, what shit. Here’s Ewan McGregor reading Anton Chekhov’s “The Bet” (11.4MB MP3). Translated by Ronald Hingley. It is one of the most read files on my hard disk, I now pass it on to you.