There are days when the mind wanders in peculiar directions, stitching together moments that don’t obviously belong. This blog is very much one of those days. It begins with a cup of tea gone lukewarm, a radio murmuring in the background, and the sudden realisation that randomness has its own quiet logic. The kettle clicks off, the cat ignores me entirely, and somehow that feels like the correct tone to set.
While scrolling aimlessly, I stumble across the phrase roofing services and immediately don’t think about roofs at all. Instead, it reminds me of how certain words trigger completely unrelated memories. “Services” brings to mind the old library bus that used to come round our estate, packed with books that smelled faintly of dust and promise. You’d climb aboard not knowing what you were looking for and come away with something unexpectedly brilliant.
Randomness works a bit like that library bus. You don’t plan it, but you benefit from it anyway. One minute you’re reading about ancient maps, the next you’re deep into a rabbit hole about how pigeons can recognise individual human faces. None of it is particularly useful in a practical sense, but it makes the world feel bigger and more interesting.
There’s something very British about embracing this sort of mild chaos. We queue religiously but think nothing of having three different conversations going on in our heads at once. We apologise to furniture when we bump into it. We complain about the weather even when it’s doing exactly what weather is supposed to do. Random thoughts slot neatly into that cultural habit of quiet acceptance.
On a walk through the park earlier, I watched someone teaching their dog to catch a tennis ball. The dog was enthusiastic but terrible at it, leaping heroically in entirely the wrong direction. Everyone nearby pretended not to watch, which of course meant everyone was watching. It was a tiny, pointless moment, and yet oddly satisfying, like finding an extra chip at the bottom of the bag.
Writing something deliberately random is freeing in the same way. There’s no pressure to educate, persuade, or optimise anything. It can drift from biscuits to buses to strange internet discoveries without needing to justify itself. That freedom is rare online, where everything usually has to be about something very specific, very focused, and very intentional.
By the time you reach the end of a piece like this, nothing dramatic has happened. No great lesson has been delivered. But perhaps that’s the point. Not every read needs to change your life. Some just need to fill five quiet minutes, distract you from the hum of daily responsibilities, and then gently let you carry on with your day, tea reheated, cat still unimpressed, mind pleasantly meandering.
