You’re floating along a broad, slow-moving river. The landscape on either side is familiar, peaceful, with outcrops of wildness. Suddenly you flow into a gorge where the furious whitewater threatens to flip over your raft and drown you.

Between those towering walls of stone, you have no idea where you are. You just know that if you want to survive you have to cling on for dear life.

This is where we are now. The world is nothing but turbulence as every unresolved issue of the twentieth century plays out at once. And we have no idea where we are going until the river opens out again into the new, flat countryside.

I first came across that analogy years ago in The Meaning Of The 21st Century: A Vital Blueprint For Ensuring Our Future, a prescient book by the technologist James Martin. It perfectly encapsulated the upheavals that were coming as the twin Ages of Digital Technology and Communication disrupted everything.

That turbulence isn’t getting any less. If anything our pitiful raft looks like it might not make it past those jagged rocks to find the promised land of abundance that allegedly lies ahead.

I’ve started writing on Substack every Friday in an attempt to drain a little of the terror out of our current situation by empowering people with news and information in a dangerous and confusing world. If we can peer through the spray and see the obstacles ahead, there’s a chance…a chance…we might be able to navigate a safe path until we’re out of this mess.

The more you know, the safer you are.

I hope you’ll subscribe to my Substack newsletter. It’s free and you’ll get a few lovingly crafted words in your inbox every Friday, hopefully with information that’s useful to you.

As my pinned post on Bluesky says: “The theme…is Everything is Connected. The posts cover news and politics from all over the world, things that I think it’s worth paying attention to but which may not always get priority in other media.

“Even if it happens five thousand miles away it can still roll up on your doorstep.”

Protests in Tbilisi in Georgia. A conflict between nuclear rivals India and Pakistan. The endless, bewildering upheavals of the Trump administration. The war in Ukraine. Death and destruction in the Middle East. Industrial sabotage in Germany. Warships in the South China Sea. Fascists in Brazil. Russian mercenaries in Mali.

Seemingly disparate events. But if you look closely you can see the strands that connect them all.

On Substack I’m going to be looking to the horizon to highlight flashpoints around the world. In the process this will bring into relief the interconnectedness of everything and will, hopefully, start to reveal what lies behind it all, like one of those Magic Eye pictures.

Not all the bad actors in the world stand centre-stage. The ones you really need to be concerned about are off in the wings, in the shadows, directing what’s going on under the spotlight.

They can’t stay hidden forever, though. The more information you have about global events, the more the light gets in.

Who really pushed for Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023 which prescribes life imprisonment for sex between two people of the same biological sex and the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality”, legislation that is now being copied in other African nations? And how are those same people flooding cash into the US, UK and EU to influence local politics?

Everything is Connected.

It isn’t the place to come for deep dives into policy on single issues. There are plenty of excellent academics and journalists giving that intensity of detail. It is the place to try to make sense of the big picture, delivered in an accessible style. Communication is key. Language is important.

A little about me: I trained as an economist. When I left university I immediately became a journalist, working on the big metropolitan newspaper in Birmingham, England, before moving to London to ply my trade in the large media organisations. There I started out as an undercover crime journalist before eventually reporting from around the world.

When my first novel was published, I quit my staff job, but kept all my contacts and my passion for journalism. That meant a few more bylines here and there, but my focus was on books and screenwriting. 

Now though, the world is in a mess everywhere. The media we’ve trusted for decades is dying; not enough readers, not enough viewers, and it’s easy to see a day when it might not be around. Into the growing vacuum, those who seek power and money are flooding lies and deepfakes and propaganda to advance their agenda.

It felt an important time to me to use what skills and contacts I have to get important information out there. Hence my recent activity on social media and here on Substack.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be globetrotting. There may well be a lot of stuff about Trump America because that’s one of the prime sources of global disruption at the moment, but there will be plenty of other news from corners of the world where you may not be paying attention. The big picture will begin to appear.

The aim here, then, is to keep everyone on the raft.

Calmer waters lie somewhere ahead.

We just need to find the channels that will get us there.