essays

Personal essays about cloth, walking, cities, memory, and learning to pay attention.

June 2026

The boat at night

A small sailing boat on big water at night, and the pair of loafers that pulled the thread back to it this spring.

June 2026

Colour after the fire

Henk Chabot's 1940 fire painting hangs in a museum with my family name. Rotterdam keeps much of its art outside, including Zadkine's hollow figure and Gabo's steel construction.

May 2026

The old men on the square

A question typed from a park bench, and the warmest Wednesday of a London March.

May 2026

Speed-running taste

Jeans and department-store shirts in January 2025; sixteen months later, guessing a cloth's weight by hand.

May 2026

Slightly more orange

This site was supposed to look like E. H. Shepard's pencil work. After three rounds of yellow, the log read 'still 100% LLM generated tell look, just slightly more orange.'

February 2026

Britain's war story

I'm Dutch; my war begins with absence. What the Blitz spirit and the Keep Calm mugs look like from Rotterdam.

February 2026

England's rentier economy

A friend's remark over dinner sent me digging through demography, class history, housing, and food bank numbers.