Between this Man Feelings entry and the last, I’ve turned 40. Happy birthday, me! I was going to use this edition to reflect on what I’ve learned over forty years on Earth but I’m writing this after a long week of work, parenting and “adulting” and the only insight I currently have to share is “don’t do the weekly grocery shop with both kids at 6pm on a Friday before anyone’s eaten anything”. Words to live by, I’m sure.
On the same day as my birthday, 8 September, I also released an EP of my five newest songs. I’d been hoping to get an entire album finished by now but I think the chaos of selling, buying and moving house in the first half of this year really took away my capacity to squeeze any more out of my free time.
I called the EP (and the lead song on it) “Shed Your Skin”. It’s partly a little nod to my old garden shed music studio, which I left behind last month when we moved house. It’s where all of these songs were written and recorded (with the notable exception of two guitar solos which I recorded in the home office of my new house) and I wanted to commemorate it somehow.
But the name is also a theme: I called my last album “Masks” (again, the closing track shared the title) and the rationale was to do with pretence, fantasy and wish fulfilment: in another life, I would’ve loved to be a professional musician. “Masks” was the sound of me putting on various masks: folk singer, rock star, guitar hero. “Shed Your Skin” is the sound of, well, letting go.
There’s a song on there about being laid off from my job (written from the perspective of pity of the poor individual who has to deliver the news); there’s a song about divorce (don’t worry, Maddy and I are fine), and a song about someone who needs to stop sitting on the fence and just make a decision (written before Ed Sheeran’s latest shenanigans. Sheeranigans?). This is me shedding my skin.
And turning 40 is the same. There’s no more clinging on to youth, though I still feel young. I’m a parent; a middle manager; a middle class stereotype. I’m not pretending (any more) that the creative dreams of my teens and 20s are still achievable: but equally, I’m happy with my life, satisfied with my achievements and enjoying just living.
So that’s the pitch: go listen to five songs about the ravages of oncoming middle age. Or give it a spin to help me bid goodbye to my beloved shed.
Until the next record drops…
Reading this week
1. Where To, Brum? A Moan (Tom Maguire, Concrete Brum)
“Birmingham is being remade but not by us. No longer even pretending to be for us, as in the early Post-War days when Herbert Manzoni excoriated the city to install his precious ringroads. Things are added and taken away according to sums whose workings we’re not allowed to see. We’re told it will make things better, but I’m not sure even the most panglossian YIMBY truly believes that.”
As a Birmingham resident this is a tough but fair read, written by someone who knows the place and feels it. And if you’re not a Brummie—adoptive or otherwise—then this is coming for your city too, it’s just not happened yet.
2. Authoritarian nationalism in the UK’s second city: Birmingham and the conjuncture of Not-Yet-Fascism (David Stark, Interregnum)
“It is precisely this question of political belonging that has become contested in Stirchley. Between September 2025 and May 2026, Raise the Colours carried out flagging ‘operations’ on seven separate occasions, four of them in October 2025 alone. One such intervention was tellingly described in the organisation’s own social media output as the ‘Battle of Stirchley’. This language is revealing. Stirchley was selected not despite its perceived hostility to the flagging movement, but because of it.”
A forensic writeup of the invasion of far-right “activists” who inserted themselves into Stirchley, where I live, to aggressively put up flags and abuse locals. The folks involved have been mostly thwarted by far-too-late legal enforcement, but this article captures their motivation perfectly.
3. Where a cat could sit (Nat Guest)
“Having been alone for so long, I am not sure how I will find navigating around another being in my space; another entity with their own wants and needs. There is the potential there for casual companionship, emotional regulation, a sense of structure. But there is also the risk of interpersonal expectations and demands; the intrusion into space; the additional gravity of another small body. Having worked so hard to carve out this small terrain of solitude, the idea of introducing an unknown into it feels destabilising.
Next week a cat will arrive and I am a little frightened. But he will be a little frightened too and so I hope we will work something out together.”
I’ve known Nat for decades and we sat together during Creative Writing 101 at university. Her writing has always been earthy, profound and witty and this piece about gaining a cat is characteristically beautiful, funny and thought-provoking.
4. Deep Blue Something’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” finds forever in “kind of” (Niko Stratis, Paste Magazine)
“They’re left with nothing, just Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which the singer and all their desire clings to, and which the fading vision of their love agrees to kind of liking. And it’s in those two words—“kind of”—that a bridge is built. Tenuous and flimsy and sure to crumble, but enough to allow both the desire and the object of it to stand in a place where they might remain connected.”
I was briefly obsessed with this song in primary school when I harboured a short but powerful desire to be a pop star; specifically one singing this song. I didn’t understand any of the lyrics but I just… kind of liked it?
Fun and miscellany this week
1. Kids using Spotify podcast comments as a social network (solomonrmissouri, Bluesky)
This is hilarious. Some US teenagers, blocked from every social network, were discovered hiding out in the unused comment section of random NPR podcast episodes on Spotify, holding conversations with each other.
2. Charlotte Church roasting Ed Sheeran over a Dead Kennedys cover (Millions of Chopped Landlord Pieces, Bluesky)
I already knew (via my partner Maddy who’s a huge fan) that Charlotte Church was a badass, but this clip of her absolutely destroying Ed Sheeran for his fence-sitting on Gaza is amazing, and then she launches into a powerful punk rock cover.
3. The Facial Expressions of Tethys (Bart Gonnissen, Bluesky)
“The Facial Expressions of Tethys by artist Julius von Bismarck. A suspended high-sea buoy that moves in real time. Sensors on a twin buoy out in the Atlantic Ocean send live satellite data to motors inside the museum. This makes the indoor buoy copy the exact, real-time movements of the ocean waves.”
I can’t convey with mere words how strange and beautiful this is, so take a look at the video for yourself.