I have been talking to myself inside my head for as long as I can remember. From the second I wake to the second I drift off to sleep, and then, I think, in some form through the night as well. Sixty one years of an interior monologue that no one has ever heard. Not because I am secretive, but because that’s simply who I am. The thoughts do not arrive finished. They arrive as an opening position, and then I am turning them over, testing the counter-argument, running the same idea again from a different angle, the way a chess player holds several moves ahead at once, weighing one move sequence against another before committing to a play. Nothing gets resolved and discarded. It gets folded into whatever I already believed, until the unspoken thinking becomes part of an ever-expanding tapestry.
I am not sure when this first became apparent to me. Probably not until I was old enough to notice how easily other people spoke, how quickly they answered, how sure they sounded, and to wonder how they managed it, because for me an answer was never the first thing. It was usually the fifth or sixth, and the others didn’t disappear, they just didn’t get said. That they could be in a room with other people and simply be there, without a parallel conversation running beneath the surface of everything. For me that has never been possible. The inner voice has always been louder than the outer one.
I have lived in Aberdeen for most of my adult life. I am not sure I have ever quite belonged to it, though that is not really about the city. The truth is I have felt like an outsider everywhere, for as long as I can remember, not unhappily, but persistently. Whatever I see is scrutinised. Whatever I read is pre-processed before I have even acknowledged it. I walk into a room and some part of me is already cataloguing it: how something was made, who chose it, why it sits where it sits, before I have had a single ordinary thought about being in the room at all. As a child this made other children, including my older brother, a kind of permanent puzzle to me. I loved Sherlock Holmes the way some children love football, and Columbo and Ellery Queen alongside him, not the mysteries themselves so much as the kind of mind that could see through them. I did not want to be them so much as I wanted their explanation for things, that the chaos in front of you is not actually chaos, that everything can be read if you look closely enough. I think that is also why Wallace mattered so much. He was the first person I ever met whose mind seemed to work the way I wanted mine to.
I visit my father’s grave most weeks at Hazelhead Cemetery. Recently, standing at the graveside, I was talking to him quietly when I became aware of someone walking in the distance. I stopped immediately. Even in a cemetery that sprawls for miles, the presence of another human being was enough to silence me. Afterwards I sat in the car and tried to record what I had been thinking out loud. I sat there and thought: sixty one years of this. Sixty one years of thoughts that never quite make it out.
That is why this site exists.
Wallace was the wisest and most intelligent man I have ever known. I don’t say that as sentiment. I say it because everyone who knew him thought the same thing. He had a quality that is rarer than intelligence, which is that his wisdom was always in the service of other people. He was not selfish. He was thoughtful and kind. Always there. One summer he brought home a Commodore PET computer from school for the holidays. It was the kind of thing he did, not for any single reason I could fully explain, but because that was the shape of his curiosity and his generosity. I have never entirely understood his motives, but I am not surprised that it framed a lifelong passion. He died two years ago. I tell people I have been having an existential crisis ever since, and sometimes I mean it as a joke and sometimes I mean it completely. The truth, on the days I mean it completely, is that I cannot stop thinking about the fact that everything he was, the quiet intelligence, the patience, the particular shape of his generosity, is already fading, and will keep fading, until there is nothing left of it at all. Not the absence of a person but the slow disappearance of everything that made them irreplaceable, and the terrible mathematics of how quickly that happens.
I have a son who is finding his way in Glasgow, writing music, becoming himself in the particular way that young people do when they are finally free to. I am not naming him here. He hasn’t had the chance to say whether he wants to be a character in something I’ve written, and I don’t think that’s a courtesy I’m entitled to skip, even for my own son, even in something written for him. I want him to have something from me that is real. Not advice, exactly. Not instruction. Something closer to evidence, that his father thought carefully about the world, felt things deeply, and tried to say true things rather than convenient ones. I know how much it meant to have Wallace. I would like my son to have something that lasts.
Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations privately. There was no intended audience. He was a man trying to think clearly in difficult circumstances, writing into the void because the alternative was not writing at all. I am certainly not comparing myself to Marcus Aurelius. But I understand the impulse. Sometimes you write because you need to. Because sixty one years of interior monologue deserves at least one attempt to be heard.
Chronos Veritas means time and truth. Both feel urgent now in ways they never did before.
I do want to be heard. I don’t entirely know why that matters, but it does, the way it matters to anyone who has spent a long time feeling that they are speaking into silence. If you have ever felt that, if you have ever had the sense that you think and feel at a frequency that doesn’t quite match the world around you, then you are probably the reader I had in mind.
I am not an assertive man. I am soft spoken, and considered, and I try to contribute fully to every conversation I am part of. I once led a large global team, and built something we were all proud of, and the wider business was too. A change of strategy decided otherwise. The work was offshored, the team dissolved, and eventually so was my role. I still don’t know if the people who made that decision believed it, or simply needed to say it to make the numbers work. More often than I can count, I have been talked over, berated, or made to feel the fool for holding a different view, reached at by a different, no less careful, logic. I fight for what I believe in. I have simply learned, at real cost, that some people do not care whether an argument is right, only whether they can outlast you, and against that kind of indifference there is no fight to win, only the choice of how much of yourself you spend losing it. I do not know yet if this will be good. I only know I have never had a voice before that could not be talked over, and sixty-one years is a long time to wait for one.