Pushing the Wave

Over time, I’ve come to see Pushing the Wave less as a series of separate pieces and more as a way of tracing a year—through what was noticed, what stayed, and what returned later with more weight than expected.

This new column is an attempt to step back and look at Pushing the Wave 2024 as a whole: the essays, the journeys, the photographs and drawings, and the threads that connect them. Some of those threads were clear as I was writing; others only emerged afterwards.

If you’ve been following along, I hope it offers a way back into the work. If not, perhaps it’s a place to begin.

I listened again the other night to the Andante from Mozart’s Sonata for Piano Duet in F major, K.497 — and something unexpected happened.

Instead of being carried back into the refined world of the late eighteenth century, I found myself hearing the nineteenth: Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, even Fauré waiting quietly in the wings.

That single movement seems to sketch the template for a century of musical introspection — the kind of inward, singing line that Romantic composers returned to again and again.

In a new essay I explore that thread from Mozart to Debussy, and how Debussy eventually rewrote the language of musical intimacy altogether.

🍞 Buckwheat Soda Bread

Soda bread is part of the rhythm of my Irish upbringing — quick to make, no yeast, no waiting around, and best eaten still warm with far too much salted butter.

After years of baking the classic white loaf, I began to wonder what would happen if I shifted it slightly. I’ve never entirely loved the wholemeal version, so I experimented instead with buckwheat flour. What I was looking for was depth — something nuttier, with a little more bite — but without losing the tenderness that makes soda bread what it is.

It took a few attempts to get the balance right, but this version does exactly what I hoped. It feels traditional, but not predictable.

The full recipe is now up on Pushing the Wave. If you bake it, eat it fresh — and don’t be shy with the butter.

Over the past year, I’ve been quietly gathering together the pieces that now make up Pushing the Wave 2024. Some were written in response to things that felt immediate at the time; others emerged more slowly, or only revealed what they were really about when I looked back at them later.

Writing Pushing the Wave week by week has never felt like producing a series of standalone posts. It’s always been closer to keeping a conversation going — with myself, and with the world around me — and it’s only when those pieces are brought together in book form that the patterns begin to show. Questions about attention, uncertainty, freedom, and how we live alongside systems that increasingly shape our choices run through much of this volume, sometimes quietly, sometimes more directly.

Travel plays its part again this year, not as escape, but as a way of thinking. Time spent on the north coast of Northern Ireland, and later in Cuba, sharpened my sense of how place holds memory, contradiction, and resilience all at once. The photographs and drawings included in the book aren’t illustrations so much as another way of paying attention — of holding onto something fleeting before it slips away.

I’ve written a longer piece on the P-Wave Press site reflecting on how Pushing the Wave 2024 came together, and on some of the essays that sit at its heart. If you’ve followed the series over time, I hope it offers a useful way into the new volume. If you’re new to it, I hope it invites you to linger.

Pushing the Wave 2024 will be published by P-Wave Press on 26 March 2026.

🌍 The Dismantling of the Old World Order

This week on Pushing the Wave, I look unflinchingly at the collapse of Western political assumptions, Trump’s abandonment of allies, and why Europe must finally confront the reality of sovereignty.

This isn’t nostalgia for what was lost—but a reckoning with what must now be built.

📼 Borrowed Cool

This week’s Pushing the Wave is an end-of-year reflection shaped around a mixtape—one I’ve carried with me for decades.

It’s about kindness rather than sermons, memory rather than nostalgia, and the idea that “cool” is never owned, only borrowed and passed on.

🌰 Buckwheat Nut Roast

Once dismissed as a vegetarian consolation prize, the nut roast is back—with substance and style.

In this week’s Pushing the Wave, I share my updated recipe inspired by meals at The Good Earth in Leicester and old-school farmhouse cookbooks.

This version uses buckwheat flour, chunky mushrooms, and a savoury, cheesy topping that transforms the humble nut roast into a hearty centrepiece.

🤖💥 Are we living in a trillion-dollar hallucination?

In my latest column on Pushing the Wave, I revisit the AI boom—and ask whether, as Carole Cadwalladr suggests, it’s become just another financial bubble.

From Dutch tulips to dotcoms to neural nets, history may not repeat itself, but it certainly seems to rhyme.