A view down a dual carriageway from an overbridge. There aren't manay cars on the dual carriageway. It is lined by trees. In the background, mist cloaks a hill beneath a pale blue sky.

A prompt response

Another change I’ve noticed since restarting this blog is that the app now presents me with a daily writing prompt—and, what’s more, lets me see an archive of the prompts from the preceding ten days. I think the idea is that you write a post based on each, but this is only a weekly blog. As such, I’m going to have to speedrun the ones I can see to catch up.

What are your thoughts on the concept of living a very long life?

Wow, okay, I see we’re not messing around with fluff like “What is your favourite animal?”; we’re straight in with the deep philosophical questions. Er… I guess that depends how long we’re talking. Would it be cool to live to 100? Sure—I’d like to get a holo-card from King George VII. But a thousand years seems like it would get rather boring, even if technology makes it possible to maintain one’s mental and physical faculties for that length of time. So we’ve narrowed down the optimal order of magnitude to 10² years, and as someone who studied pure maths that’s enough precision for me.

What is your mission?

I don’t think I’m one of those people who has a “mission”, other than something simultaneously grandiose and banal like “be happy”. The mission of this blog was originally to encourage people to travel outside of Oxford. I still think there’s a lot to be said for local tourism, but my mission in writing this is now just to put something out into the aether that, hopefully, if you’re reading this, you find at least mildly diverting.

Describe an item you were incredibly attached to as a youth. What became of it?

Ah, one I can answer properly—indeed, factually, because I have evidence of this. Apparently, when I was at school, I had to fill in a worksheet about something that was precious to me. I picked my first teddy bear, who was, imaginatively, called “Daddy Bear”.1

A section of a worksheet, filled in by a child. In child's handwriting, it says: "My precious thing is my teddy bear called Daddy Bear. It is precious because it was my ver first teddy. Sometimes I take him to bed. He is the leader of all my teddies. His eyes are covered with fur. This is Daddy Bear." There is then a child's line drawing of a teddy bear with buttons down his front. Underneath, in the teacher's handwriting (as a prompt on the worksheet), it says "How do we look after precious things", and underneath the child's response says "I look after Daddy Bear by putting clothes on him."
This was around the time comments about how good my handwriting was for my age stopped appearing on my school reports.

I decided halfway through the exercise, clearly, that he was sufficiently precious that he was too good to be referred to as “it”. Meanwhile, my answer to “How do we look after precious things?” is (as requested) a general answer, and to this day I protect any gold ingots or magical cursed rings that come into my possession by dressing them up in a three-piece suit. As for “He is the leader of all my teddies”—well, that’s a story for another day.

“What became of it?”—you surely don’t think I’d have kept the worksheet and not the bear, do you?

A teddy bear sitting on top of a shelving unit, with other teddy bears in the background. The main teddy bear is brown and medium-large, with fur partly covering his eyes. He is wearing a white chef's hat with "Alex" embroidered on the front in blue script typeface. He is wearing a blue top, with "AUTHENTIC" embroidered near the bottom-right around a star, and a red scarf with tassels.
“Good day to you.”

Here is Daddy Bear, eyes still covered with fur, still being looked after by having clothes put on him.

Come up with a crazy business idea.

I assume we’re looking for something here that is so ridiculous nobody would actually try it. The problem with that is that the bar for that is incredibly high, when (for example) someone set up a business selling subscriptions for ordinary, non-collectable coins at a 35% mark-up. So this will be hard, but let’s try some things:

  • Houseplant paint, so you can touch them up when your poor care makes the leaves turn brown. Wait, no, that exists.
  • Deliberately unpleasant-tasting chocolate, so you don’t eat too much of it. No, that’s been done as well.
  • Soluble embroidery thread, so you can easily undo mistakes. Nope, try again.

So none of those meet the criteria. I guess the trick is to come up with something so niche that it’s extremely unlikely that anyone has ever thought about it. What about blancmange-themed walking tours of Edinburgh city centre? Nobody seems to have tried that one.

But maybe you’re supposed to come up with something “out-of-the-box” that just might work. In which case: ha, like I’m going to tell you.

What snack would you eat right now?

Bold of you to assume it’s “would you eat” and not “are you eating”. As it happens, I have data on this one too: in 2025, I was the fifteenth most-prolific purchaser of spearmint Polo mints in Scotland at Sainsbury’s. Given that I’m pretty sure I purchased (and consumed) an unhealthy amount, I’m deeply concerned or the fourteen people who beat me. I don’t know if this was Sainsbury’s’s intent in telling me, but I felt sufficiently shamed by this that I have resolved not to buy any of them this year. And if I do I definitely won’t scan my Nectar card.

Think back on your most memorable road trip.

Contemplative silence.

In what ways do you communicate online?

Does this mean platforms? Surprisingly few these days, with my restarting of this blog doubling the number of services I regularly use. But perhaps this, again, is a deeper question. I communicate meaningfully, sincerely, facetiously, and contradictorily.

What is your favourite animal?

Okay, sure. When I was a child the answer was clear: dolphins. Also in my archive of papers is a list I asked my dad for of details of related charities, and I even walked down the street in Whitby once shaking a bucket and shouting for people to give me money to “SAVE THE DOLPHINS!”. I don’t know what I thought they needed saving from—assuming I was thinking of the bottlenose dolphin2 they’re apparently doing basically fine. Even then, I’m not sure what I was going to do with the money as a six-year-old (or whatever age I was)—the best thing I can think of is to give it directly to the dolphins and save them from financial dependence on humanity. At least it would protect them from the loan sharks.3

The answer now is less clear. I’m also concerned that whatever I answer here might doom me to a life of themed gifts for every birthday or Christmas, based on an animal I came up with in ten seconds to write this post. So I guess this is another one where I need to choose something obscure. Er… let’s say the Ozark big-eared bat. Note the specificity—for wishlist purposes, I hereby confirm that I loathe and detest all other chiroptera.

Where can you reduce clutter in your life?

If you’ve read the parts above about things I still have from my childhood, I think you’ve got your answer.

Can you share a positive example of where you’ve felt loved?

Wow, this truly is an emotional rollercoaster. Only two virtual days ago I was being asked to think about animals. Sure, I could take the opportunity to write something truly personal and heartfelt. But, again, I note the specific phrasing of this question—the answer, of course, is “Yes”.

If you could un-invent something, what would it be?

At this point, prompts like these.

  1. On the one hand, my defence for this unoriginality is that, since I was given him as a very young baby, I presumably had nothing to do with his naming. But that sidesteps the fact that as an older child I had a family of polar bears that were all called “Poley”. ↩︎
  2. I was—even now I can’t name any other kinds. ↩︎
  3. Boos from audience. ↩︎

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