Adam Wood

adamwood.blog · British English

The personal site / online notebook of Adam Wood, a cultural omnivore living in Oxford.

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Last post: Nov 8, 2026
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Nov 8, 2026 · original
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🌕 019 — Unnecessarily Burdensome
Oct 26, 2026 · original
Read on the web → Hi, hello, how are you? The Hunter’s Moon is out, and so it’s time for me to send you another loosely knitted-together set of thoughts under the title Syzygy Business . This issue is reaching you on International Chocolate Milkshake Day—a holiday that I invented eight years ago, to mark my late mother’s birthday after her passing. She loved a chocolate milkshake, and so if you need an excuse to enjoy a chocolate milkshake, I offer you this one. If you’d like to toast a small Welsh lady as you do so, simply lift your cup and think ‘to Sue’. • • • I read this piece in The New Yorker, by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, with increasing astonishment and delight: ‘Computer Chips Are the Most Magnificent Things Humanity Has Ever Made’. Not only is it a fantastic journalistic deep dive on the history of computer component design and manufacture, it’s full of brilliantly evocative writing.
I think I’m right in saying that Kiss...
Oct 9, 2026 · original
I think I’m right in saying that Kiss the Hippo have about a dozen shops in London, of which I’ve somehow visited zero. I’ve had beans from them a couple of times in the past, however, always with good results, and these are also proving to be a hit — rich without being overpowering. Reply by email
The baseball season is over for my beloved...
Oct 5, 2026 · original
The baseball season is over for my beloved Chicago Cubs, who suffered ignominious defeat in an NL Wild Card series against San Diego. I’ll be honest: it got to me a little, to have the season end that way. I had been daydreaming about Pete Crow-Armstrong delivering something memorable in the playoffs, to cap a pretty ridiculous MVP run in the regular season. I guess that’ll have to wait until next year. My malaise was helped a little by the news that a new Chad Harbach novel is arriving soon. His debut, The Art of Fielding (2011), is a delightful book about baseball and belonging; I had started to think perhaps it was the only one he would ever publish. Then a friend (and fellow fan of The Art… ) messaged to ask whether I’d heard the news : The Brightness arrives in a few short weeks’ time. I did little more than glance at the synopsis, but that was enough to learn that the new novel sha
🌕 018 — Whatever Happens in the Room is the Show
Sep 26, 2026 · original
Hi, hello, how are you? It’s autumn and the moon is full. What more could you ask for? I have started bringing home pocketfuls of conkers and distributing them throughout my home for their well-established and indisputable spider-deterrent properties. This, of course, is Syzygy Business , your lunar-monthly newsletter miscellany comprising a bunch of unrelated things that have been on my mind. As always, if you want more structured thoughts, you can find some of those on the blog . Recent posts over there have included a new painting ; a comedian we saw ; a film we saw ; a personal milestone . • • • I enjoyed this article in National Geographic : ‘ Learning to Listen in Japan ’, which is a portrait of the country’s jazz café culture. It’s reminiscent of the work of Craig Mod , and particularly his book on the same topic: Kissa by Kissa (2020). It sounds kind of ideal to me — spending a f
One of the principal reasons for our recent...
Sep 21, 2026 · original
One of the principal reasons for our recent trip to Brighton was to collect a painting. Some time ago I was fortunate enough to work alongside talented graphic designer / artist Siân Klein at an art centre here in Oxford. She fled the city and headed to the coast during pandemic times, but we’ve just about stayed in touch, and I recently learned that she’d turned her hand to landscapes. Specifically she’s produced a series of bright acrylic paintings that celebrate the geometry of cityscapes. As soon as I showed these to my special lady friend, she wondered aloud whether Siân would be interested in making a painting for us, of our former neighbourhood in Reykjavík. A few months later, the resulting piece now adorns one wall of our living space, and we couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. Reply by email
Daniel Kitson — Thrum
Sep 20, 2026 · original
I first saw Daniel Kitson live about a decade ago when he was touring a show titled Tree . It was the first time in the comedian’s career that he worked with a substantial piece of set dressing, and—more than a decade later—he mentions as part of his current show, Thrum , that the giant tree is still in storage. It’s a not-insignificant monthly expenditure, he explains, to keep it there. But environmentally-responsible disposal of the tree would cost ~10 months of storage costs in one go, which has never felt like the easier choice. Somehow, Kitson manages to make the dry maths of his financial imprudence into something hilarious. It speaks to his enormous likability and his skills as a comic, but it also nods to a key component of his onstage persona: projecting a complex mix of self-assurance and self-ridicule—a “generational talent” who cannot get out of his own way. What makes it wor
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026) dir Jane Schoenbrun
Sep 20, 2026 · original
I recently caught a screening of Jane Schoenbrun’s latest film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026), and I’m happy to report that they remain an interesting filmmaker making interesting films. The first of those, 2021’s We're All Going to the World's Fair , didn’t really work for me but was at least formally and visually inventive. I thought a better balance was struck with I Saw the TV Glow (2024), which was funny and tender as well as looking great (and calling on both 90s nostalgia and Buffy fandom). TSaDaCM feels like another case of Schoenbrun applying their own sensibilities onto a familiar genre template: this time, specifically, the meta slasher movie. The specifics of plot are less important than the fact that (as both writer and director) Schoenbrun is exploring very personal subjects in a smart way, and with a lightness of touch that invites the audience to participate
This week we spent a few days down...
Sep 20, 2026 · original
This week we spent a few days down in Brighton, and I have brought back coffee and food recommendations for you. Loam (Gloucester Rd) — a cute little spot in the heart of the city; probably the best coffee I had this trip 17 Grams (Meeting House Ln) — impeccable packaging design and a really good veggie breakfast; let down only by whoever was on aux playing some questionable stuff Fika (Madeira Dr) — really good coffee + stupendous baked treats 44 Poets (Rutland Rd, Hove) — worth the journey out to neighbouring Hove for the quiet vibe, cute dog 1 and good coffee Bonsai Plant Kitchen (Baker St) — hands down the best meal we had, and one of the best vegan restaurants I’ve ever eaten at; we ordered eight different dishes but I would have been perfectly content with a plateful of the tempura cauliflower or a huge bowl of the ‘dirty rice’ The Pickle (Bristol Rd) — a little further out in Kemp
Metric et al @ Brixton Academy
Sep 19, 2026 · original
Last Saturday we headed into London to see a trio of Canadian bands under the billing of the All The Feelings tour. We were staying in Camberwell, which is not an area of London that I know, so we took the opportunity to walk around — found a cute little park where we saw a guy repair a lamppost whilst a surprisingly inept spaniel failed to find and retrieve a tennis ball. We browsed at Lala Books , got pretty darn good pizza at Theo’s (where the chilli sauce is not to be underestimated), and then headed to Brixton Academy, a venue I used to attend frequently, but haven’t visited in years. We caught the tail end of Stars’ set celebrating 20+ years of Set Yourself on Fire (2004). I was then approached by a guy, five minutes later, asking whether they’d played yet… hated to give him the bad news. I made a game of spotting Toronto Blue Jays caps amongst the crowd until Broken Social Scene c
Today I am 16,676 days old, and I’ve...
Sep 18, 2026 · original
Today I am 16,676 days old, and I’ve been lucky enough to be in a relationship with my beloved special lady friend for 8,338 of those days: exactly half. From here on out, it’ll be true to say that I’ve spent more of my life with her than without, and I cannot express just how blessed that makes me feel. Reply by email
Do you know… I don’t think I’ve had...
Sep 13, 2026 · original
Do you know… I don’t think I’ve had beans from Square Mile before. Longstanding roasters based in north-east London—of which coffee YouTube’s own James Hoffman is co-founder—it’s a (semi-)local famous name that I’m yet to sample anything from. That’ll change soon though, as I just picked up this bag from the Eastcastle St branch of Kaffeine during our weekend stay in the big city. They do things right at Kaffeine, and it’s always worth a visit. I ordered a double espresso, which was potent and delicious, and was served with both a sip-able green tea palate cleanser and a glass of filtered water with a light citrus boost. Reply by email
At lunchtime today, I cycled out to Little...
Sep 9, 2026 · original
At lunchtime today, I cycled out to Little Clarendon Street to grab a coffee at the newly re-opened Common Ground . The vibe here is different from any other coffee spot in Oxford, partly because it’s also a co-working space / community arts hub. This afternoon, almost every customer was celebrating with the staff that they managed to take ownership and get the place up and running again. Add in good coffee, super comfy mismatched seating and someone in the corner playing out 70s soul vinyl — it felt good to have the doors open again. The current lease runs into next summer, so if you’re local to Oxford please go support the place. I did my part by grabbing a delicious cinnamon bun along with my long black. Reply by email
Recently I’ve been thinking about a couple of...
Sep 4, 2026 · original
Recently I’ve been thinking about a couple of different tech-related things that sort of overlap. One is the (emerging) shape of the new social web; the other is a pull I’m feeling to try and lessen reliance on American companies. I’ve been interested in / concerned by what became of social media for some time. 1 Since the sundering of Twitter in 2022, I’ve kept an eye on the various alternatives, with particular interest in Mastodon and Bluesky. Actually, to be more accurate, my interest has been in the protocols behind those platforms: ActivityPub and AT Protocol respectively. Both have their strengths, but in recent years I’ve become increasingly bullish on the prospect of an open social web based in AT Protocol (or atproto). Perhaps most important, its basis in individual ‘Personal Data Servers’ (PDSs), as a user-empowerment mechanism that also solves for centralisation, is very exci
Rachel Cusk — Life of M (2026)
Sep 2, 2026 · original
I spent the recent Bank Holiday reading the new book from Rachel Cusk. A continuation of her project to—seemingly—remove not just plot but character from the modern novel, it arrives freighted with some headline-grabbing buzz about the fact that the ‘fictional’ actress of which it purports to be a portrait is a (very) thinly-veiled Natalie Portman. I found it a somewhat frustrating read. Cusk’s language remains mesmerising, but here it’s pointed in a distinctly ungenerous, perhaps even unkind, direction. If the person depicted in the novel were entirely the product of Cusk’s imagination, you would say that she had made it her exercise to centre the novel around someone for whom the reader is invited to feel unsympathetic. So clear are the allusions to Portman’s career, however, that it begins to feel like spite. The bulk of the slender novel is bracketed by conversations between the actr
🌕 017 — Love is a Doing Word
Aug 29, 2026 · original
Hi, hello, how are you? This is Adam , making a delayed appearance in your inbox this lunar month. I recently learned from this awesome moon-tracking app , however, that most full moons last about three days, so I’m granting myself leeway. Did you (European folk) catch the eclipse a little while ago? And what about the meteor shower? For a while there it felt as though the sky was just showing off. Here in the UK there was also a sense that the Sun was angry at having been momentarily occluded. Days of 36ºC had me sheltering in place. As I write this, however, under the pale effusion of the Sturgeon Moon, things are far more comfortable. Autumn approaches. For no better reason than that I realised I could, I recently watched a double-bill of new Charli XCX movies. The first was The Moment (2026), a supremely arch meta-mocumentary focussed on the furore surrounding Charli’s summer-definin
I like trying out new roasters and I...
Aug 22, 2026 · original
I like trying out new roasters and I like funky packaging, so this pick-up from Edinburgh’s own Cult Coffee Roasters is a win-win for me. Actually, a triple win: check out the neat tarot card-style pack-in that was foil-wrapped inside—come for the coffee, get a free bookmark. I’ve made a couple of cups of this already, as filter: one in the Chemex and another using a single-serving no-bypass dripper. Both have been pleasantly complex, if a little darker / heavier than I’d usually go. Reply by email
Jem Calder
Aug 16, 2026 · original
Shhh… don’t tell my reading group , but I’ve also been seeing other books. In fact, I just got done with a pair of books by British writer Jem Calder . Reward System (2023) is a set of interlinked stories, and this year’s I Want You to Be Happy is Calder’s first novel. The two share a similar focus, centring a relationship between a man in his mid-to-late thirties and a woman in her early-to-mid twenties. Throughout both, Calder shows compassion for his characters where it would have been easier to draw one or other of them as a villain. Both have flaws (some more serious than others), but I was impressed by the nuance with which Calder could write from both perspectives. This is the case in the novel, in particular, where the chapters alternate perspectives, focussing first on Joey and then on Chuck as they navigate their new romance. Calder uses this oscillation to good effect. In one
This afternoon we went for a ~10km walk...
Aug 2, 2026 · original
This afternoon we went for a ~10km walk around Wytham Woods — our first visit in a few years. Very peaceful, very dry right now. We came upon the pretty well-preserved head of a fox. PSA: if you’re somewhere in the 5’10”–6’2” range, I left a pretty good walking stick next to the exit out of Botley Gate car park. You’re welcome. Reply by email
New in the hopper this morning is this...
Jul 18, 2026 · original
New in the hopper this morning is this offering from Edinburgh-based roasters Carter . I didn’t get the ‘forest fruit cake’ in my first cup (as filter), but it was clean and pleasant. Reply by email

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