Summer Break

As I write this, I only have one further post for The Crow’s Nest queued and ready to go next week. This is deliberate: summer on Substack is the quiet time, the pause between the seasons of interest and readership and, generally, not the right time to share anything you wish to actually be read by more than a few people.

All photos from a walk on Sunday, to gather wild strawberries on ‘our’ mountain.

This year, I almost made the error of giving myself extra work to do, for potentially little to no return—I deeply considered a week-by-week deconstruction and discussion of the 13th season of the History Channel show, Alone, linking it to my own knowledge and experience, and also cunningly using it to touch on wider salient points. Thankfully, for my summer and, potentially, you, I gave myself a stern talking to and decided against it.

I will be popping in on Substack Notes from time to time, and intend to also use the quieter months to read more of your work, including, but absolutely not limited to, that of Susie Mawhinney, Ailsa Ross, Anne Thomas, rebecca hooper, Feasts and Fables, Jonathan Foster, Kate Hill, Laura McVeigh, Rosie Whinray, Sarah Crowder, Stacy Boone.

I’ve said it before, but I think considering your Substack subscriptions as a wonderful library is the best thing ever. I try not to stress too much about not being up to date with reading, but sometimes I do worry—then remind myself I can read those words at a point which suits, take a book out of the library, and appreciate every word. Thanks (I thoroughly intend to write more about the voices you might enjoy here but, for now, that small list is a good start).

This summer, I shall also be trialling W Social, (Wsocial.eu) which, if you do not know, is a new social media platform advertising itself as:

‘A European social network governed by EU law, data hosted in Europe, and built for real, verified people. Trust your feed.’

We’ll see how well this pans out. I’m rather tired and jaded by the whole enshittification of the internet and, although I shall give this a chance, I don’t secretly hold out much hope for it being a good place to be (but I would be utterly delighted to be proven wrong).

If you are also thinking of heading to W Social, or are already there, I’m alexandermcrow.wsocial.eu. Do say hi!

What else can you expect after this summer interlude?

Witness Notes will return in the autumn, precisely when remains to be seen, although I suspect it will be September. I have a lot more material to share, some new thoughts and snippets of my past, and some I’ll be reworking or resharing from previous work. I remain surprised by just how many words I’ve crafted over my life. It is a lot.

Likewise, I intend to rework and reshare some other older work, such as my Edges & Entries series, for example. My subscriber numbers and people are quite different from when I shared those pieces.

Whether I will reshare my A Fall In Time series, however, I do not yet know, but I doubt it.

I have a number of essays already drafted or, in some cases, edited, which I shall also be sending out after summer. Several of them are linked to my currently passing through my 50th year (I’ll turn 50 in May 2027), whether other lists of 49 things, such as the recent scent-based one I shared, or reflective essays looking at who I am, where I’ve come from, and where I would like to go—whether physically, or metaphorically.

Much of the work I’ve been doing this year has been offline, words which will be shared in another fashion at some point in the near(ish) future. That is lonely work—writing is by necessity a lonely process, even as we writers observe and notice all around us, secreting and squirrelling things away for digestion and regurgitation at a later date.

And all of this has been done against the backdrop of a species and civilisation leaking stuffing from the seams, stitches popping and button eyes hanging by threads.

I have made my peace with what is happening—not ‘what is coming’, for it is already here—and all my hope is now centred on things I can hope to influence and achieve, mostly personal and hyperlocal things, but also reaching out to those my words and work might just help.

I shall be sharing more essays about hope, about how we can retool it, and about how we can grieve and mourn and move out from under the despair which so many seem to be overwhelmed beneath.

In short—you can’t go wrong with being kind. You can’t go wrong with outlasting those who are doing their best to destroy and debase, and you can’t go wrong with finding joy, whether in a single flower or bee, a cooler night after many suffocating ones, or in the uncontrolled, utterly unselfconscious laughter of a child. There is a lot to be grateful for, and I’ll be sharing these things again after summer.

Thanks for reading, or listening, as ever.

Do please share this with anyone you think might like my work, whether the years of letters here on Substack, or that which is yet to come.

And, if you can afford to, you can support my work in a few ways. The first is by taking out a subscription here (if you do, then I’ve found that The Crow’s Nest pops up on the lists curated by Substack and, when it does, I gain a number of new free subscribers and more followers, all of which is great).

The second is by sending a tip of any amount, via this button, which will take you to my KoFi page.

Finally, sharing my words is great support, and commenting on them likewise. I’m doing better at replying to comments, but still not quite as quickly as I’d like!

Thank you, to all of you who have done one of the above, even if it is simply putting a little heart on a letter, that means a lot, too. Thanks.

Have a great summer (or winter, for my friends in the global south), and I’ll hopefully see you all refreshed and ready for a new academic year in the Fall.