But the reflex never died. A plate lands in front of me, and out comes the phone, quick as a tic, just in case future-me wants visual notes for a write-up. Which is, I’ll grant you, a bit weird.

It got weird enough, about six months back, after a meal at the Wolf in Brisbane, that I sat down the next day and actually wrote the fucking review. Properly. Didn’t publish it though, cos I’m not that guy anymore. And the Wolf? It’s currently closed for renovation.

But I’m publishing it today instead to ask you lot a question. Should I carve out one day a month, pick a favourite meal and write it up? Cos these photos are getting embarrassing.

I like secret places, especially in cities. I like finding obscure little bars down unpromising backstreets, or ten-dollar barbers above hardware stores. (A true thing that happened to me once in Brisbane.) There’s nothing secret about The Wolf. Motherfucker’s right out there in the middle of Post Office Square, announcing its wares to the CBD with one of the best cafes in the city.

But as good as the cafe is (spoiler: it’s really fucking good), the restaurant tucked away behind it is better.

It feels like a secret place because you have to sort of sneak in down a narrow hallway and push aside a heavy curtain, and once you’re inside, there is no outside. There are no windows looking out onto the Square, no view of the commuters hurrying up to Central Station at the end of the day when we sat down to Dirty Wolf martinis and the creamiest fucking oysters I’ve had in about fifteen, maybe twenty years.

I dunno where the oysters came from, and knowing wouldn’t do you any good because these guys are committed to the freshness bit and your oysters are gonna be coming from somewhere else, wherever best they can source them that day.

I was struck, in the few minutes it took to shuck them and serve them up on a generous mound of ice, by how quickly The Wolf cut you off from the wider world and wrapped you entirely in the comfortable exile of its dining room. In place of windows, there’s art and a warm architectural glow. The dining room is a kind of urban burrow carved out of soft light and expensive textures, all brassy gleam and leather hush. You step through that curtain and into a room that feels like it’s been assembled by someone who used to design first-class train carriages for a glamorous empire that never existed.

The bar is the first seduction: a long slab of glossy stone fronted by deep red stools with the sort of upholstery that makes you sit a little straighter, as though your posture should match the provenance of the whisky behind the counter. Soft benches upholstered in a shade of café-au-lait and burnt sienna, run the length of the room to a glossy, retro-framed portal into the open kitchen. Chefs move inside like a team of jewel thieves working under pressure.

Your host—I don’t know him yet, because I’ve only been once, but I do know we’re going to be friends—is one of those garrulous mofos with the gift of making you feel as though you are the most interesting person they’ve ever met, someone deserving of the care and attention poured into the Dirty Wolf, signature of the house, a super chilled martini with a drop of rosemary oil and a small sprig of the same plant set ever so carefully alight, then quickly blown out to release the aromatics.

Is it as good as the martini with a twist from Rothwell’s, a few minutes around the corner? It’s… different. Rothwells’ martini arrives on a silver tray in a frosted coupe, with a whole extra jug of Even More Martini nestling in its own ice bucket like a bonus level you didn’t know you’d unlocked. It’s a drink that practically winks at you and says, “We’re in this together, champ.”

It may be the best martini in the city, perhaps the world. But the Dirty Wolf is coming for it, brushed with rosemary oil, cool and herbaceous, the sort of drink that feels like distilled zen cool, poured over ice.

It went perfectly with the oysters, which arrived shimmering on ice and topped with a sweet-chilli vinaigrette so light it barely touched them, just nudged the brine in the right direction.

I was hungry and didn’t want to scoff down my fat little beauties just to lessen the pang, so we also had a small, fresh-baked baguette with truffle butter. The truffle content was generous, but the butter was a little hard, and writing that, I feel ashamed that I could even think such a thing at a moment when the larger machinery of the world seems to be screeching and stripping its final gears. But maybe that’s why it matters. Long after the towers fall and I’m hunting my enemies through the rubble of our civilisation, I’ll remember that stubborn quenelle of truffle butter as one of the tiny, absurd luxuries that reminded me we had it pretty good.

Better than pretty good was the duck breast. Duck is one of those dishes that can expose a kitchen’s limits in a single slice. Duck, when done badly, tastes like warmed-over despair. Here, though, the meat is properly rare, not raw, not trembling as the axeman cometh, and smoked honey glides through the dish like a soft chord, meeting the earthy parsnip cream, the tiny sweet peas, the charred lettuce with a kind of pastoral warmth. It tastes like something from a countryside that maybe never existed, but should have; a small and hopeful reminder of gentleness in an age that’s running low on it. The fibre helps, too, of course. Gotta move that protein along somehow.

I had made a noble, grown-up decision to forgo dessert, being in need of some extra belt notches by now, only to discover there was a cheese cart gliding toward the table like a Trojan horse filled to the brim with delicious dairy fat. What was I supposed to do, insult my new best friend? I took two: a middle-aged Comté and a Brie so obscenely creamy it should have come with a defibrillator standing by, warming up its little electric paddles.

I regret nothing.

And I expect no further regrets when I inevitably return. I emerged from The Wolf slightly dazzled, very full, and sporting the smug glow of someone who has briefly escaped the tyranny of sensible eating. This is a restaurant with the confidence to be more than good; it wants to seduce, to cosset, to make the rest of the city look like a cold bus shelter by comparison. The Wolf is a reminder that our civilisation, however frayed at the edges, can still produce nice things.

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I have lots of other notebooks. My work desk is covered in them, and my man bag—yes, that’s right, I carry a man bag; don’t you judge me—is home to a well-used and much-loved Moleskine notebook. Here it is right here: battered, full of writing, exactly as the designers intended.

Last year, I bought a Traveler’s Notebook cos I started taking Field Notes sketch pads to the coffee shop while walking my dog in the morning. The notepad went into my man bag, which is why I warned you not to judge me, because now you feel bad, don’t you? The man bag had a totally manly purpose, which was to carry my field notes down the coffee shop so I could sketch my dog while I drank my coffee, like a man.

But then I had my sketchbook and my notebook tumbling around inside my man bag, and this was intolerable. After some fruitful online procrastinating, I came across the Traveler’s Notebook—a way to carry four or five separate notebooks in one leather binder. There’s a whole culture around these things, which I spent many hours spiralling into on YouTube before finally pressing the “fuck it” button and buying my own.

However, when it turned up, it was beautiful, and the notebooks were pristine, and I couldn’t possibly mess them up the same way I messed up my old Moleskine notebook…

So, they sat unused in my man bag for nearly a year until the other night.

I was on the mat at Jujitsu, working with some of the other black belts, getting ready for my second-dan grading, which required me to demonstrate and explain at least eight joint-locking throws. Everybody was throwing their favorite throws at me: “Oh, you should do this, JB.” “No, you should do mine.” “No you should do this other really dangerous one.” And because I was having trouble arranging the throws in the bento box of my memory, I thought, “Fuck this, I’m just going to write them down.”

So, I stepped off the mat, grabbed the only notebook available to me, my Traveler’s Notebook, opened it up, and scribbled a few words into a pristine notepad. It was messy, it was ugly, but it did the job.

It did two jobs, actually. It recorded my initial thoughts about which throws I had to practice, and just as importantly, it got me over my mortal fear of messing up my new notebook. I now feel like I can finally just use it as a notebook rather than carrying it around as some sacramental object d’art.

There’s a little bubble that pops in my brain most weeks, sometimes twice a week. A book. Or even more often, a whole season of some show I devoured on a long weekend twelve, eighteen months back. Up it comes from the silt, and I think: Oh yeah. I watched that. I loved that.

Which is a bit weird. If you loved something, how did you manage to forget it existed?

I don’t think it’s just me going full geezer. That’s real too — ask me where I put my phone down four minutes ago, and your answer will be the blank dead stare of the cognitively disconnected. But that’s a different sort of forgetting. Keys-and-wallet forgetting. This feels like something else. A whole ten-hour story I was obsessed with at some point. Characters I cared about. All gone.

My working theory, which I’ve been chewing on for a while now, is that it’s not really a me problem. It’s a we problem. A mass cultural amnesia, brought on by the reality that we’re all being buried in an avalanche of Content. And when you’re under the avalanche, individual snowflakes don’t matter much. The book, the movie, the ten-part limited series some streamer spent a hundred million dollars on- it’s just more churn, ploughed under by next week’s churn, and the week after that and the week after that, whatever and ever amen.

I’ve felt this for a while, which is why I got a little jolt of vindication reading this piece by Max Bolen about Netflix’s problem with people finishing season one of a show, loving it, but simply never coming back for the rest.

Reading it, I did think of two shows I’d watched on Netflix, The Night Agent and Locke and Key, which I enjoyed heaps at the time and then just… drifted away from, never to return. They didn’t get their hooks in deep enough to survive the plunge back into the churn.

And I wonder if that might genuinely be a binge-model problem, because I don’t have this issue on Apple TV. I still get the old, familiar, faintly masochistic pleasure of watching an episode of For All Mankind or Severance and then resenting being made to wait like an animal for the next one to drop a whole week later. I don’t forget the shows I watch on Apple. And I definitely don’t forget to come back for the next season — quite the opposite. I’m sitting there refreshing, going, come on, Tim Apple, give it up for JB.

But I don’t think it’s purely a drop-it-all-at-once-versus-drip-feed mechanism. I think there’s something bigger going on underneath the release schedule, and Bolen gets closer than anything I’ve read to actually explaining why.

This is Ted. Ted is a recidivist criminal who stole and ate an entire lemon cake from the kitchen bench. Ted feels bad, not because he got caught, but because now there is no freshly baked lemon cake. I feel pretty bad, too, for the same reason.

I’ve started writing a fortnightly column for Crikey, starting with a follow-up to the bit they republished from Sideboob about that EV-clickbait story the ABC did a few weeks ago. This ran last week, and I’m not sure whether it’s free to read at Crikey, but they’re cool with me re-upping it here.

We were a long way out of Albury, cold rain coming in sideways on a hard wind, the night as black as a metaphor for something very, very black indeed, when I finally admitted I might’ve made a terrible mistake trying to prove that jerk from the ABC wrong about electric cars. The battery was tumbling towards zero, losing another percentage point with every one of my increasingly ragged breaths.

How did I get myself into this mess? Simple: my daughter had announced she was moving to Melbourne to study, and like any loving father, I smacked my fist into my palm and said, “Right. Time to show that ABC jerk what’s what.”

We handed her our newish car, a fully electric Volvo EX30. She loaded it with her worldly possessions and a couple of friends and off they went down the coast — sensible young women, booking accommodation in advance with overnight charging at every stop. Three days, Brisbane to Melbourne, on a freeway thick with fast chargers, never once dipping below 30%. Boring. Competent. Everything working exactly as advertised.

But this wasn’t enough for me. No, I was going to drive that EV back via the inland route, just to show all the clowns wailing about EVs in Rural-n-Regional Straya that they were wrong too. Fuck yeah! I smacked my fist into my palm again, for fist-smackin’ emphasis. “I’m coming for you, stupid EV-hating ABC jerk, and my granny-charging cable’s comin’ with me!”

Possibly, instead of all that manly fist-smacking, I should have topped up the battery before leaving Melbourne.

We rolled out at 4am with 72% state of charge — which is what you call your battery level when you’ve become an electro-knob who says “state of charge” out loud, unprompted, to people who have no idea you’re talking about. The dashnav reckoned Albury-Wodonga, with its generous bounty of chargers, was a stretch, but Euroa, this fly-speck hamlet with a servo and one sorta-fast charger, should be no trouble at all.

The trip computer, however, had not budgeted for the weather: single-digit temps when we left the city; apocalyptic rain and wind on the freeway. The battery burned through its, ahem, state-of-charge, fighting the elements (and powering the seat warmer), and by 20 klicks out of Euroa the low-battery warning icon was glowing like Satan’s taint.

Meanwhile, I’m exploring the outer limits of range anxiety, freaking out over whether there’d even be a charger. Would it be the right plug? Would it be working? Would I have to line up behind five other idiots who’d also prioritised their personal feud with the national broadcaster over sensible long-range EV planning? Would we even make it?

Reader, be cool. We made it — just — rolling into Euroa before dawn on 8% and getting the charger entirely to ourselves. I’d love to tell you the mercury had gone sub-zero, a little sympathetic atmosphere to spice up my hero’s journey, but it was still in the low single digits. Nothing for a hardy Victorian to complain about, but death to a displaced Queenslander. It was cold enough that my fingers quickly went numb and useless, and getting the charging app open left my hands shaking like a degenerate lush three days off the grog.

Unlike a petrol station, where you jam the nozzle in, pull the trigger and swipe a card, filling your EV’s battery with electrons, or lithium ions, or gently grated pixies or whatever — I should probably check — is a small and often thorny bureaucratic negotiation. The charging network is a public-private mosaic of competing operators, and for now at least, most of them seem to be competing for your data.

In the ABC’s ridonkulous EV story, it was this demand to charge via an app that first unhinged the reporter. The unhinging was both reasonable (a normal punter wouldn’t necessarily know or understand any of this charging app nonsense before they got caught out the first time) and a bad-faith stunt (a good reporter would do his research first, and explain what was needed, rather than setting himself up to fail just to harvest clicks).

My uncomfortable experience of driving from Melbourne without enough battery? That was entirely on me. The problems we hit driving north from Albury were a consequence of niggling failures in the build-out of the national EV charging network. And with tens of thousands of new electric vehicles hitting the road this year thanks to Donald Trump’s folly in the Middle East, it’s going to grow from a niggle to a chargepocalypse.

The problem is just a lack of chargers. When people talk about range anxiety, what they really mean is charger anxiety. Modern EVs have long legs. What gets your cortisol simmering and that greasy sheen of sweat on the brow isn’t wondering whether the car can make the next town. It can. But when you get there, will the plug be compatible? Will the charger be working? Will you need yet another app? Is there enough 5G to download it? Or have you just driven 500 kilometres to admire a shiny, high-tech bollard?

Driving from Melbourne to Brisneyland over three days, we found plenty of broken bollards and were briefly taken hostage by a BP fast charger outside Wagga that simply refused to unclench the car. After that, we abandoned the inland route, but even on the much better-served coastal freeway, I had a Basil Fawlty–style meltdown when an NRMA charger in Port Macquarie insisted my perfectly good credit card was worthless, then finally rolled into Tesla’s newest Supercharger in Byron Bay. This turned out to be hidden in the basement of an apartment building, well beyond the reach of any mobile network.

By this stage, we’d gone full frontier improv. Jane wrestled the charging cable into the car while I prowled the top of the car park ramp like Gollum, iPhone held aloft, hissing “My precious…” every time the signal flickered up to two bars of 4G, the magic threshold at which the app could talk to Tesla’s servers and convince them to make the world’s richest man a little bit richer.

The car? It ran like a dream. The drive? So much easier than the road trips I recall from my student days. And weirdly — or maybe not, given how adversity can bind people together — the community and fellow-feeling of EV drivers who were always ready to help each other out was a joy to encounter.

But there is a tsunami of electric vehicles coming, and the charging infrastructure in huge swaths of the country, especially along the major inland routes, is bullshit.

A cool little tip from the NYT about a site that… well, I’m not sure what it does, actually. But I think it turned the LA Metro system into mood music. Maybe I should just quote the bit:

It’s not a bad background track to play when you want to put on your cans and get some work done.

Link’s here if the quote link fails.

Threads traces the slow march towards global thermonuclear war stemming from a crisis in the Middle East—and the devastating effects such a conflict would inflict on Great Britain. The reason aficionados venerate it is simple but harsh: Of all the films in the genre, Threads has, by far, the grimmest ending. Threads is the very epitome of an apocalyptic narrative in which the living would envy the dead. The movie is so unrelenting that a recent documentary about the making of the film concluded that some of its cast and crew “suffered with the trauma of being involved” (Aslett, 2025).

I’d also assumed the British made-for-TV special was the more influential, but again I was wrong. Reagan credited his viewing of The Day After with encouraging him to chase real progress on arms limitation talks with the old USSR.

Anyway, it’s a long, fascinating read and one of the few really thinky analyses you’ll find of apocalyptic cinema (as you’d expect from The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists), so have it if you’re on the toilet at work and don’t fancy getting back to the ol’ veal fattening pen just yet.

The brutal, powerful legacy of Threads

By Daniel W. Drezner | July 8, 2026

It has a real Walking Dead S1 vibe to me. I can easily imagine a couple of walkers shambling out of the undergrowth and getting caught for a moment behind that old fenceline.

The apocalyptic aesthetic is so beautifully composed I’m thinking of using it as a book cover sometime.

I like the idea that they’re still out there, though. Which is why I enjoyed this piece in the New York Times on the decline of the buffet in Las Vegas, which is, of course, the spiritual home of the full-on, super-max, over-the-top, all-you-can-eat gorge-a-palooza. (Gifting you the link, free, courtesy of my subscription. You’re welcome.)

The food sits and withers. The food runs out. The tongs are inexplicably sticky. So many things can go wrong at a buffet, but sometimes — admit it! — the problem is you. I realized this recently at the Buffet, inside the Wynn casino and hotel in Las Vegas, looking down at a plate of things I didn’t want.

My plate: a tiny blini with a mush of caviar, a piece of slightly overcooked cod on celery purée; thick, bubbled chicharron; a single, now desiccating shrimp dumpling I’d pulled from a steam basket then taken on a 10-minute walk; Boursin mashed potatoes pooling with a little fat; a slice of very pink prime rib; a mini birria taco soaking in a bowl of dark broth; a piece of sauced and grilled pineapple; a seeded cracker.

Who did this?

Distracted by the crowds, the warm lights of the carving station and a large mermaid made of fondant that looked a lot like Jennifer Aniston, I’d slipped into a kind of culinary fugue state. Back at the table, I was confused by my choices, but there was no denying that some part of me, revealed by the emotional mechanisms of this extravagant buffet, had made them. The buffet always shows you who you are.

I’ve never been to Vegas, and I doubt I ever will. My brother has been over thirty times, and I don’t doubt he is well acquainted with the form.

The real surprise in Times’ piece was why the buffet is dying. And it is dying. Apparently there used to be hundreds of them in Vegas, and now there’s only half a dozen left, most running a 90-minute limit on how long you’re allowed to fill yourself up like a garbage truck. The reason, according to the Times, is that the casinos which used to subsidise buffets as a lure to keep customers in the house are shifting their money toward celebrity restaurants instead.

As someone who spent a decade as a restaurant reviewer, I gotta say: that does not sound like an upgrade to me. You can get a genuinely excellent restaurant almost anywhere in the free world. What you cannot get, outside of a very expensive hotel or a casino, is a great buffet. (I walked past the Sheraton’s buffet spread here in Brisbane yesterday morning on my daily walk and was reliably impressed.) The casino buffet exists for one reason: to lure in the unsuspecting hungry gambler and keep him near the tables. It’s not hospitality; it’s bait, delicious, crab-leg-shaped bait.

If I ever got an offer to do a reading or a bookstore appearance in the US—and yes, I am slapping my thighs laughing at the idea of a bookstore appearance in Vegas—it wouldn’t be the fee or the fans that closed the deal. It’d be the promise of a proper casino buffet. Whereas a celebrity chef restaurant holds zero appeal. These things can absolutely be good restaurants serving decent food, but that doesn’t make them any different from any other half-decent restaurant in any city on Earth. You’re just paying extra for someone’s name on the menu.

Anyway, it’s all completely academic, because America is over and I will never travel there again. But I did enjoy the piece. Now I’m left wondering: are the Chinese doing all-you-can-eat buffets anywhere?

I took a week off my podcast habit last week, and can report back from rehab: it’s good in there. Nice and quiet. The gentle tweeting of birds is delightful.

I probably shouldn’t be listening to as many podcasts about the terrible state of the world as I do. I’m not sure they’re good for me. I’m not sure they’re good for anyone who consumes them the way I do, which is to say: constantly, urgently, like the news cycle is some sort of fucking sabre-tooth tiger that’s gonna eat me alive if I look away for even a second.

It’s a hard balance, innit, because you can’t just switch off completely. That’s exactly what the fascists want. So staying informed is basically a polite “fuck you” to a bunch of cunts who would very much prefer you didn’t know what they were up to.

Unfortunately, though, just as an entire media ecosystem sprang up worshipping Trump, and is now morphing into something that worships the genuinely repugnant ideas he’s only ever grasped in the dimmest, most reptilian way, an entire counter-ecosystem has grown up in response. (And on those rare moments when I’m being honest with myself, I’m part of it. Every time I write about politics, the engagement goes up, the subscriptions go up, and I make more money because, as the good Dr Thompson taught us, fear and loathing pays).

I’m lucky enough that I don’t need to make my living that way, so I try not to, whenever I can help it. But plenty of people now make full time bank from resistance grifting, not just in America, but everywhere, cos the market for fury is global. Some of them do genuinely good work, but God, having a week away from it—not listening, not reading, barely watching—it’s so good for the soul. Pretty fucking good for the nervous system, too. We were road-tripping, and I didn’t put a single podcast on, because I was in the car with Jane and her mum, and it would’ve been rather rude to jam the AirPods in and go mainlining The Bulwark.

That’s what this stuff does to you; it cuts you off. It builds this little sound bubble where everything’s heightened, and your fight-or-flight response is running hot around the clock. We didn’t evolve for that. We evolved to sprint from a tiger once or twice a week, not to be at maximum alert 24/7. So I skipped the engaging/enraging content on purpose.

It made me think I need to do some serious timeline triage on my Substack and Bluesky too, cos I reckon 80 to 90 per cent of what lands in my feed is political, and that sucks. I’ve cleaned it out before, but it just creeps back in. And of course, you can’t fully check out, because checking out is exactly what they’re counting on. So, I don’t know where the happy medium is. I’m not sure there even is one. Best I’ve got, since I have to read this stuff for work anyway, I should probably start treating it like a necessary poison and titrate the dose. Stay informed. Just don’t be a sicko about it.

I’ll write this up properly for Friday’s column or for Crikey as a follow-up to the piece I did on the ABC’s genuinely unhinged EV beat-up a couple of weeks back. We learned a lot about the car on this trip, but even more about the state of the country’s charging infrastructure outside of the big metro centres. We ran the battery down into the low teens just once with no certainty there’d be a working charger at the other end, and that right there, that specific, low-grade hum of dread, was range anxiety in its purest form. But that’s not about the vehicle.

One thing I can confirm from a full week of anecdata: everybody loves their fucking electric car. One of the unexpectedly nice bits of EV ownership right now is the chat at the charger. Everything’s still novel enough that the drivers standing around waiting for their cars to drink up the electrons are all comparing notes like the biggest freaks on the smallest subreddit. Doesn’t matter if it’s a BYD, a Kia, a Tesla, or our Volvo, the peeps talk about these things with genuine, slightly evangelical affection.

It makes sense, I guess. These are new vehicles built around new tech, and the tech is very good. Case in point: the EX5 we’re picking up in a couple of weeks comes with built-in butt massage. You can cruise down the Hume, entirely unbothered by the disgraceful state of the road surface, because the car will be gently kneading your arse the whole way as a distraction.

The adaptive cruise in the Volvo is so good at holding your speed, holding your distance front and back, keeping your lane, that there’s really not much left for the driver to do except steer and look out for kangaroos. And even then, it’ll have a go at that too if you let it. It is not, Volvo will insist, full self-driving. But /Whisper Voice/… it is pretty fucking close to self-driving.

The payoff I didn’t see coming… no sciatica. Six or seven hours behind the wheel and nothing. I hadn’t clocked how much low-grade damage that constant tension on the accelerator/brake leg does until it just wasn’t there any more. Even a two-hour run up to Byron in the Mini used to leave whoever was driving wincing by the time we arrived. Seven days up and down the East Coast in the Volvo with nary a twinge, because for most of it, you simply didn’t need to do anything with your leg.

Night driving turned out to be its own thing, too. Auto high-beam was a small miracle for somebody who’d never had it before. Set it, forget it, and it’ll pick out the ruts-n-‘roos hundreds of metres up the road in the dark, then dim itself the instant it catches headlights coming the other way. Or from behind! That’s a real chunk of cognitive load lifted off without me even asking for it.

And the big A4 screen, mostly running Google Maps at night, solved a problem I hadn’t really thought about until I didn’t have to any more… the low-voltage worry of not knowing what a strange road will do next. Is this gentle right about to whip into a blind hairpin left? With the route animated for a klick or so ahead in dark mode, I always knew what was happening before I got there.

We’d have coasted the whole way on pilot-assist if not for the small matter of a six-truck SPLOSION on the freeway between Canberra and Sydney, which shut the whole road down. This was the gnarliest stretch of the trip, hands down.

Google Maps threw up three detours. I took the shortest one, which would’ve been an absolute weapon of a drive at nineteen with a couple of beers in me. (With a very good chance, nineteen-year-old me would not have walked away from it, since I didn’t learn to drive until I was 40).

Near the end of that hour on the back roads, right before we rejoined the highway, I came around a tight bend to find a kangaroo dead in the middle of the lane, a genuine unit, seven feet if it was an inch, courtesy of someone who hadn’t managed the swerve I just did. Would’ve wrecked us, for sure. Although it might not have, I suppose, cos half these new cars will jam the brakes or grab the wheel for you on collision detection. Not an experiment I fancied running on an unlit back road at midnight, all the same.

So, we came home from our four thousand kilometre round trip deeply impressed with the Volvo, and this apple pie stand at Stanthorpe…

… but I recognise that’s really a verdict on where EVs and modern cars more generally are at. Stick me in a BYD or a Tesla Model S, and I reckon we’d have rolled home just as smug.

And it’s only getting better, fast. I saw a report the other day that the Chinese battery maker CATL is working on a pack good for 1,500 km of range that fully charges in ten or fifteen minutes. If that’s for real, the internal combustion engine’s clock has basically run out, the day we get the charging network to match it. And that, as it happens, is a completely different story.

Which I gotta go write up for money.

We. Were. Not.

This freebie is not automatically applied to your bill. You should talk to your power company about whether they’re holding out on you.

And if they are, take those suckers for free every kilowatt hour the Good Lord sends.

Absolute scenes at the EV charging station here in Mittagong this morning when I pulled in just after 6am.

We’d stayed in Bowral overnight at a really lovely hotel called Links House, where I had a fantastic cassoulet. We had access to a power point overnight, so I plugged in the trickle charger, which gave us about an extra 25 percentage points on the battery.

It wasn’t really enough, because we’d had a big drive the previous evening — made about an hour longer than it should have been by that massive explosion at the truck stop on the Hume Highway. Rather than shooting up the freeway, I had to take the car through some pretty gnarly little country roads at dusk and into early evening, constantly waiting for a kangaroo to bound out of the bush and smash into the car. Some hairy driving. But at the end of it, there was cassoulet, a nice glass of wine, and an open fire.

I woke up this morning with about 56% on the battery and thought, “Nope, I want 100%.” So I popped over to Mittagong, grabbed a coffee at an early opener, and plugged into an Evie fast charger at the local Homemaker Centre.

Heading north to Bangalow today.

Just about to head over to her new apartment with a suitcase full of even more stuff. We’ll pick up the car and drive back to Brissy tomorrow.

Just one question.

Are you allowed to drag race trams?

When he’s not writing epic fantasy at his home in Eastbourne, England, he suits up with his three sons and a collection of like-minded weirdos to stand in a shield wall and bash at each other with replica weapons from about a thousand years ago. He also used to play in a rock band, runs a small business rejuvenating vintage furniture, and before all that, taught history at the University of Brighton before quitting to care for a daughter with a disability, which is when he started telling his kids bedtime stories, which is when his kids told him to write it all down, which is partly how he ended up winning the David Gemmell Award and producing some of the finest fucking sword fights in contemporary fiction.

You’re not supposed to lead a book review with the author’s biography, but in Gwynne’s case, you kinda have to, because his work makes more sense when you understand that the author has genuine, bruising experience of people hitting each other with iron weapons. When you read his fight scenes, you’re not reading a bloke who spent an afternoon on YouTube looking up “medieval combat techniques.” You’re reading a man who’s had a sword smashed into his shield and felt the numbing vibration travel up his arm into his shoulder.

I get the feeling this matters more than you might think.

I came to Gwynne’s The Faithful and the Fallen — four books, starting with Malice in 2012 and ending with Wrath in 2016 — in a doomscrolling fugue state. I snapped one night and decided I wanted a book. Probably a long book. And specifically, a book with a lot of good guys hurting lots of bad guys with edged weapons.

Gwynne delivered on this with operatic super-abundance.

It is, to use the technical term, a trilogy. Natch. With four books in it. Because when you sit down to write the final volume of a trilogy, and it turns out you’ve got about a thousand more pages of story to tell, the best thing is to just write them. I, for one, do not hold this against Gwynne. I’m currently writing a trilogy that’s heading towards fourteen or fifteen books. Whatcha gonna do?

The Faithful and the Fallen is set in the Banished Lands, a world that looks broadly medieval but isn’t really, because despite what you see in all the tapestries, our Dark Ages past was not, in fact, populated by giants, Nephilim, and ancient orders warring over a prophecy about the Coming of Darkness. The series has way more swords than sorcery. The magical woo-woo matters and shapes the plot, but the sorcery is not the hot sauce here. This shit is all about the swords. And the axes. And the spears. All of them deployed across thousands of pages of well-rendered medieval carnage.

Our protagonist is a young lad called Corban, who we meet in the first pages of Malice apprenticed to his father, a blacksmith of heroic proportions. The setup is familiar; the unassuming boy with the locally famous dad, a small village, the encroaching darkness. If you’ve read enough epic fantasy, you’ll be certain you know exactly what you’re getting.

But you don’t. Or at least I didn’t.

The Chosen One trope is not just a feature of Gwynne’s world — it’s the meta-subject of the series. He’s clearly thought hard about what it would actually mean for the fate of the world to hinge on a specific human being, for the forces of darkness to know this and act accordingly. And rather than resolving this into the usual arc — reluctant hero accepts destiny, kicks evil’s ass, gets laid — Gwynne takes a swerve. I won’t give away the spoiler. But I will confess that when he jerked the wheel around, I’d been reading for several thousand pages, and I still didn’t see it coming.

Thanks, guvnor.

There’s a guarantee on the back of the first book: even the brave will fall.

Gwynne keeps this promise with actuarial thoroughness. The series runs a large ensemble cast, with a dozen major point-of-view characters, and he invests real time in building each of them as full human beings rather than narrative functionaries. Which means that when they die, and many of them do, it comes as a real loss. More than once, I was like, “Oh come on, man! No!”

People sometimes complain about my habit of killing characters. Lulz. Mister Gwynne would like a word with you. Please step into the dark alley over here.

On the writing itself: I’ve read a lot of fiction involving close combat. I’ve written some of it. Before reading this series, I would’ve told you there’s a limited number of ways to describe two blokes trying to kill each other, especially with swords at close quarters. The vocabulary is finite. The geometry is finite. The outcomes — death, injury, flight — are finite. Yet, Gwynne has dodged this across three thousand pages, somehow making each fight distinct from the last. None of them feels repetitive, and none of them leans on technical obscurantism to manufacture the illusion of authenticity.

He’s not doing what Eric van Lustbader used to do in his early ninja novels of the 1970s, that almost pornographic inventory of bone and muscle and the precise angle at which a samurai blade cuts through both. Lustbader was straining for literary effect, cataloguing violence the way a food critic might do flavour profiles, each movement a discrete aesthetic event, sometimes rendered in the original Japanese for extra bragging points. Gwynne just tells you what’s happening. And somehow, through some alchemy I can’t entirely reverse-engineer, it works at a level that the anatomically obsessive approach (my approach, tbh) never quite achieves, because you’re never reading about the sword fight; you’re inside it, living in the body of the person it’s happening to.

I suppose this is what a decade of standing in actual shield walls does for a writer. You know what it feels like from the inside. I like to imagine I get the same payoff from three decades of jujitsu training when I’m doing hand-to-hand scenes. The practice hopefully comes out in the prose. If I ever write the epic fantasy novel I keep dreaming I might write one day, I’m coming back to this series and extracting those fight scenes to break them down at the molecular level, and referring any critics to the well-established literary tradition of writers stealing shamelessly from writers better than themselves.

There’s another four books in the same world, in a sequel series called Of Blood and Bone, set a hundred and thirty years after the events of Wrath. The first one is A Time of Dread, and the inevitably epic conclusion arrives with The Fury of the Gods.

I had every intention of being sensible about this. I read the first of Gwynne’s novels as a palate cleanser. Then I gorged the rest. When I finished Wrath the other day, I thought I should take a break. Maybe read William Dalrymple’s history of the East India Company.

Instead, I foolishly read the sample chapter of A Time of Dread.

And here we go again.

Allow me to beg your indulgence. When we got the car late last year, it came with two delightful pieces of merch: this little fellow who sits in the backseat and goes with us everywhere…

… and a Volvo-branded umbrella. And I’ve got to tell you, it’s the best fucking umbrella I’ve ever known.

I normally hate umbrellas. They’re awkward. They’re cheaply made. If they’ve got a hook handle, it catches on everything. They’re a garbage piece of technology that never goes anywhere.

If umbrellas had advanced at the same rate as silicon, we’d all have little defensive weather stations on top of our heads, tracking each individual droplet of rain and vaporising it with lasers before it got anywhere near us. That would be cool. Instead, we’re stuck with these bullshit, clunky, cheap Chinese wire-and-nylon contraptions that offer no protection — except my umbrella, which was beautiful and massively over-engineered. Now I’ve lost it.

I was out walking in a light drizzle, which connived against me by ceasing for a few minutes while I set up my dictation rig to record a Patreon post. I started recording, got distracted, and walked off without my umbrella. It was about 6:04 am on an otherwise empty campus — QUT at Kelvin Grove — but by the time I realised with horror what I’d done and sprinted, yes, sprinted, back to recover it, it was gone.

Some terrible, starving student had obviously spotted it, grabbed it, and moved it with all dispatch into the secondhand umbrella markets, where it surely fetched an ungodly price. They’re now as rich as an astronaut, while I’m condemned to walk around soaking wet. This is the worst thing that has ever happened to anybody.

I just finished reading Anna Goldsworthy’s Quarterly Essay on artificial intelligence. What an amazing piece of work. It was nothing like what I expected, and nothing like what I would’ve written if they’d commissioned me to do it. That’s not just self-regard, either. I’m in the middle of writing December’s quarterly essay on the rise of the New Right in Australia.

This evening I’ll be at Avid Reader in West End to launch Goldsworthy’s volume. That’s why I was reading it: to pick the eyes out of the thing and frame our discussion.

The first thing that struck me was the literary quality of the writing. It’s funny — like everybody in this business now, I read everything with my filters up, hunting for AI tells. And I’m not an anti-AI jihadist. But I can’t help noticing the bot’s mechanical fingerprints on posts, notes, and essays everywhere now. There was none of that in this essay. It read like a 100% organic product, despite Goldsworthy obviously having had to engage with a chatbot — usually Claude or ChatGPT — at various points, given the subject matter.

The writing was good enough to give me a crisis of confidence about my own upcoming essay. And I’ve already written two of the motherfuckers, so according to the people signing the cheques, I’ve got some idea what I’m doing. But twenty pages in, I felt like a complete pretender. Thankfully, that passed once I settled into the argument itself.

I still have to sit down this arvo and write up notes for tonight, so I don’t have anything specific to say about the content yet. But if the topic interests you even slightly and you get the chance to read this, do yourself a favour: buy a copy, or borrow one from the library. It’s well worth a couple of hours of your time.

I walked into the bedroom and stopped in my tracks. Sniffed.

What is that smell?

Oh no. The dogs.

We’d taken them to the creek a couple of hours earlier, and at some point during the clean-up from Wet Dog to Inside Dog, they’d gone rogue, hit the rug, possibly the furniture, and basically pre-loaded the entire room with eau de stagnant fucking creek. We’d washed them the second they got out of the car — proper doggy shampoo, the works — but it gets in deep. It gets in generationally deep.

So fine. I figured that was it. Pulled the rug, threw it in the sun, problem solved.

If only.

A couple of hours later, the smell was back, except now it had matured. It had developed tasting notes. And my brain, unhelpfully, made the connection to the lizard that died in my office last year and took the better part of a week to find, because that’s exactly the bouquet we were trending toward. I got down and did the full forensic sweep — under the bed, the corners, the cupboards. Sniff-sniff-sniff.

Nothing.

We ended up sleeping with the window open that night because the smell kept climbing, and the only reason that wasn’t a problem is that it’s the middle of winter in Brisbane, and we could still leave every door and window in the house wide open without anyone needing a second blanket. Thanks for that, fossil fuel industry. Genuinely. Couldn’t have cooked the planet to a nice liveable mid-winter room temperature without you.

I’m lying there in bed, windows open, marinating in dead-lizard nostalgia and ambient climate terror when the truth announcs itself with a thunderous crashing and bumping straight through the roof above our heads.

Oh noes. Not again.

My old nemesis. The possum.

At least two of them must have set up in the roof space and, as best I can figure it, some unsupervised offspring wandered off from base camp at some point and died in the cavity of my bedroom wall, possibly in a touching homage to its late uncle, who did the same thing in my office wall last year.

Which means Peter the Possum Man is coming back.

Last time, Pete cut a hole in my office wall, reached in, and pulled out a whole mess of possum parts, all the while muttering “I love my job, I love my job, I love my job”. I love his job too. I love it specifically because it isn’t mine. But I’m not thrilled about him standing in my bedroom this time with a saw, because I remember from last year that even after the magic powder and the industrial deodoriser and all his professional possum-extraction mojo, the smell doesn’t leave.

The one bright spot: we’re about to head off on a road trip for a week, which means I get to leave every door and window in the house open with Thomas minding the fort, and by the time we’re back, the smell might have faded to something merely bearable.

Anyway, thanks again to the fossil fuel industry for the mild winter nights that make this all possible.

You absolute legends.

This is a picture of a very sore and tired dog. It was Maggie’s ninth birthday last week, and on the weekend we somewhat foolishly took her to the creek to let her have a run. Foolish because it’d been raining all week, so that place was always going to be a sodden mud bath. But foolish also because Maggie’s a little bit nuts and refuses to accept she is no longer a puppy.

Everything went about as well as you could expect. Both dogs bounded from the car and launched themselves into the muddy wonderland of the creek. They charged up hills and down ravines, dived into the water, swam, chased each other, and chased the dozens of other dogs who were out for their walk.

But Maggie, of course, did everything at 180%. She was already stiffening up by the time we got home, and by early evening, she was in a lot of pain, shivering and whimpering.

I had some sympathy. I’d done four hours on the mat at Jujitsu the previous day, and I was sorta feeling it. But I had an hour-long hot bath and a handful of Ibuprofen, washed down with red wine, so we sat together for quite a while, feeling sorry for ourselves. I’m pretty sure she felt worse, though, because for me, a hot bath, a heated blanket, and a good night’s sleep pretty much put me right. She was about three days recovering.

I’m dictating this post while I’m out on a walk with her, and she’s moving as freely and as strongly as ever, so she didn’t tear anything or do any permanent damage. But I’m not sure what to do with her going forward because she loves running off the leash so much; it seems a cruelty to deny it to her.

But she has no self-control. She always goes hard when she has the freedom to. It was funny when she was a young dog and could recover quickly. Nowadays, not so much.

Next thing I know, I’ve emailed at least ten thousand of you about a sandwich you will never eat.

Insert ‘Box of Shame’ GIF here and remind myself never to publish via the Substack app again.

I did promise when I took your email that I wouldn’t waste your time, and now I feel I’ve wasted your time. Even worse, I’m doing it again by posting this apology.

Oh God. Make it stop.

Look, I promise I will try not to do that again until I inevitably fuck up and do that again.

So let's, er, let’s try to find some reason to clog up your email.

Oh look! The audiobooks for the latest Axis of Time reloads have dropped.

And for all five of you following The Agency series, that also came out in audio recently, (and even I didn’t know!). I really should figure out how to do this self-promotion thing.

Anyway, again, sorry about the sandwich.

Next time you hear from me, it will be about something super important.