One book in print and I am in the process of writing four other books. The struggle is accepting I can’t write them all at once. They are presented here in the intended order of publication.
- Grasping the Nettle of Change: Understanding Social Evolution to Reclaim Your Power
- Land, City and Soul: Nature and the Art of a Symbiotic Life
- Gender, Discontent and Healing: Biology, Society and the Individual
- Pride without Prejudice: A Brief History of the British
- Agency: Agents, AI and Free Will
1. Grasping the Nettle of Change: Understanding Social Evolution to Reclaim Your Power
“How the world works, and your inherent power to change it.”
Published, and available now. The first book sets out the framework the others build on: social evolution, how change actually compounds, and the individual’s real, inherent power to intervene in it. See for full text: Grasping the Nettle of Change
2. Land, City and Soul: Nature and the Art of a Symbiotic Life
“Nature counts everything. How to read the honest record and live a life that answers it: on the land, in the city, and embedded in the soul.”
This book begins with the chagrin of being born on a dairy farm in Cornwall, with a boy who loved the place yet never forgot the quagmire of slurry behind the barn. From that dual citizenship, the farmer’s son who can still name where the herd’s account went, it builds one argument in three movements: that nature counts everything, including the inconvenient, and that a life lived well is a life that reads the record the world actually keeps.
The Land. Starting inside the farming life it examines, the book reads agriculture’s honest record: the borrowed intention that drains to the lagoon, the flood, the nitrate that does not stop at the farm boundary. Its counter-evidence is not an idealised pastoral past but a working proof: a stockfree organic market garden on unkind, stony, rented ground, paying wages through every winter by listening to the land and what grows there. The demonstration runs from soil to plate, including the food we eat and the diet we choose as the lens used daily.
The City. The same reading brought to the built world, where the modern city has become a “digital hive” of interruption and fragmented time. The book provides the blueprint for biophilic urbanity: functional blue-green infrastructure rather than decorative greenery, daylighting buried rivers, urban forests as the city’s circulatory system, and the natural stabilities of trees and moving water as a clinical shield for the over-stimulated mind. Newcastle upon Tyne is its laboratory and prototype, with the principles scalable to any post-industrial city in the world.
The Soul. The argument turns inward, to the rhythms every life is made of. All life needs its rhythms: the beating heart, the circadian cell, the tide, the season. The book examines what happens when a life’s rhythms are confiscated, by flat 24-hour light, by the sold rhythm of the night shift, by the flicker of the feed, and what is reclaimed when they are kept. The soul’s one life is a rhythm to be kept, not consumed.
Early chapters exist as finished drafts in the book’s own voice, including the farm’s opening account and the reading of the land’s record, with the veganic counter-evidence settled and its source chosen.
Voice and method are ruled and in daily use: the honest record as the book’s central word, plain punctuation, the gate test of the said-aloud sentence, and the returning question applied to the page itself.
The structure continues to evolve with the writing, the chapter plan growing as each movement meets its material.
3. Gender, Discontent and Healing: Biology, Society and the Individual
“Why the relationship between the sexes has become a battlefield, how to understand the complex reality of being human, and the way through to healing.”
This book follows its subtitle as its structure: biology, society, the individual. It begins where honest examination must begin, in the biology, and ends where the reader actually lives, in the healing of a single life.
Biology. The book starts in the laboratory of the real: chromosomes, hormones and anatomy, showing that biological sex exists as a spectrum of natural variation, including intersex conditions, rather than a rigid binary, and that diversity is normal. It dismantles the false dichotomy between nature and nurture, arguing that it is our biological nature to be shaped by nurture, and it separates four distinct but related things the culture wars blur together: the body, the brain’s differentiation, the expression of gender, and the direction of desire.
Society. On that biological ground, the book reads the social reality: the traditional gender contract, where men were defined by economic provision and women by domestic management, has disintegrated, and its collapse has fuelled modern rage and frustration. It argues that we are living through the trauma of a fractured system, one that extracts an unsustainable cost in health, time and relationship stability from everyone, regardless of their perceived success. Three crises carry the diagnosis: economic displacement, particularly among young men (NEET rates), a loss of identity and a missing anchor in the modern world; the uncompensated burden, the structural exhaustion and chronic illness disproportionately affecting women who manage a household’s mental load alongside professional roles; and social collapse, the aggregate of the fractures, in plummeting birth rates, family breakdown, and rising depression and suicide.
The Individual. The turn to healing. Against both the “woke” and “anti-woke” dogmas, the book offers an “awake” understanding: grounded in evidence, open to complexity, committed to precision, and aimed at the person, not the faction. Through detailed case studies, from the domestic reorganisation of the Rodsky family to the ecological rewilding of the Knepp Estate, it proposes Shared Stewardship: a transition from extractive systems to regenerative ones, in which dignity is decoupled from market wealth and tied instead to meaningful contribution, care and community resilience. Its governing conviction is that education and empathy allow for the emergence of healing, and that the book’s role is to make that healing possible for the individual reader, not to hand down verdicts.
A comprehensive outline exists across eight parts and 33 chapters, providing a progressive journey from foundational definitions, through the real pain of the fractured contract, to nuanced philosophical and contemporary debates, and onward to healing.
The Introduction and the early parts (Foundations, Biological Realities, Social Construction, Sexuality) are written as polished, persuasive text, including detailed scientific explanations and theoretical frameworks (the Kinsey Scale, Social Learning Theory, Gender Schema Theory). Much of the opening material, including the case studies of the Rodskys, Schultes, Burrells, Rinaudos, Errol Beckford and Zoë Desmond, is written or deeply outlined, providing the visceral reality the subject demands.
The manuscript weaves in the work of key thinkers, including Margaret Mead, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Judith Butler and Alfred Kinsey, alongside a personal narrative thread that grounds the academic content in lived experience.
The later parts are currently held as robust, detailed summaries ready for immediate expansion into full narrative chapters, and the specified data (such as NEET rates and North East Real Living Wage statistics) sits as placeholders awaiting final statistical insertion. The Glossary is already fully developed to ensure terminological precision.
4. Pride without Prejudice: A Brief History of the British
“An analysis of the British story that neither glorifies nor condemns it: how to hold pride in your country while holding it to account.”
This book seeks to reclaim the middle ground in the increasingly polarised debate over Britain’s national story. Rather than viewing history as a simple choice between unadulterated pride or absolute shame, the narrative presents a nuanced patriotism, using the British monarchy (not as a royalist, but as a chronological scaffold) to examine the messy, contradictory and evolving story of the land and its people, from the signing of Magna Carta to the contemporary reign of King Charles III.
The book is guided by two central philosophical pillars:
Biting the Hand That Feeds You. Britain’s historical successes, its maritime dominance and industrial wealth, created the intellectual and social space for self-critique. It frames movements like Abolitionism not just as reactions to evil, but as products of a society that had gained the freedom and resources to dismantle its own injustices.
The Paradox of Freedom. The narrative reframes the modern British talent for fierce historical debate and self-loathing as a sign of institutional strength. The ability to publicly vilify past heroes and scrutinise the Empire is the ultimate evidence of a healthy, free society, a liberty that is in itself a source of national pride.
A clear eight-part structure is in place, beginning with the foundations of the modern state and concluding with the monarchy’s role in a post-imperial, globalised world.
The key anchor events, such as the Tudor Revolution, the Hanoverian involvement in and abolition of the slave trade, and the Victorian industrial engine, have been researched and selected for their narrative and thematic weight.
The Introduction and early chapters (the Tudors and Elizabethans) are in a polished state. Later sections, particularly those dealing with the 20th century and the post-war identity crisis, exist as robust, detailed drafts.
The “Biting the Hand That Feeds You” philosophy is being woven through the middle chapters, so the transition from imperial expansion to moral evolution is seamless and intellectually rigorous.
5. Agency: Agents, AI and Free Will
“What AI actually is, and what it means for your freedom: agency in an age of agents.”
The newest of the five, and the deepest question of them all. Where other books about AI ask what it costs, this one asks what it is: what agency means, whether any machine can rightly be called an agent, and where free will stands once our tools begin to imitate the shape of a mind. It argues that the danger is not a malicious machine but an atrophied human, the unexercised mind losing its power, and that agency is proven in the quiet switches of a life: the tools chosen on purpose, the attention kept, the decisions that stay with the person. The machine can take the checking; the human keeps the choosing.
Source material is being gathered, from the deep-time story of human progress to the newest testimony of practitioners, with each piece held to the standard of the whole family of books.
The writing is deliberately sequenced behind the books before it, so that when its turn comes it arrives with the ground prepared.