I wanted to make this publication long before I could decide what should go into it. The difficulty was never finding something that interested me. It was choosing what to lead with.
There is the work I do, the things I want to build and everything else that catches my attention. An image. A place. A question about why something feels the way it does. Put together, they make sense to me. Explaining the connection to someone else has been harder.
When I started putting OFFBEAT together, the apparently simple task of selecting three topics brought that difficulty into focus. I wanted something personal enough for friends to recognise me in it, and interesting enough for someone I had just met to want to keep reading. I also wanted room for interests I haven’t discovered yet.
For a while, choosing the opening subjects felt like choosing which version of myself the site would introduce.
That is quite a lot to ask of three articles.
So I’m starting with a collection. It will give some things more space than others. It will change as I do. The connection between one piece and the next may occasionally be obvious; sometimes it may take a little longer to appear.
I’d like someone to leave with a sense of the world inside my head.
Some of what appears here will grow from work. Some will be there because I find it beautiful, puzzling or difficult to leave alone. There will be ideas that become something, and others that remain a good conversation.
This first edition is a beginning. I don’t need it to settle the question of who I am. I’d like it to make an introduction possible.