I scrutinise the remaining leaves of the ledger. They are precious few. My archival zeal has been so relentless, so thoroughly efficient, that I find I have whittled my history down to the final, dusty appendices. There is a peculiar, hollow irony in realising that my life, once so crowded with the minutiae of academic procedure, has been reduced to a set of supplementary indices.

YouTube video by Old Bloke New Music

Episode Three of Old Bloke: New Music, in which two more tracks are fed into the increasingly unreliable machinery of the Dad-o-Meter. This time it’s Man/Woman/Chainsaw and Big Truck. Two very different bands, two tracks, one Old Bloke, and the usual assortment of opinions, comparisons, bewilderment, and inappropriate dancing. No freebies, no paid promotion, and no guarantee that anybody sending me music will actually like what I say about it.

Episode two of Old Bloke: New Music, in which I continue my entirely unnecessary mission to find out whether there’s still new music capable of getting an old bloke out of his chair. Two more tracks go head to head, the Dad-o-meter gets another workout, and the production remains reassuringly held together with string, glitches, and misplaced confidence. This time it's Modern Woman and The Bleep Test... st...

I just started a channel reviewing new music. It’s called Old Bloke New Music and, yes, it’s a bit of a Ronseal deal. This is the first, slightly dodgy episode and, of the four I’ve made so far, by far the most primitive. I am, slowly but surely, getting the hang of the software. Each episode features two tracks in a dad-dancing face-off.

If I were to cross out my own name, what would be the consequence? Would I cease to function as the scribe, or would I cease to have been entirely? The philosophical implications were tedious in the extreme, yet the physical sensation was altogether unmistakable. My hand, the very extremity holding the pen, appeared to be receding, becoming a distant observation rather than an immediate, lived experience.

YouTube video by Old Bloke New Music

I arrived, eventually, at the middle section of the register, which was given over entirely to the mid-century archives. It was a tedious catalogue of names, a sprawling list of those who had attended a symposium so thoroughly forgotten that it felt an affront to even acknowledge its existence. I began at the very top of the page. Allcock, Bailey, Jones, Smith.

Creative Gambles and Corporate Euthanasia. One must eventually confront the evidence of one’s own aesthetic deviancy. My cinematic resume reads like a morgue of corporate aspirations, a curated collection of what the industry politely terms “commercial disappointments”. To look upon my list of recent favourites: Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Scooby-Doo, Eternals, The Marvels, Ghostbusters (2016), Josie and the Pussycats, John Carter, The New Mutants, and the patron saint of creative hubris, Hudson Hawk, is to see a history of the publicly pilloried.

To review the trajectory across these essays is to witness a profound chronicle of architectural and hauntological containment. We began within the dusty, subterranean vaults of the text itself, tracking how the archival past behaves like a biological parasite that consumes the contemporary subject. We then saw this temporal rot leak outward into the city's physical grid, transforming the colonial lanes of Providence and the damp wharves of Innsmouth into a recursive labyrinth where forward progress is revealed as a convenient fiction.

On returning after a rousing weekend of friendship and frivolity, I began to harbour the uncomfortable suspicion that my efforts were not those of an editor, but of an unspooler. I was not merely recording history, as was my usual position; I was actively unravelling the fabric of the present. Removing the stock from the soup. The ledger ceased to be a passive archive and became an agent of active negation.

The contemporary cultural landscape is haunted by an entity that bears only a superficial resemblance to Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Decades after he died in poverty and obscurity, the Providence writer has been subjected to a corporate and populist reanimation project that mirrors the clinical, misguided ambitions of his own fictional scientists. Because the vast majority of his core canon has slipped into the public domain, unburdened by copyright restrictions or central estate control, his mythos has become an open-source quarry.

My name is, perhaps was, Thomas Arthur Cannon. Of that, I am almost certain. I have been in the employ of Upton Campbell, archivist and librarian of my Alma Mater, since graduation, some eleven years prior. He is a good man, by and large. However, he does possess a regrettable fondness for the occasional, or perhaps more than occasional, sherry, which he consumes with a meticulousness that would make a chemist blush.

The communal play that defined the early growth of Lovecraft’s myth-cycle is often celebrated as a pioneering experiment in collaborative fiction. Yet, from a hauntological perspective, it represents the precise mechanism of the canon’s undoing. By actively inviting his inner circle of correspondents to borrow his fictional books, locations, and entities, Lovecraft created a shared world that was inherently unstable, decentralised, and resistant to codification.

If we apply the lens of psychogeography to Lovecraft’s Providence, we stop viewing the setting as mere backdrop for cosmic indifference and instead see the urban environment as an active participant in the haunting. The city operates as a palimpsest where every layer of history is not recorded but physically felt by the observer. Lovecraft performed a kind of involuntary psychogeography long before the Situationists formalised the drive.

I adore Godzilla films, whether the original Toho productions or the more recent Legendary Monsterverse incarnations. Especially Mothra who, along with the Groke, I see as my spirit animal. During the heyday of GeoCities, a small website called The Church of Mothra appeared. It treated Mothra as a curious blend of the Virgin Mary and Mother Earth of the kaiju universe, an absurd theological joke that somehow worked.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward offers the most coherent architecture of hauntological failure in the Lovecraftian canon. Ward is not a mere antiquarian; he is an agent of the unburied past. His research into the life and deeds of his ancestor, Joseph Curwen, is an archival endeavour that goes beyond simple historical recovery. It is a fundamental disruption of the present.

Providence is an series of essays that are nominally about HP Lovecraft. You find out why 'nominally' fits as the essays go on. This is the introduction essay. The rest will turn up inbetween other post as that many essays on one topic might be tiresome if they come all at once. That said, the next couple of posts will be 'Chapter One' followed by something else entirely.

The cultural artefact known as Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? represents a sustained and surprisingly rigorous interrogation of the late twentieth century landscape. To the casual observer, the first two seasons appear as mere Saturday morning diversions, yet a closer examination reveals a profound meditation on the nature of the suburban uncanny. The series operates within a world ghosted by the remnants of a fading industrial past, where every spectral apparition is ultimately revealed as a material fraud.

Why I know Skyrim Better Than My Home Town

Why the X-Men Never End — memory, seriality and myth. The mutant past is perpetually reimagined, transforming history into a shifting landscape of retroactive continuity. This instability of memory provides an exquisite metaphor for the precarious nature of mutant identity. If the genetic code is a text that can be edited, then the history of the species becomes subject to the editorial pen.

Haunting the Present — politics, surveillance and control. The paradoxes of mutant time are embodied in the recurring figure of the future mutant who returns to warn of a catastrophe yet to occur. The mutant lives within a temporal loop, unable to fully inhabit the present because they are perpetually haunted by futures they have already witnessed. Every struggle with their powers becomes a confrontation with the unsettling truth that they are not the masters of their own house.

The Haunted Genome — biology and identity. The X-Men represent a particular brand of spectrality, defined less by biological deviation than by the persistent presence of a future that refuses to arrive. They are haunted by the promise of integration, a future in which the line between Homo sapiens and Homo superior dissolves into harmonious coexistence. Yet that future is always deferred.

This pressure is often framed as rumination, but rumination implies choice, or at least agency. Under slow time, memory behaves more like background radiation. It fills the space left by a future that has stopped pulling its weight. What’s striking is not that the past appears, but that it does so without nostalgia. These memories are not necessarily warm or desirable.

Slow time is not the absence of activity. This is usually where people start, and it’s where things immediately go wrong. Slow time is not what happens when nothing is happening. It is what happens when something continues to happen, but refuses to progress. Time remains present, insistent, and oddly demanding, while withholding any sense of movement. It does not stop.

Do you think we’re shaped more by our experiences or by who we are? We are our experience.

Yeah, I've been a bit busy.. 'Thresholds' is finished but I'm holding that one back for a while, 'Cosmic Indifference' is about 60%  done and 40% note form. 'Bound to the System' is something of a departure for me. Still hauntologically based but, a very, very ,very different subject. Still in the research phase. And I've not mentioned the novels yet...

The intersection of Kneale’s work with the mechanics of the phantom limb becomes most visible through his preoccupation with systems that persist in running on invalid assumptions. This phenomenon is characterized by a structural refusal to acknowledge that the foundational logic has been withdrawn. In the Quatermass narratives, the horror is not derived from the presence of the alien, but from the realization that the human apparatus is a legacy system attempting to process a reality for which it was never designed.

In Quatermass and the Pit, Kneale’s ‘Hobbs End’ is London’s wound reopening. Agoraphobia is the private version of that reopening; the moment the body realises its access to the world is not stable. The world remains there, but it is no longer guaranteed. The contract between action and outcome becomes provisional. The future tense becomes conditional. What used to be automatic becomes something you have to build each time from scratch. 

Now, this is the point where I started to suspect something I had not quite said out loud before. Agoraphobia is not just compatible with hauntology. It is one of the most literal embodied versions of it. It is what haunting looks like when it is not aesthetic, not nostalgic, not mediated, but procedural.  The outside world starts behaving like a future that never quit e arrives.

Amputation gets described as removal, which is technically accurate in the way a spreadsheet can be accurate. Yes, the limb is not there. Well done, everyone. The problem is that the body does not treat “not there” as a settled category. It treats it as a minor inconvenience, a clerical error. It treats it as something that will be corrected shortly, if only the correct person can be reached. 

If Hiroshima haunts through absence, the Titanic haunts through overexposure. The Titanic has been replayed, retold, reconstructed, and reanimated so many times that it barely qualifies as an event anymore. It is a format. A floating morality tale with excellent set dressing. What makes the Titanic endure is not the scale of the loss. Tragedies of similar or greater magnitude have been absorbed into statistics and quietly forgotten.

Disasters have a habit of lingering long after everyone has agreed that they are finished. The rubble gets cleared. The plaques get installed. The anniversary documentaries get commissioned. The calendar ticks on, smug and sequential. And yet something remains, hanging around like an unresolved thought nobody can quite place but nobody is willing to dismiss.  This is usually where we reach for words like legacy, impact, or lessons learned.

  On the way down, the sound followed for a while, then thinned, then vanished. It didn’t echo. That was the strangest part. For all its droning insistence, it left no trace once it was gone, like belief without belief, or ritual without risk, or an email thread that evaporates the moment you close Outlook even though it has somehow eaten three hours of your day. 

Someone nearby pointed something out; a holy thorn, maybe, or a story attached to a stone. Delivered with the bright certainty of a fact that has never been forced to withstand follow-up questions. I thought of Joseph of Arimathea turning up like an afterthought, drafted into local legend because the land needed a backstory and Christianity had one spare. It’s not that anyone is lying exactly.

We were almost at the top when we heard it. Not music exactly, more a pressure system. A low drone with delusions of grandeur, stretching itself between notes like a cat claiming the entire sofa. Sometimes it slid into a whoop (the sonic equivalent of someone waving from across a car park), sometimes it collapsed back into a single breath held too long, as if the air itself had become mildly trapped in a waiting room.

So, after the publications of three books this year, I thought I'd take a bit of a break. One the first day of that break (around 9:15am while enjoying a cappucino and a good book at my local coffee house) I had three ideas for new books. Convergances  - about the lazy universe. (about 20% done) Untitled novel - In which the novel is the villain, (about 50% done)

We are fond of saying that we live in a mythless age. What we usually mean is that we no longer believe in gods. But belief was never the engine. Structure was.  Strip ancient hero myths of their metaphysics and what remains is not theology, but procedure.  Take Theseus and the Minotaur. Forget lineage, kings, sacrifices. What remains is a person navigating a rule‑bound space under partial information, pursued by a moving threat, using pattern recognition and timing to survive.

I@m not usually one for blowing my own trumpet. If there's one thing that is going to ever scupper my chances as a well known author, its that I am clueless about self-promotion. I spent a good few years promoting others as a job, but when it comes to me?? Sigh. So when A review like this coes along, you can bet your arse I@m going to be posting it everywhere.

What built in obsolescence ultimately produces is not progress, but permanent provisionality. Nothing is allowed to settle. Systems are designed to be replaced before they become fully known. Objects arrive with an expiry date already humming beneath the surface. Even digital things, ostensibly eternal, are kept in motion through update cycles and compatibility traps. The present becomes a narrow ledge between depreciation and replacement.

Digital obsolescence exposes the lie at the heart of planned decay. The problem is not entropy. It is compatibility. The object has not failed. The system has moved. This produces a new category of thing: the intact but unreachable. Objects that still exist, still function, still make sense, just not here. Not now. They belong to a past that has not receded but has been fenced off.

  Nostalgia is often described as a feeling, which flatters it enormously. Feelings are flighty. They arrive late, leave early, and can usually be distracted with a cup of tea. Nostalgia, when it really gets going, behaves nothing like this. It lingers. It settles in. It rearranges the furniture. It sends otherwise reasonable adults searching for obsolete hardware at indecent hours, convinced that this time the missing piece will fall into place.

Have to be honest, I was getting very despondant about the lack of traction this novel was getting. I had one very good (five star) review on Amazon.co.uk and another from a local news outlet, but other than that, and precious few sales, nada. I'm just shit at marketing myself. Then I looked on Amazon.com... 4.5 stars over all. Wow!

Further thoughts - and new material - about a compulsive urban legend. The original essay is in the book 'Haunted When the Minute Drag' from my Book Shop. The Phantom Hitcher Hiker (Again) The phantom hitchhiker problem is often misunderstood as a problem about ghosts. This is forgivable. The story does, after all, involve someone who shouldn’t be there, is briefly there anyway, and then isn’t.

LGBT Novel Cultural Studies Poetry Psychogeography Superheroes Kelvin Flats Brutalism Sheffield Crucial Three Essay Academic adjacent hauntology agoraphobia Myth

Doorways are where time goes to hesitate. Not dramatically. Not with any particular flair. A small, almost polite pause, like a sentence without its verb, your inattention assumed. A doorway is supposed to be simple. You are here, then you are there. Inside becomes outside. Outside becomes inside. A clean switch. A reliable piece of sequence. You step forward and time agrees to follow.

At some point, the future stops behaving like a direction and starts behaving like an obligation. This isn’t dramatic. Nothing collapses. There’s no moment you could point to later and say, that was it. The future doesn’t disappear. It quietly changes function. What once operated as anticipation begins to require management. Plans no longer pull you forward. They sit there, waiting to be maintained.