The Earth has been writing her story for around four and a half billion years.
Mountains have risen, oceans have learned the language of the moon, forests have breathed in silence, and life has patiently rehearsed every possible way to exist.
Then we arrived.
If all that time were folded neatly into a single year,
humanity wouldn’t appear in January, or July, or even Christmas morning.
We would step onto the stage with barely eighteen minutes until midnight.
Eighteen minutes.
That’s all we’ve needed to crown ourselves kings of a kingdom we didn’t build.
We point at our cities, our satellites, our machines that reach beyond the stars, and call it progress.
Yet somehow, the hands clever enough to map distant galaxies still struggle to protect the soil beneath their own feet.
We’ve spent fortunes looking for another world while treating this one like somewhere we’re only passing through.
In those eighteen minutes, entire voices have fallen silent.
Species that survived ice ages, volcanoes, asteroids, have not survived us.
Every extinction is another verse removed from Earth’s oldest song.
And still, the forests whisper.
The rivers remember.
The wind carries warnings we keep mistaking for background noise.
Hotter summers.
Stronger storms.
Longer droughts.
Skies that burn.
The planet isn’t seeking revenge.
She’s showing us the consequence of forgetting that we belong to her, not the other way around.
But this isn’t the end unless we decide it is.
Because every generation inherits a pen.
Some use it to sign away tomorrow.
Others write a different future.
Every tree planted. Every river restored. Every choice made with something beyond ourselves in mind becomes another sentence in a story worth continuing.
Perhaps our eighteen minutes will not be remembered for how quickly we conquered,
but for the moment we finally understood
that the greatest measure of intelligence was never how far we could travel from Earth—
What’s one habit that has improved your life the most?
f I had to choose just one habit, it would be meditation.
Not because it gives me all the answers, but because it helps me stop fighting battles that only exist in my own mind.
For a long time, I held onto anger. I replayed conversations, revisited old hurts, and carried resentment far longer than I probably should have. I thought holding on somehow made me stronger or somehow proved I was right.
It didn’t.
It only hurt me.
The people or situations I was angry about often carried on with their lives while I carried the weight. Looking back, it seems like such a waste of energy.
Meditation changed that.
It didn’t erase the past. It simply taught me to observe my thoughts without becoming trapped by them. It reminded me that I always have a choice: hold on or let go.
Most of the time, letting go is the better option.
Not because what happened doesn’t matter, but because my peace matters more.
These days, I still get frustrated. I’m only human. But I no longer give anger a permanent home. I acknowledge it, learn what I can from it, and move forward .
That small daily practice has made me calmer, more patient, and far more present.
Funny really. I started meditating to quiet my mind.
What I discovered was that the greatest benefit wasn’t learning how to be still.
It was learning what was never worth carrying in the first place.
Stay Safe
Bc
Ps here’s a scribble I wrote on this subject some time ago
What’s a chapter of your life you’d title “The Hard Years” — and what got you through it?
If you’ve read my books or been following this blog for a while, you’ll probably know the answer before you’ve finished the question.
Roughly twenty years ago.
That was the chapter.
It was the point where it honestly felt like life had looked at me and thought, “Go on then… let’s see how much this bloke can actually take.”
I was on the verge of homelessness.
I was fighting to have a relationship with my daughters.
My PTSD was running riot.
I was autistic but had absolutely no idea at the time.
And my mental health?
Well… “shot to shit” is probably the most accurate medical diagnosis I can give you.
Let’s unpack that.
After a relationship ended, I found myself with nowhere to live. My family couldn’t help, so I ended up sleeping on the sofa of an old wrestling mate. It wasn’t glamorous, but it beat sleeping rough again.
Eventually she moved in with her boyfriend and we came up with what seemed, at the time, like a sensible solution.
I’d stay in her little council house and carry on paying the rent.
Yes.
I know.
Subletting.
Not exactly legal.
But when your choices are breaking the rules or sleeping rough, morality suddenly becomes a luxury.
While all that was going on, my daughters’ mum had started making contact as difficult as humanly possible.
I’d turn up to collect the girls.
“Oh… we’ve gone out.”
“They’re not here.”
“They don’t want to come.”
The excuses changed.
The result didn’t.
Letters from my solicitor about parental responsibility went unanswered.
Phone calls rarely got through.
And when they did, the girls were apparently never available.
It was only last year that I found out some of the things they’d been told about me growing up.
One of them was that I’d wanted my youngest aborted before she was born.
I hadn’t.
But lies have a habit of hanging around long after the people telling them have moved on.
Looking back now, I understand why I was falling apart.
Back then I just thought I was broken.
Everything piled on top of everything else.
The housing.
The court stuff.
Missing my girls.
The PTSD.
Trying to make sense of a brain that worked differently without knowing why.
So I did what a lot of blokes do when they’re drowning.
I reached for anything that promised five minutes of peace.
Drink.
Drugs.
Self-harm.
None of it fixed anything.
It just delayed having to feel it.
Then came the moment that genuinely broke me.
The council discovered I was living in the house.
I was told that if I cleared about £400 of rent arrears I could take over the tenancy.
I worked every bit of overtime I could.
Paid every penny.
Walked into the meeting convinced I’d finally caught a break.
Instead, I was told I had four weeks to move out.
When I reminded them about what I’d been promised, I was told I’d have to bid on the property along with everyone else.
I’d basically paid someone else’s rent arrears for nothing.
That one hurt.
For the next month I bid on every property I could.
Nothing.
That’s when I hit rock bottom.
I tried (for the first time) to end my life.
I woke up in hospital the following day to two police officers asking why I’d done it and telling me how selfish I’d been for upsetting everyone.
Different times.
Thankfully we’ve moved on a bit since then.
Recovery wasn’t some magical Disney montage.
It took years.
Hospital admissions.
Medication.
Counselling.
Learning how to exist without constantly wanting to disappear.
Then, during one of my final stays in hospital, a member of staff suggested I start writing down how I felt.
I nearly laughed.
Writing a diary?
Really?
I’d grown up believing men dealt with problems by getting on with them.
You certainly didn’t write about your feelings.
Still…
I’d tried almost everything else.
What was one more roll of the dice?
Those first pages weren’t poetry.
They were just chaos.
Anger.
Fear.
Grief.
Questions I didn’t know how to answer.
Slowly, without me really noticing, those pages started changing.
Sentences became verses.
Verses became poems.
Poems became something that made sense of everything that didn’t.
People often ask me what saved my life.
It wasn’t poetry.
Not at first.
Poetry came later.
What saved me was finally giving myself permission to be honest.
The poetry simply gave that honesty somewhere to live.
Without those notebooks there probably wouldn’t have been books.
There wouldn’t have been performances.
There wouldn’t have been conversations with complete strangers who’ve quietly said, “I thought I was the only one.”
There probably wouldn’t be this blog.
So what got me through The Hard Years?
My daughters.
Even when I couldn’t see them, they gave me something to keep fighting for.
Pure bloody-minded stubbornness.
I’ve never liked being told I can’t do something.
And somewhere deep down, underneath everything else, there was still a tiny voice saying,
“Don’t let this be how your story ends.”
Turns out that little voice was right.
Life isn’t perfect now.
It never will be.
But I’ve learned that the hardest chapters aren’t always the end of the book.
Sometimes they’re just the part that explains why the rest of the story matters.
If you’d asked me this question twenty years ago, I’d probably have said no.
Chaos was something to be avoided. Something that interrupted plans, made life difficult, and generally arrived at exactly the wrong moment. Like seagulls at a picnic or printers five minutes before a deadline.
These days?
I think chaos gets a bit of an unfair reputation.
Don’t get me wrong—I wouldn’t recommend living in constant turmoil. None of us thrive under endless stress. We all need moments of calm, stability and routine. They allow us to recover, reflect and simply breathe.
But the opposite is equally true.
Too much order can become its own prison.
Nature understands this far better than we do. Every ecosystem exists because opposing forces work together. Growth and decay. Creation and destruction. Day and night. Even at the smallest level, the universe is a constant dance between order and randomness.
Without variation, nothing evolves.
Without disruption, nothing adapts.
Without a little chaos… life becomes remarkably stagnant.
As artists, I think we understand this instinctively.
The perfect photograph rarely happens because everything went exactly to plan. Sometimes it’s the unexpected shaft of light breaking through the clouds. The bird that lands exactly where you weren’t expecting it. The rain that forces you to see a familiar landscape from a completely different perspective.
Poetry works much the same way.
Some of my favourite lines have arrived uninvited, usually while my brain has wandered off somewhere else entirely. They weren’t carefully engineered. They simply appeared, carrying truths I hadn’t consciously realised I was thinking about.
Chaos has a habit of introducing ideas that routine never would.
Science even backs this up.
Complex systems often need a degree of randomness to remain healthy. Too much order leads to rigidity. Too much chaos leads to collapse. Somewhere in the middle lies resilience—the ability to bend without breaking.
Perhaps we’re not so different.
We need structure to keep us grounded.
We need unpredictability to keep us growing.
The trick isn’t eliminating chaos.
It’s learning not to fear it.
Some of the biggest changes in my own life arrived disguised as disruption. At the time they felt uncomfortable, even frightening. Looking back, many of them became turning points that led me somewhere better than I’d originally planned.
Life has an odd sense of humour like that.
It rarely asks permission before teaching us something important.
So yes, I think a little chaos is good for us.
Not because it’s pleasant.
Not because it’s easy.
But because it reminds us that we’re still capable of adapting, creating and discovering new versions of ourselves.
After all, if every painting were perfectly symmetrical, every poem followed exactly the same rhythm, and every photograph captured the obvious angle…
Art would become predictable.
And life would be rather dull.
Sometimes it’s the beautifully untidy bits that make the whole picture worth looking at.
Every morning before the sun stretches itself across my window, before my coffee tastes like anything but bitter, happiness hides.
She’s crouched behind the blinds, folded into the corner of yesterday’s pillow, laughing quietly at me as if I don’t know how to look for her.
I try.
I try like I know her favorite hiding spots, like I know the exact way she breathes when she’s shy, like I can coax her out with half-empty mugs and songs that smell like home.
But she moves.
Slips under the fridge, slides into the cracks of my bathroom tiles, hides in the sound of my keys clattering like she’s daring me to follow.
So I do.
I follow.
And sometimes, just sometimes, she peeks out like a shy smile from a stranger in a crowded street.
For that moment, my chest remembers what it’s like to be full, and I swear I hear the echo of her saying,
you found me again.
Then she disappears.
And I swear I’ll find her tomorrow.
Because happiness isn’t something that knocks politely.
It is a professional hide-and-seek champion, undefeated for as long as I’ve known her.
And me?
I am the kid counting with my eyes closed, hands over my face, promising the dark that I’m still playing.
There’s a strange thing that happens as you get older.
You spend most of your youth trying desperately to become your own person — carving out your own identity, your own voice, your own little corner of the world.
You swear blind you’ll never become your parents, never pick up the odd habits of your grandparents, never start saying things like:
“Don’t leave that light on, it’s like Blackpool illuminations in here.”
And then one day…
You catch yourself doing exactly that.
For me, it happened in the shed.
Now, if you’ve read my ramblings before, you’ll know there’s always a shed somewhere in the story. Like some recurring side character that quietly steals the scene. But sheds aren’t really about wood and nails and rusty hinges, are they?
Not really.
They’re memory boxes.
Little sanctuaries built out of timber, silence, and inherited habits.
When I was younger, both my grandads had sheds — though, much like the men themselves, they were completely different worlds.
My maternal grandad, Walter was a retired firefighter and gentleman of the old school variety, had a shed that smelled of compost, damp wood, and honest work. Plant pots stacked everywhere. Garden canes leaning in corners. Twine, tools, and jars full of screws that “might come in useful one day.”
There was always an old bit of carpet on the floor.
Always a greenhouse nearby. Always tomatoes growing somewhere.
His shed wasn’t tidy by modern standards, but it made sense in the way only a working man’s shed can. Every object had a purpose. Every scratch and stain told a story.
And him?
He was happiest there.
Not because it was an escape from life — but because it was life.
Then there was my paternal grandfather Sydney — a former Rolls Royce engineer with the larger-than-life personality and a shed that felt more like a workshop for some eccentric inventor. Freezers, tools, cables, bits of machinery, shelves packed with things no child understood but instinctively believed were important.
He approached life like an engineer and a comedian trapped in the same body.
One minute he’d be discussing something technical enough to launch a rocket, and the next he’d be making ridiculous noises or blowing raspberries just to make us laugh.
And somehow, despite being worlds apart, both men found peace in exactly the same place.
A shed. A chair. Something to tinker with. A bit of quiet.
Funny, that.
Now I’m older — older than I ever imagined myself becoming when I was young and invincible — I’ve realised I’m becoming a strange hybrid of both of them.
I’ll spend one afternoon carefully organising tools and muttering about “doing the job properly,” then the next I’m wandering around annoying Mrs Bob with terrible jokes and sound effects like a man who’s escaped supervised care.
I catch myself polishing shoes properly. Taking pride in appearance. Pottering in the garden. Sitting in the shed just listening to the rain on the roof.
And honestly?
I don’t mind it one bit.
Because the older I get, the more I realise inheritance isn’t always money, property, or genetics.
Sometimes inheritance is smaller than that.
It’s habits.
Expressions.
Ways of sitting quietly with yourself.
The understanding that peace can sometimes be found with a mug of coffee in a shed while the world carries on without you for half an hour.
My own shed these days is a mixture of both men.
There’s the practical side — tools, chargers, bits of wood I refuse to throw away because they might become useful in approximately seventeen years time.
Then there’s the softer side.
A chair. A rug. A notebook. A place to write scribbles that occasionally become poetry.
It’s not glamorous. It’s not Pinterest-worthy. And it certainly wouldn’t survive one of those minimalist home makeover shows.
But it’s mine.
And somewhere in its walls live echoes of both the men who helped shape me.
The firefighter with soil on his hands and kindness in his heart.
And the engineer with a sharp mind and an even sharper sense of humour.
Maybe becoming your grandparents isn’t something to fear after all.
Maybe, if you’re lucky, it’s something to be grateful for.
Because one day you realise the people you loved never really leave.
They remain in the small things.
In the way you make tea. In the way you speak. In the habits you never consciously chose.
Or in the way you smile quietly to yourself while sitting in a shed on a warm afternoon, completely at peace for the first time all week.
Sure, I love comic books. I love photography. And I’m definitely passionate about Mrs Bob—but that’s a story for another day.
The thing that truly sets my soul on fire is poetry and mental health awareness.
At first glance, they might seem like two completely different worlds. One is art. The other is survival.
But for me, they’re inseparable.
Because poetry helped save my life.
More than twenty years ago, I wasn’t the happy, well-adjusted bloke many people know today. In truth, I was a mess. My mental health was spiralling dangerously out of control. I was drinking heavily, drowning emotions I didn’t understand, and convincing myself that I had to carry every burden alone.
Like many men of my generation, I believed I had to “man up.”
Keep quiet.
Stay strong.
Don’t talk about it.
But silence can be a dangerous thing.
There were times when the darkness became so overwhelming that I tried to end my life. More than once.
Eventually, after waking up in the resuscitation room of my local hospital following one particularly close call, something shifted inside me. Looking back now, I realise it was a crossroads.
I could continue pretending everything was fine until it killed me.
Or I could ask for help.
I chose help.
Not because I was brave.
Not because I suddenly had all the answers.
But because I looked at my two young children and realised I couldn’t leave them growing up without a father.
For the first time in my life, I stopped trying to fight alone.
One of the professionals helping me suggested I start writing down my thoughts and emotions. The idea was simple: get the chaos out of my head and onto paper so I could begin to understand it.
At first, I filled notebook after notebook with late-night scribbles. Thoughts. Fears. Anger. Pain. Hope. Anything that was bouncing around inside my head.
Then something unexpected happened.
As I read back through those pages, I started arranging some of the words into verses. The emotions were still raw and chaotic, but now they had rhythm and shape.
It wasn’t poetry as I know it today.
It was closer to rap lyrics.
But it was the beginning.
The real turning point came when I wrote a piece for a family member’s naming ceremony. Afterwards, people kept asking me where I’d found the poem.
When I told them I’d written it myself, they seemed genuinely surprised.
And so was I.
For the first time, I allowed myself to think:
Maybe I’m a poet.
Over the following two decades, I spent countless hours learning, practising, refining and developing my craft. Every poem taught me something new—not just about writing, but about myself.
In the early days, poetry was my pressure valve.
A way of releasing everything that threatened to consume me.
My work was dark.
Unflinching.
Sometimes uncomfortable.
I wrote about depression, self-harm, suicide and the realities of living with poor mental health. Topics many people preferred not to talk about.
But those conversations mattered.
They still do.
Today, my writing covers a wider range of subjects. There’s more light alongside the darkness. More hope alongside the pain.
Yet mental health remains close to my heart.
Particularly men’s mental health.
I’ve been inspired by some incredible slam poets and advocates who have used their voices to challenge the outdated belief that men should suffer in silence. The idea that being strong means never showing vulnerability. The lie that asking for help is weakness.
Because it isn’t.
Real strength is speaking up.
Real strength is reaching out.
Real strength is staying.
The truth is that there are countless blokes out there who are fighting battles nobody else can see. Men who smile on the outside while struggling desperately on the inside. Men who believe they’re alone.
They’re not.
And that’s why I keep writing.
Because somewhere, someone might be reading these words and recognising a piece of themselves.
Someone who feels exhausted.
Someone who feels trapped.
Someone who is standing closer to the edge than anyone realises.
If my poetry, my story, or my words can make just one person pause for a moment and choose to talk to someone—anyone—instead of suffering alone, then every difficult chapter of my journey has been worthwhile.
Because poetry didn’t just give me a voice.
It gave me a future.
And if sharing that future helps someone else find theirs, then I’ll keep writing for as long as I have words left to write.
For a long time, the biggest obstacle I faced wasn’t a lack of ability—it was believing I belonged. Like many writers, I wrestled with imposter syndrome and the fear of rejection, convinced my scribbles weren’t quite good enough to share.
Thankfully, Mrs Bob saw something in them that I couldn’t see in myself and encouraged me to start submitting my work.
Slowly, publication by publication, award by award, that little voice of doubt has begun to lose its grip.
It still whispers from time to time, but these days I’ve learned to answer it with evidence.
Sometimes overcoming fear isn’t about becoming fearless; it’s about having the courage to take the next step anyway.
The Ramblings of Bob Christian 