12/10/2026
From 2024 to 2025 I lived in England, in an old stone house (built c1770) on the side of a hill in West Yorkshire, high above Huddersfield. I lived alone and explored the surrounding regions alone. I would go days without talking to anyone. Coming from a subtropical environment I had to learn how to survive in this freezing landscape. My old life in Australia gradually slipped away as I got used to making a fire each night - how does one actuality use coal and kindling? At sunset each evening I greeted the leaping foxes and the ghostly Barn Owls. Badgers would secretly dig the ground along the path leading to my house in the dead of night, looking for Badger nourishment. I read book after book, after book in my solitude. At night I slept under five blankets yet if I awoke during the night I would occasionally throw open the bedroom window and look at the valley out there before me. Tiny dots of distant light indicating that a house was there, though impersonal and not caring. Who lived in those lights? Maybe if I walked a little further I would meet them. There was the Huddersfield Bus Station, as grim as any Soviet far-eastern gulag one could imagine, and I took the most morose yet most beautiful photo of my life there. This was empty England, and I didn't mind, for it was my England. My silly England.
