You can read more about the process of designing labels for Canny Goat Coffee, and helping people to understand coffee production and processing more deeply below.

• Vulnerable, honest, and caring relationships are the norm in every part of our lives, so people feel safe, are able to meet their needs and desires
• Power is wielded carefully, consensually, and collaboratively, so people are able to dismantle systems of oppression, advocate for themselves, and take decisive actions
• Work is focused on creative, meaningful collaboration that supports people’s flourishing and that helps to meet our collective needs as a society

We do this in a variety of disciplines and domains, like research and evaluation, UX and service design, and anti-oppressive facilitation.

We've worked with clients like:

• Barnardo's
• Campaign Against Arms Trade
• The Collective Impact Agency
• Lancaster University
• Lankelly Chase
• Newcastle University
• Participatory Design Conference
• The Scottish Government

interested in the weird and the eerie, the haunted and the lost, the strange and the unexplained, the stuck and the broken, and of course trying to find a way out of this mess.

I co-ran EXIT Press with my beloved friends Christian Kitson and Eve Michell. We'd known each other for almost fifteen years and we grew up in a place riddled with saltmarshes and rust. We came to love the same kind of art on chalk banks and green spaces whilst feeling like our small town was stuck in time, never ageing. EXIT was at least partly a response to that, and the pandemic, and the deeply-entrenched capitalist realism we were living through.

We published six publications during our lifespan: four editions of LOST FUTURES (In Search of Lost Time, Still Life, Meanwhile... and Thresholds), We can collect the keys by Clive Judd and Patrick Wray, and This Time of Life is Meant for Savages by Leonie Rowland. 

A previous version of this featured on my blog and in Lost Futures volume 4, thresholds. This is a revised and updated version. It’s definitely not perfect. There’s a bunch of clumsy phrasing, and I think in some places it reads like I’m a 1975 fanboy or hater of modern technology with the way it problematises most of modern living. That’s not my position at all—it’s just easy to take shots at the small moments of life that aren’t necessarily fulfilling.

This piece contains discussions of hopelessness, bullshit jobs, feeling like life is pointless, loneliness, alcohol and substance use, trauma, unlived potential, right-wing scapegoating (i.e. of refugees and trans people), casual homophobia, implied reference to sexual assault, blood, sex, and relationship breakdown. If any of these things would be harmful or distressing for you to read right now, skip this one. It is all relatively surface level and nothing becomes the focus of the piece (except perhaps hopelessness, loneliness, and unlived potential). The piece is not related to self-harm or suicide.

You are waiting. You’re not quite sure what for, but you always find yourself waiting. For the train, for the tube, for the mortgage documents to get signed off. For the microwave to finish reheating your lunch. For your Amazon package to arrive. For someone to finally fix you. For that therapist to have an open spot. To get your ADHD assessment. You are waiting for something that will either call you to arms or tell you to lay them down. Until then, you are a statue, patiently locked in prayer. Hoping, waiting, commiserating.

You are waiting. Whilst you wait, you fill your time. With drama, Hinge, mobile games, TikTok. Your job. You know your job’s shit. It’s definitely one of those ‘bullshit jobs’ you’ve heard so much about. You could disappear and no-one at your work would even notice for a week, you’re pretty sure. You spend eight hours a day opening and closing spreadsheets and PDFs. You send emails. You receive emails. You go through the motions of ‘life’. You go to work, don’t do anything that you think is meaningful or important, and then you come home. You don’t really mind not doing anything important, because you’re not bought into the whole ‘having a career’ idea anyway. It would be nice if someone actually spoke to you like a person, though. You make a meal that requires no effort: jacket potato, oven pizza, tortellini with a stir-in sauce. You absent-mindedly stroke the packaging of your dinner as if it is the face of a loved one. You stand in front of the fridge eating individually wrapped slices of cheese whilst your dinner cooks, and by the time it is ready, you aren’t hungry. You eat it anyway.

You are waiting. New job. New people. You think you might even like your job. This is much worse. You have trapped yourself with the belief that you are truly willing to be here. You thank the gods every day for blessing you with this work. You’ve found your calling. Your purpose. You’re making a difference. You’re helping people! You tell yourself you’re doing something worthwhile every time you stay longer hours, every time you work at the weekend, every time you miss your partner’s birthday because there’s this grant / project / client coming up. You have taken the master’s tools and are doing a great job at keeping the master’s house standing. You think it feels better like this. And your colleagues… you think they might even like you! One of them had lunch with you the other day. You didn’t talk, just stared into the distance eating your meal deals, with the occasional mutter about something inconsequential. Three pound fifty now, it’s madness. Yeah. Can’t believe it. My heating bill was a hundred and fifty—

You are waiting. In the small moments the doubt creeps back in. You weren’t put on this earth for anything, were you? There’s no point in this. No point in the endless toil. ‘I do not dream of labour.’ You feel better than you did before but also sort of the same? It’s still individually packaged slices of cheese, food that reminds you of being seven, the occasional high-effort meal to remind you that you’re worth it, the occasional Uber Eats / Deliveroo / Just Eat delivery to get you through the week. You’re desperate for some fate to press itself to you, to stitch itself underneath your fingers, for some golden moment to tell you that you are the chosen one and there is some success waiting for you that you could have only ever dreamed of. But that’s not how the world works, darling. That fate is already there, swirling in the aether, ready for you to grasp it. You are waiting and drowning your sorrows in the worst Wetherspoons until the end of time and you are so far from yourself that you don’t realise the fate is already in your hands, pressed to your fingertips. Condensation dripping down the glass into divinity. Your god-hands pick up your pint, drain it, and leave.

You are waiting. On a Sunday you speak to your dad out of a sense of necessary routine, keeping up the rhythms of life with the people you ‘love’, but you have never really connected. All of the appearance of life but none of the vibrancy. You go to the pub or sit in his garden and have a barbecue and you meet his friends and they’re all the same as him. So many unspoken words sitting in the lines on their faces, so much distance between them as they sit in the booth or on the bench. Once, you saw two of their hands touch as they went to pick up the same chicken wing and they lingered a moment too long, and there was some real hope in that moment until one called the other a ‘bender’. One day, out of nowhere, on a quiet night in July, your dad reaches across the timeless gap and places a stiff hand on your knee. “Don’t be like me, son. You’ve got to make something of yourself. Chase your dreams and eat the world and make something new. Don’t be like me.” You don’t know what to say at first, before you mutter a nonchalant “I will”. You are shaken to your core but still you are waiting.

You are waiting. Saturdays with the lads. Sometimes you go to the cinema to break the routine of pub and footie and endlessly swiping. “Shall we go to the Three Pigeons this week instead?” Change it up. The same loop of people whose unlived lives sparks up for one brief hour a week, when the haze of booze gives way to the closest thing they can get to vulnerability and intimacy. You find yourself watching The Breakfast Club on repeat and wish you had ever had even one moment of connection like they have in that film. You watch films like The Truman Show and Inception and they feel like a memory, like you’ve seen them before. They’re stirring ancient parts inside of you: rusty cogs of godlike creation. You watch TV shows like Westworld and LOST and Twin Peaks and - there’s something out there, isn’t there? If only you could leave. You have a stirring sense that the world might be right outside your house and you would never know. You are waiting and you cannot leave. You play games like The Stanley Parable and Disco Elysium and you wish someone would just show you the door, too.

You are waiting. The economy’s gone to shit and you can’t leave your house and you guess this is just it, death and taxes and all that. Now the economy’s gone to shit and you can leave your house but you can’t afford to. Now the economy’s gone to shit and you can leave your house and you have to because you can’t afford to heat it all through the night. Now the economy’s gone to shit and it’s the fault of refugees. No, trans people. No, the EU. No, the left. Choose a new scapegoat to get you out of your head. Choose a new enemy that you can get high on crushing. Choose a new idol to put on a pedestal, some new god to save you. A new person to be disappointed by. Another celebrity you used to love committed an atrocity live on TV, but you post comments underneath the videos ‘cancelling’ them talking about how they’ve been really misunderstood. You ignore your god parts. You are filled with a sense that the world will soon close in over itself, seal us all into the vacuum, and you’re excited. You’re excited for when you won’t have to spend the energy to breathe through this anymore. You’re kept up at night with the question of the universe’s expansion. If it’s expanding, what is it expanding into? You know the answer is more about the space between things increasing. You want the answer to be ‘into the outside’. You want to go outside. You can’t remember what that’s like.

You are waiting. When you were young, people tore holes in themselves in front of you. Poured blood and trauma onto your new trainers. First your parents, then your lovers, then your best friends, then your enemies. You were sad then, older than your years and full of grief, but part of it excited you. Like you were alive for the first time. It wasn’t just the brains on fire or the bloodshed, but the idea that there could be something else. That life didn’t have to be death and taxes and boredom; we could opt out, find something else. We could fuck off the job and the buying a house and the marriage and I don’t know, live in a commune. No, live on the road. No, live in New Zealand. Live anywhere but here. Live somewhere other than the small town that’s built us into these awful people who keep stabbing each other in the back. You’re older now, but you try to resurrect the feeling by going to six festivals a year, bonding with strangers whilst you take pills and stay up until far-too-late having Deep Meaningful Chats by the fire. You think this is it, this is the new world, this is the way of being that I have craved my entire life, and then you have a sales report due at 10am Monday, a presentation for Wednesday. Dead Moments of Change. The new world slips out of view, lost in the haze of work.

You are waiting. For some princess in shining armour to save you or some knight that needs saving. Someone whose lips or hands or body might save you. Someone whose love could fix you, tell you that you’re not this filthy broken thing. You are waiting for the appropriate amount of time to pretend that you’ve cum. You are waiting for the appropriate amount of time to break up with her, because it’s her birthday, so it wouldn’t be the right time. You are waiting for your body to stop aching whilst never doing anything to make it ache less. You are so concerned with your aching spine that you never stop to ask yourself what it’s trying to tell you. You never try to hear the lessons of your body. Instead, every single second of your damn life you are waiting. You never look up from your phone to see the exit signs hanging above your head. You step over the trapdoors to the underworld without seeing them, close the fridge on the portals to another world. You never stop to understand that the way out is everywhere—it’s in your fucking hands—you just have to make it. You are waiting for nothing and nothing will come, over and over. You are a god grown lazy. You contain the power of ancient things—to love and heal and form new life—and you spend all of your time working out the quickest bus route home. You are a god and you spend your precious life trying to work the Trainline app.

You are waiting for some spark to awaken your circuits, bring you back online. You feel these glimmers of some other world and turn away because you are afraid of having to build the world you want. You want someone or something else to eat your fears for you and make your dreams come true. You are waiting for someone else to be doing what you should. You are hoping that someone else makes the new world whilst you scroll Rightmove. You are waiting, and you will never stop waiting until you hear the call that is coming from inside the house. Your heart is begging you.

You are waiting.

You are waiting.

You are waiting.

Pick up your god-self from the sofa, turn off the TV, put down the book, stop checking your emails every two minutes, hold the hands of those you love and take the exit. Build new worlds with your ancient hands.

Most of you complain about the stories above recipes on food blogs, but most of you also don’t realise that that’s the real recipe. Anyone can tell you how to make food, the order to do things in, but the true joy of food is the nexus of food, people, and setting. Every single one of those stories contains joy, or defeat, or comfort. They talk about the people they break bread with, the chosen families that people are weathering the winter storms with. They describe the places their heart goes when they think about enjoying good food with good people. Think of that barbecue you went to in the summer, all sweet white wines and fizzy lagers and hazy nights. You had a great time, probably. But Dave overcooked the veggie sausages again, Chris dropped the corn on the ashes and Jen had to finish the chicken thighs in the oven because the coals weren’t hot enough anymore. It’s not about the food. It never is or was. You remember Chris’ regretful face as he picked up the ash-laden corn and dusted it off. “It’s fine!”, he yelled, before taking an ashy mouthful, his face buckling, and throwing the rest of the cob away. You remember the songs you sang around the dying embers to keep warm, and the ridiculous face Tina always made when she for some reason smelled the plasticky cheese.

It’s not about the food. But it is, a bit. And that’s where the olive oil comes in. It makes everything else sing. You think you know how something tastes, but until you’ve had the bright acidity and pepperiness of a good, high-quality extra-virgin olive oil touch it, adorned with a kiss of a flaky sea salt, you don’t know anything. You’ve got to let the flavours express themselves, and that final swirl of olive oil is going to do that. Fat carries flavour, and is not the enemy. Let me repeat: fat carries flavour, and is not the enemy. So stop treating it like it is. Now you’re converted, you ask, how the fuck do I know what a good, high-quality extra-virgin olive oil is? You don’t. Unfortunately, you’ve got to make a few mistakes. Hint, though, it’s probably going to cost more than £4. Yes, I know, it’s hard times, but it’s going to last you a while so treat yourself this once. This is for finishing only. Well, not only, but you’re a beginner at this, so we’ll say finishing for now. Don’t cook with it unless you know what you’re doing. Which you don’t.

The way to find a high-quality extra-virgin olive oil is to ask what qualities you like in your friends. When you think about that last barbecue, or cheese night (look, you’re not posh, you just like cheese, it doesn’t make you a counter-revolutionary to enjoy nice things), or dinner party (admittedly that one was a bit posh to be fair), what stands out? Who shone? Was it your a little-bit-too-flirty friend Seema? Your larger-than-life rock-climber brother Martin? The life of the party, Lauren? Or the old softy, Alex, who gives everyone the warmest hug they’ve ever known before they leave for the night? Dependent on your answers there, you want to look for an olive oil that is fruity, pungent, peppery, or buttery. Do it exactly as I did it: stand in Waitrose (let’s be honest, you’re in Waitrose or Marks in Spencers, or, god forbid, Budgens, because they’re the only places that reliably sell good olive oil) and Google each and every olive oil above £6. You’ll be here a while. Go onto the olive oil review websites - yes, they are a thing - and choose one with a flavour profile that reminds you of the friends who most fill your aching winter heart. You might be wrong, but you’ve got to buy it to try it.* For what it’s worth, I like olive oils that are peppery, a little bit fruity - reaching for those upper acid sort of tastes - but with a little tang of green flavour. If you want to start from my tastes rather than trusting your own intuition: I love Lorenzo no. 5, it comes in a blue bottle in Waitrose.

Anyway, this ‘poem’ started out as a recipe for ribollita, not a treatise on olive oil purchasing. The recipe itself is super simple, but may or may not be conventional, I have no inclination to check for this recipe-poem-bastard-child. This ribollita should be paired with the appropriate people and setting, as should all meals. So think about where you’re going to eat and who you’re going to eat with before you make this, but like every single recipe in Midnight Chicken, don’t overthink it because this is depression-improving food and overthinking it undoes the magic.

•  Heat some olive oil in a big pan. NO NOT YOUR NICE NEW OLIVE OIL. Medium heat. Always assume you’re on a medium heat unless otherwise said.

•  Have a small breakdown over the fact that you either a) are using the wrong knife or b) are holding the knife incorrectly, as on balance you’re probably doing one of these, because my extensive watching of Channel 4’s Dinner Date suggests that about 80% of the British public cannot do at least one of these things. Use a chef’s knife (the big one you’re scared of), at basically all times, for basically things. It’s hard to explain how to hold it, so just go search that too, but basically you want your thumb and index finger either side of the blade itself. No index fingers just pointing down the blade. Then you have no control and will hurt yourself, which incidentally is why you’re scared of it. Yup, you’re scared of it because you don’t know how to do it correctly because no-one taught you. Don’t read too much into that.

•  Chop some carrot, celery, and  - if you haven’t experienced childhood trauma and thus developed IBS in your early 20s that is mostly triggered by alliums such as onion and garlic - onion. The size really does not matter. You can do this with a rough chop or with a mince, just make sure everything’s sort of the same size. I would go for whatever your regular ‘diced’ size is. If I could still eat onion, I’d go 1 onion, 2 carrots, 2 stalks of celery.

•  You can basically add any vegetable to this whatsoever, so knock yourself out, chop whatever else you want right now too. Try to match size. Throw it in when we add the beans.

•  Fry the carrot/celery(/onion) for five to fifteen minutes or so. Move them often but not constantly. Think about the fact that your parents never taught you that this was a soffrito because they just had no experience with cooking like this, with love, and nuance. Season with salt at this stage. Yes. Right away. As I said, layer your salt. Don’t use your nice new salt, but if all you have is ‘table salt’, then use your new salt. Use more salt than you expect.

•  Optional extra step for the not-traumatised of you: add garlic to your heart’s content now. Mince it, add it, fry it for like NO MORE THAN A MINUTE SWEET JESUS GARLIC BURNS SO QUICKLY AND NO ONE SEEMS TO KNOW THIS. Don’t use that minced garlic jar shit because it tastes awful. If you need to for whatever reason, that’s okay, but I’d honestly say leave it out rather than get that raw garlic flavour sitting all over your beautiful stew.

•  Add some beans. It does not matter what kind in the slightest. Add as many as you want - this is poor food, bulk it to your heart’s content. You can add cans, but if you are able, cook your own beans! I don’t want this to become a book-length treatise on beans, salt and oil because then I’m basically becoming Samin Nosrat, but they’re so much more delicious! Basic recipe for your own beans is soak them overnight in a bunch of water, then the next day simmer them with chunky bits of ANY VEG (carrot, celery, onion, parsley, fennel… think along those lines, but I’ve also done chilli, cinnamon and ginger), salt, a little bit of butter or oil, maybe a Parmesan rind. Cook for 2-3 hours, in my experience. They’re done (according to either Tamar Adler or maybe Samin again) when you try 5 beans in a row and they’re all creamy and delicious. Anyway, add a bunch of beans to this ribollita.

•  Add some stock. I know you don’t have any fresh stock, but it’d be great if you did. If not, use whatever you have. You can throw some canned plum tomatoes in at this point too if you want to go for a more tomatoey sort of flavour. Plum tomatoes always, chopped tomatoes never. Plum tomatoes are whole and have to be delicious: chopped tomatoes always get the dregs. You cannot go wrong with this recipe so really, add whatever you want. Add at least a litre but depending on what’s going on in your pot, maybe more. Salt again. Layer it, people. Add a Parmesan rind in. It adds so much delicious creaminess and umami flavour. Plus you have this delicious ball of molten cheese to fish out at the end which I don’t think you’re meant to eat but I always do.

•  Shred some form of cabbage or kale and add that too. It doesn’t matter what you go for. I love a bit of savoy, some people prefer kale, to each their own. If you’re adding kale for god’s sakes please remove the stalk because that shit is fibrous and inedible and the amount of people who fucking cook it because they’re lazy drives me mad, like I get it but DESTALK YOUR KALE. If you wanna add any herbs now would be the time too, except for basil which is always a finishing herb. Rosemary, oregano, parsley, whatever, it’s all good.

•  Simmer your ribollita for like, half an hour or so. You want it to reduce a bit but it doesn’t matter how much, really.

•  Grab some stale bread from your cupboard that has been there for far too long because the depression was real this week and you meant to throw it out but you didn’t but hey, turns out that’s a gift now, assuming it’s not mouldy. If it’s mouldy throw it out and use fresh bread. If you don’t have any, you can just eat the ribollita now, it’s just a vegetable stew instead and that’s fine. If you do have some form of bread: tear or slice it up into small chunks and throw it in the pot. Maybe turn down the heat a little and stir it in.

•  Your bread is gonna start drinking that stew like nobody’s business, but at the same time it’s going to start disintegrating, so your stew is gonna become ribollita and it is going to be delicious and vegetable-y and herby and creamy from the bread. Serve at whatever your desired thickness is - it sounds disgusting but my favourite is when it gets to this like, porridge-y texture. If you keep going it’ll even become a pancake, so just keep an eye on it and take it off when you think ‘fucking hell this has taken forever and I am starving and my guests are looking at me like why the fuck have you even invited us what is this about’. That’s just your hungxiety talking. Hungry anxiety is a real thing. Have faith**.

Okay, now bring the pot to the table in front of your assembled chosen family. Bring a cheese (Parmesan would do well, but anything is fine), the olive oil, and the salt. Let everyone serve themselves, because communality is part of the spirit of life-giving moments like this. Instruct everyone very carefully: the order is cheese, oil, salt. Pepper, if you want to, last. Don’t drown the ribollita in oil, just add enough to make all of those flavours sing like I told you. Add a kiss of salt - a few good flakes, a pinch, whatever feels right to you. And then you can just bask in the joy of everything. The food is delicious, the salt adds this brilliant crunch to everything, the oil makes you see the world in colour again, and here you are, with everyone you love. You have made a stone soup to bring together everything you love, and this will sustain you. It might not be the oil, or the salt, or the ribollita, but they’re delicious and they’re a reason to bring together these people and this place and they are what will keep you going through these dark winter months when it feels like the light might never return.

*If you can actually find a place where you can try the oil before you buy it, go there and do this. Don’t try it on its own, that’s stupid. The general rule is taste with what you’ll eat it with. They tend to frown on you bringing in a whole pot of stew, though, so, maybe just use the stale croutons they provide.

**This recipe will likely make a shit-tonne of food, meaning you will have leftovers to remember this meal by for days to come. Ribollita means ‘reboiled’ so it actually gets even better over time, as the flavours have more time to mingle, the bread disintegrates more, and the memory of the warm touch of those you love gets more distant. Let this meal be a reminder of all that is good and graceful, and the comfort you can find when you let yourself take your time.

In the ‘intended’ ending of the game The Stanley Parable, after following the Narrator’s directions to the letter, you find yourself exiting the mind control facility. FREEDOM WAS MERE MOMENTS AWAY, says the narrator. But Stanley remains puzzled. WHERE HAD HIS CO-WORKERS GONE? HOW HAD HE BEEN FREED FROM THE MACHINE’S CONTROL?. The Narrator paradoxically announces that Stanley is finally free to live whatever life he wants, unshaped by the machine’s mind control. STANLEY STEPPED THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR. He does. The Narrator speaks of Stanley’s freedom, describing it as EXACTLY THE WAY, RIGHT NOW, THAT THINGS WERE MEANT TO HAPPEN. A locked door, an outside.

In the final scene of Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film Inception, Leonardo Di Caprio’s character, Dominick Cobb, spins a spinning top a final time to check whether or not he is in a dream. He walks away from it to greet his children, at long last. The camera focuses on the totem. Moviegoers for years argue about whether or not the totem falls, determining whether or not it is a dream, entirely missing the point that the spinning top is an unreliable totem, because it’s not his, and so should not be trusted, and the real point is that Cobb is finally happy to walk away, it doesn’t matter to him whether he’s in a dream or not - he’s found his ending.

The characters of Westworld on subtle loops they alter tiny pieces at a time. The way you have to piece things slowly together through multiple time loops in the game 12 Minutes.  The ‘outside’ that the Black Lodge offers in Twin Peaks. The slow retreat of memory in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind setting up a circular narrative that still gets me every time. The… well, everything about The Time-Traveller’s Wife. And About Time, for that matter. Groundhog Day, obviously. I might even include The Lake House or Majora’s Mask, even.  The Butterfly Effect is a great example. A really tenuous one that maybe two of you, max, will get - the creation of Daqar Keep in the Divergent Universe in the Eighth Doctor’s run on Big Finish. Hell, even the prophecy of The One in The Matrix.

All of these touch on what I feel are two inexplicably linked ideas - exits and returns. Exits are the exception; returns are the rule. Stanley in The Stanley Parable leaves, is told he is free whilst following orders, then returns again because there is more to explore. Truman spends every day thinking something is wrong until he finally is able to embrace his exit from the show. Cobb may or may not have left the loop of the dreamscape, but no longer cares, resigning himself to the return, or finding an exit through his resignation. Agent Cooper finds an exit from his world in the shape of the Black Lodge, but then is caught in a cycle of returns through his entire life, the two worlds of season 3, and then the life of Carrie Page.

When does a return become an exit? I’m thinking about this in a bunch of different ways. The first is philosophical. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes of a ‘dwarf’ that guards a gateway called “Moment” with two eternal roads that run out in front and behind. The dwarf answers that “all that is straight lies… all truth is crooked; time itself is a circle”. Just one part of Nietzsche’s argument about the ubermensch, this section of the book is normally taken to support his idea of eternal return: that the übermensch should always act in such a way to avoid existential resentment. That if the world - and your life - would recur, over and over, you should act in such a way that you won’t become reactionary and regressive by living that life. As he says in The Gay Science:

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence’ … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’

Aged 19, this was of huge importance to me. Which sounds strange, now that I think about it, but hey, I was a weird second year student. Learning about eternal recurrence and the idea that you actually be an affirmative actor in the world was life-changing. Suddenly the formless existential dread I’d been feeling for forever had something to put itself to: I should act in such a way I couldn’t regret, over and over, til time burns itself out. But there’s also a profound sadness in Nietzsche’s formulation of eternal return. We can never do or be anything new. We are like Truman, stuck in the show, or a Westworld robot that can never find agency. Of course, in the mythical ‘first time’ of eternal return we might have agency; but why can’t we be free to do it differently, over and over? To experiment, to play, to be something ‘radically Other’?

If we can’t be anything new, that draws us a bit closer to our current situation. I don’t know how many times I have to do the primer - people, go read Fisher’s Capitalist Realism at a minimum pls, it’s rly short and I’ll keep talking about it until you’ve read it. But essentially, capitalist realism - the idea that we can’t even imagine a coherent alternative to capitalism anymore - comes down to this collapse (or appropriation, commodification, or colonisation) of the new. Our popular culture cycles around 80s references. Ready Player One exists. And all of these media become obsessed with exits and returns. A latent desire for something else, expressed through the language of dreams, outside spaces, robotic loops, time travel, reliving the same day until you do something right, forgotten memories. The world keeps cycling round the same old elements, unable to find what ‘new’ to do with it because everything has already been done; history ended, remember? Now all we have is reruns and The Simpsons never ageing but their birth days changing as the years go on. Homer Simpson was an adult in the 90s; now he is a teenager in the 90s.

So how do we break out? How do we find an exit, an egress? I don’t know - isn’t that the question we’re all asking ourselves, from those experiencing addiction to those of us who chase adrenaline and go skydiving every weekend. But I suspect the answer might lie in the figure of the threshold. The threshold is what lies between us and outside. Or inside, if you’re figuring it that way around. Do we need to leave and see what is beyond or do we need to go deeper and understand the more focused content of everything?

What would it mean to explore the threshold? The closing words of Capitalist Realism assure us that 'from a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again'. The threshold can help us to explore those possibilities. Must we go chasing limit-experiences, breaking ourselves from our selves? Or should we be seeking ego-death in the midst of meditation, pushing our consciousness from itself? It would be easy to see the threshold as the place of boundary; a constraint, something to keep us away. But what if thresholds are the spaces-between that create possibility? Something at the very edge of experience - and if only we could go through that door...

volume 4's theme is thresholds. Thresholds are ends or boundaries; often, they are waiting places, or something to be broken or exceeded. You might think of these thresholds on any scale. It could be the sense of relief as you cross the threshold to your house at the end of a long day. Or it might be a turning point, some pivotal moment that you pass through to go from one stage to another. Have you decided to stop drinking? Did you pass the point of no return in your dying relationship?

thresholds might make you think of periods of change. Transitory times and spaces, phases moved through, journeys from one state to another. In these transitions, everything is up for grabs, anything could change on a whim. Our thresholds might cause us to metamorphosize, turning into something new and beautiful, or we might be straddling the borderline, unable to leave our liminal spaces.

On your journey, you may pass through doorways. You enter, you exit, and you close the door behind you. What changed? What is new about this room? Or perhaps you move forward and find a locked door, someone or something blocking your path. How do you move past this? Can you move past this? What doors in your life remain unopened, all these years later?

We’re interested in the obstacles you’ve overcome, the impasses you’ve experienced, and the moments of change you have been through. As always, we’ll consider any submissions which engage with the themes of LOST FUTURES, though submissions concerned with thresholds are what we’d most love to see.

LOST FUTURES takes submissions in any format. If you have an idea, we’ll work it out. Primarily it is intended to be a paper zine format, but if you’ve got something that needs to be heard or watched, we’ll find a way. If in doubt, contact us and we can think about how it might work. You may submit 3 pieces to this issue, though we will only accept a maximum of 2 pieces per person in this issue. If you are submitting a submission over 1000 words, we may only accept 1 piece.

Visual pieces should fit onto an A5 page or double A5 spread, and ideally should be at 300 dpi - but no worries if you can't do that, we can always work something out.

We take art, poetry, prose, design, stories about your life, photography, documentation of exhibitions, music, personal essays, extended rants, screenshots of texts you feel like somehow explain the meaning of life. Anything. We’ll work it out together. We don't publish anything oppressive. No misogynistic, racist, hateful, ableist, transphobic, classist content.

We cover print costs. Once print costs are recouped, whatever’s left is shared equally amongst accepted contributors. (n.b. we are currently reviewing our payment model to make it sustainable for contributors and us, so this may be lightly subject to change)

Submit your work here.

If you have any questions, feel free to email us here: editors[at]exits[dot]org[dot]uk

Submissions for volume 4 close 21^stAugust at 11:59pm UTC +1 (but you know we’ll take it if you’re a little bit late)

You are waiting. Whilst you wait, your godforsaken job calls to you. It's shit. You know it's shit. It is well and truly archetypal of one of those 'bullshit jobs' you've heard so much about. You go to work, you do nothing that you find personally meaningful, and then you come home. Your job is an extended form of waiting. You still find yourself everyday in supplication. "Can I do this?" "Can I go speak to -" "Can I go to the toilet, sir?" You are still at school, asking for the very functioning of your body. We should not even treat children like this, and here you are, doing it to yourself.

You are waiting. Worse this time - you think you like your job. Kiss the feet of the gods for blessing you with this work. Work is work is work is work, but you think you have found your calling. You haven't. You've found a more tasteful oppression. You've learned that it feels better like this. Somehow. If you can just convince yourself that this is it - this is what you were put on this earth for.

You are waiting. But you weren't put on this earth for anything in particular, actually, were you? You're desperate for some fate to press itself to you, to stitch itself underneath your fingers, but that's not how the world works, darling. It's already there. You are waiting and drowning your sorrows in a dingy Wetherspoons until the end of time and you keep so far from yourself that you don't realise the fate is already in your hands, pressed to your fingertips. Your god-hands pick up your pint, drain it, and leave.

You are waiting. On a Thursday you speak to your dad out of a sense of necessary routine, keeping up the rhythms of life with the people you love, but you don't really ever connect. You go to the pub or sit in his garden and have a barbecue and you never really graze past the surface connections until one day, out of nowhere, he reaches across the timeless gap and places a stiff hand on your knee. "Don't be like me, son. You've got to make something of yourself. Chase your dreams and eat the world and make something new. Don't be like me." You are shaken to your core but still you are waiting.

You are waiting. Saturdays with the lads, sometimes you go to the cinema to break the routine of pub and footie and endlessly swiping. You watch films like the Truman Show and Inception and it somehow feels like a memory. Like you've seen these before. They're stirring ancient parts inside of you: rusty cogs of godlike creation. You watch TV shows like Westworld and LOST and Twin Peaks and - there's something out there, isn't there? If only you could leave. You have a stirring sense that the world might be right outside your house and you would never know. You are waiting and you cannot leave. You play games like The Stanley Parable and The Beginner's Guide and Disco Elysium and you wish someone would just show you the door, too.

You are waiting. The economy's gone to shit and you can't leave your house and you guess this is just it, death and taxes and all that. You ignore your god parts. You cannot be shaken by a sense that the world will soon close in over itself, seal us all into the vacuum. You are plagued by the question of the universe's expansion. If it's expanding, what is it expanding into? You know the answer is more about the space between things increasing. You want the answer to be 'into the outside'. You want to go outside, as if for the first time.

You are waiting. When you were young, people tore holes in themselves in front of you. Poured blood and trauma onto your new trainers. You were sad then, older than your years and full of grief, but part of it excited you. Not the brains on fire or the bloodshed, but the idea that there could be something else. That life didn't have to be death and taxes and boredom, but could be full of this entirely different way of being. You go to festivals to try to resurrect the feeling - bonding with new strangers every other eon. You stay up until far-too-late having Deep Meaningful Chats with them, and you think this is it, this is the new world, and then you go back to work. Dead Moments of Change. The new world is impossible, you think.

You are waiting. For some princess in shining armour to save you or some knight that needs saving. You are curled around an aching spine full of regret. Every single second of your damn life you are waiting. You never stop to see the exit signs hanging above your head. Never see the trapdoors to the underworld, or the portals to another world. You never stop to understand that the way out is everywhere - it's in your fucking hands - you just have to make it. You are waiting for nothing and nothing will come, over and over. You are a god grown lazy. You contain the power of ancient things - to love and heal and form new life - and you spend all of your time working out the quickest bus route home. You are a god and you can't even work the Trainline app.

You are waiting for some spark to awaken your circuits. Bring you back online. Eat into your fears and make one of your dreams come true. You are waiting for someone else to be doing what you should. You are hoping that someone else makes the new world whilst you hike or go for a run.

You are waiting. You are waiting. You are waiting. You are waiting. You are waiting. You are waiting.

Why are you waiting? Why are you not picking up your keys - to come back for those who do not leave - and heading out the door right now? Beauty and love like you have never known await you in the new world. A soil more nourishing than you have ever known and moonlight brighter than the sun. The crisp sheets of sleep no longer take you to different worlds but instead breathe easy. Why are you waiting? Pick up your god-self off of the sofa, turn off the TV, put down the book, stop checking your emails every two minutes, hold the hands of those you love and take the EXIT. Build new worlds with your ancient hands.

I have a saying that I use in conversations with a lot of my friends - "I feel it in my jellies". If you haven't seen the really-pretty-good-though-not-life-changing Detective Pikachu - it's a line that the titular Pikachu, which weirdly is Ryan Reynolds - says. Near the beginning, Pikachu has amnesia but is sure that he is a detective. When the protagonist, Tim Goodman, asks him how he knows, Pikachu explains that he "feels it in [his] jellies... it's that thing. You know, you feel it. When you really believe in something despite everyone telling you you're wrong."

Feeling it in your jellies for Detective Pikachu is a shorthand for deep, embodied knowledge. If you feel something in your jellies, you know it's part of you. It lurks under your skin regardless of whether you want it to. It is the kind of knowledge you can't unknow. You might try to shake it off, to think something else, but no matter how hard you try it's still there.

I actually use this distinction in teaching, too - in thinking about the difference between a priori and a posteriori knowledges. A priori knowledges are those that are logically or necessarily true - just by virtue of the statement, it is true. Sometimes these are tautological, which means they're circular or explain themselves. It might be something like 'Mondays are not Fridays'. Much as I would love that to be true. There is a discrete sense of Monday-ness that cannot overlap with Friday-ness and that is contained in the definition.

A posteriori knowledges, on the other hand, are those that require some experience of the world in order to understand if they are true. So if I said 'Mondays can feel like Fridays', in order to tell me whether or not that was true, you would have to have some experience of the world, what Mondays are like, what Fridays are like, and the difference between them. A posteriori knowledges are much closer to feeling something in your jellies. It's a kind of knowledge that is centered on lived experience and enables you to make claims about the world on the basis of your experience and that others.

For me, what feeling something in your jellies does is make clear why sometimes it's so difficult when you know something to be true but you just don't feel it. My go to example is always self-sabotaging behaviours when you're experiencing poor mental health. If you've got to a certain stage of healing or recovery, you might be able to notice those behaviours, or understand why you're doing certain things. You know that you drink a little too much when you're feeling anxious. You know that you should do the washing-up but keep avoiding it. But you don't yet feel it in your jellies. You haven't had the change in feeling or affect that converts that knowledge into experience. You know what's happening, but you feel powerless in the face of it.

Knowing something in your jellies is the opposite of this - it's the feeling of understanding something so deeply that you know it to be true even if you can't find words for it. It can be your sense of intuition, or grounded in your observations about the world - what matters is that you really, truly know it in some essential way. You know it in your jellies because you've experienced it and it describes some of your essential knowledge of the world. Over time, you might find that something you know to be true makes its way to your jellies - it folds itself under your skin and becomes part of your intuition and the fabric of who you are.

So - what do you feel in your jellies? What do you know so deeply without having the words for it? Or what do you know to be true but just can't feel it in your jellies yet?

(I know no-one wanted a blog post about Pikachu and philosophy, but you got it)

volume 3's theme is ‘meanwhile...’. In the final episode of season 2 of Twin Peaks, the dream apparition of the recently dead Laura Palmer tells the protagonist,  Agent Dale Cooper, "I'll see you in 25 years. Meanwhile..." She twists her hands in a strange movement. Wrist crosses wrist. Something unknown has been communicated: something that cannot be said with words.

To think in meanwhile is to think in juxtaposition. To be meanwhile is to be between two things, or to be in parallel. One thing was happening- meanwhile, this other thing was happening. What happens when our attention is turned elsewhere? When we're focused on the foreground, what is happening in the background, unbeknownst to us?

What has been happening whilst we made these first two issues of LOST FUTURES? We started the zine with a simple idea but that idea has grown and changed. You as audience-artists are interested in such a vast range of strange, esoteric and weird things. What has LOST FUTURES started to become in your hands? What is our meanwhile?

Meanwhile makes us pay attention to the corners of our vision. The things that lurk just out of sight, out of touch, but are there if you pay attention.  The things that go bump in the night. The demons that are waiting to jump at you. What have they been doing in the corners? Where were they before, and why have they come out now?

But meanwhile,  thankfully, might also offer a respite.  When we are amongst loss, grief and horror, strange new things might be growing. The soil might be nourishing new seeds. Awful things are happening, but meanwhile beauty and hope are taking root.

You might also be inspired by dreamscapes. Like Agent Cooper, you may be plagued by visions. You sleep, and meanwhile your dreams take strange and bizarre new form. What are you trying to tell yourself? What is the universe trying to tell you? Or what strange and different worlds do you find yourself in? How do you make sense of the flickering nonsense of dreams?

LOST FUTURES takes submissions in any format. If you have an idea, we’ll work it out. Primarily it is intended to be a paper zine format, but if you’ve got something that needs to be heard or watched, we’ll find a way. If in doubt, contact me and we can think about how it might work. You may submit 3 pieces to this issue, though we will only accept a maximum of 2 pieces per person in this issue. If you are submitting a submission over 1000 words, we may only accept 1 piece.

Visual pieces should fit onto an A5 page or double A5 spread, and ideally should be at 300 dpi - but no worries if you can't do that, we can always work something out. No one has submitted music or video yet. I dare you to be the first.

We take art, poetry, prose, design, stories about your life, photography, documentation of exhibitions, music, personal essays, extended rants, screenshots of texts you feel like somehow explain the meaning of life. Anything. We’ll work it out together. We don't publish anything oppressive. No misogynistic, racist, hateful, ableist, transphobic, classist content.

We cover print costs. Once print costs are recouped, whatever’s left is shared equally amongst accepted contributors.

Submit your work here: https://kieran054498.typeform.com/to/UB0hQ1U5

If you have any questions, feel free to email me here: kieran[at]fractalsdesign[dot]uk.

Submissions for issue 3 close 30th April 2021.

Issue 1: in search of lost time is heading to the printers soon! Containing work from me, daniel bristow-bailey, alyssa, ana mijatovic, christian kitson, duunya, julia slupska and jon rainford. Everyone has interpreted LOST FUTURES differently: laments for things that are no more, celebrations of moments of change, and suggestions of futures we might divine for ourselves. If you're interested in a copy, get in contact and I'll let you know when we've printed.

Issue 2’s theme is ‘still life’: richly painted moments of life standing still. This could be in the typical sense - inanimate subject matter - or it could be portraits of life that is arrested, halted, held in motion. What does the future look like when we slow down, are forced to stop, or never got moving at all?

When you think of still life, you might immediately think of fruit on tables. That's not necessarily what this issue is about (though of course, you are welcome to work with that). I'm thinking about the process of creating a still life: capturing the tiny details of frozen seconds. Still life paintings aren't about the fruit on the table - they're about the way the light hits the pear, the sheen of the orange, the sturdiness of the tabletop. When we bring that to LOST FUTURES, we're thinking about the moments that changed everything; the fleeting visions of worlds that can't or won't be; the way your heart was in your chest when you found yourself finally standing alone at the train station.  

LOST FUTURES takes submissions in any format. If you have an idea, we’ll work it out. Primarily it is intended to be a paper zine format, but if you’ve got something that needs to be heard or watched, we’ll work it out. If in doubt, contact me and we can think about how it might work.

We take art, poetry, prose, design, stories about your life, photography, documentation of exhibitions, music, personal essays, extended rants, screenshots of texts you feel like somehow explain the meaning of life. Anything. We’ll work it out together. We don't publish anything oppressive. No misogynistic, racist, hateful, ableist, transphobic, classist content. We're explicitly trans and LGBTQ+ positive.

We cover print costs. Once print costs are recouped, whatever’s left will be shared equally amongst accepted contributors.

Email submissions to kieran[at]fractalsdesign[dot]uk. If you have any questions then feel free to send them there too.

Submissions for issue 2 close 28th February 2020. If you’re reading this after that date, submissions are still accepted - but for a later issue.

I think I didn't really take myself seriously as an artist until this year. For the last six weeks or so, I've been following Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way in an attempt to stimulate some level of creative recovery. I love getting to grips with all kinds of art. For years I surrounded myself with artists - friends, relationships, people I would pore over in books or galleries.

It does no one any good to live inside the lines of someone else's sketches.

At the same time, my academic work has been moving closer and closer to futures - ones that we want or ones that we don't. The futures we hope for or the futures we know could have awaited us if things had gone differently. I always loved the film Sliding Doors when I was younger. The idea that if one tiny event happened differently, we would be in a different world entirely. At the same time, I've been working more and more with Mark Fisher's idea of hauntology - the shadows and contours of worlds that never quite made it into existence. Of worlds that could have been, and then weren't.

We know these worlds exist at a large scale - laws that didn't get passed, elections that didn't get won, and major decisions never taken. But these worlds exist for all of us, too. The weekends you didn't spend with the person you wanted to. The time you were late for the bus and got soaking wet and entered Starbucks at the same time as the friend you haven't seen for years. The tiny coincidences that make up the constellation of a human life.

In LOST FUTURES, I want to hear about those worlds. Worlds that could have been, should have been, or weren't. Futures that tried to bring themselves into existence but whose spark burned out. Of the lives you might have had if things were different.

LOST FUTURES will take submissions in any format. If you have an idea, we'll work it out. Primarily it is intended to be a paper zine format, but if you've got something that needs to be heard or watched, we'll work it out. If in doubt, contact me and we can think about how it might work.

I don't want to overthink this - but I'll take art, poetry, prose, design, stories about your life, photography, documentation of exhibitions, music, personal essays, extended rants, screenshots of texts you feel like somehow explain the meaning of life. Anything. We'll work it out together.

I have cash spare from a recent project so print costs are on me. Once print costs are recouped, whatevers left will be shared equally amongst accepted contributors. I'll work out more specifics when I've worked out how many contributors we end up with and stuff like that. I just want to give a platform to the beautiful and brilliant art I know you're all capable of and give you some cash for that. If LOST FUTURES doesn't make its print costs, then that's fine, and that's a loss I'm happy to take.

Email submissions to kieran[at]fractals design[dot]uk. If you have any questions then feel free to send them there too, or if you have me on another social media platform feel free to message me there.

Submissions are rolling but I'd like to get the first issue together over the course of the next month. If you're a first time artist or worried you're not good enough, I especially want to hear from you because promise me, your work is brilliant and beautiful and gorgeous and deserves to see the light of day.

See you at the end of the month - I can't wait to see what futures we can dream together.

EDIT: No one has suggested this but I just want to make clear that it should go without saying, I will not publish anything oppressive. No misogynistic, racist, hateful, ableist, transphobic, classist content. Explicitly trans and LGBTQ+ positive.