About

I am Romanian by birth, German by formation, British by location and paperwork. I lived through one system collapsing when I was small, and I have spent my adult life in two countries whose self-image keeps fraying at the edges. I am married to a Briton, raising two British children, paying British taxes and watching the country that took me in convince itself, every morning, that it is being destroyed.

Most of it is not being destroyed. Some of it is broken. Some of it is being broken on purpose. A lot of it is fine, in the boring, daily, working-out-of-Suffolk way that things are fine. The problem is the volume.

The Scotland Route is a book written in instalments. It is about the escape plan I make every morning and have no intention of using, and about what that plan is actually for. Some of it is autobiography, because the only authority I have in a conversation about fear is that I grew up in a country that was very afraid, and I have lived in two countries since that are nominally not. Some of it is argument. Some of it is what I tell my own kids about the world they are walking into, which is also what I am still telling myself.

The essays filed off the route are separate. They tend to be about how a story reaches me and what happens to it on the way, which is the same subject approached from the other end.

Writing here is posted as it is finished. There is a feed if you want it, and the archive of earlier pieces remains on Substack.