Dan Cullum

Maru and I have spent the past few days on Rottnest Island. Its nearest landmass (bar the Australian mainland) is more than 3,000kms away. It’s a small island with a 24km ring road and 63 bays and beaches.

Rottnest receives thousands of visitors per day, but with only two hotels on the island, most visitors are day trippers. They hire bikes, cycle round the island, take a few selfies with the impressively docile Quokkas, and then head back to the mainland.

Maru and I decided to stay for three nights, and we are so thrilled with our decision. The island is practically deserted in the early morning, and in late afternoon onwards (as the last ferry to the mainland is at 04:30pm).

I went for a sunrise run this morning and hardly saw a soul. And yesterday evening Maru and I found a high point, watched the sunset, and cycled back to the settlement on silent roads.

We’ve also been impressed with the infrastructure on Rottnest. It seems like each detail has been thought through carefully; from the quality of the roads, hydration stations, signage, rubbish bins, walkways and paths, and the few bakeries, cafes, public toilets, and restaurants on the island. They’ve made it easy for people to travel here and not leave a trace of rubbish or cause any damage to the local flora and fauna.

These fewer days have been magical and we’re thrilled with our decision to stay a a few nights.

My grandfather tried to help me learn how to ride a bike by sending me down his sloping backyard with a little push. I can’t remember if I fell off or if I crashed into the fence at the end of the yard. Both equally terrifying for a young lad.

Because whole ordeal with my granddad spooked me, it must’ve been my dad who later removed my training wheels and helped me learn how to ride.

However, since getting my nephew a balance bike, and seeing other young kids riding them through the London parks, it now seems like a much more obvious way to learn.

What really matters is learning how to balance. Training wheels are designed to compensate for poor balance, whereas balance bikes get kids to focus solely on building up their balance and coordination muscles before worrying about other things like peddling.

This feels like a much more natural way to learn how to ride a bike, and is a method I anticipate will continue to grow in popularity.

We’re at a beautiful spot in Western Australia where the view of the stars is unspoiled by light pollution.

Maru took a number of iPhone long exposure photos over the past few days, and the results were stunning.

We got especially lucky that the moon was just beginning to wax, so the sky was still very dark. Maru was able to capture multiple shots of the Milky Way, and considering the photos were taken on an iPhone, I think they turned out much better than I expected them to.

Here are my two favourites:

I wrote a few weeks ago about how Maru is a massive Oasis fan and how we missed out on tickets for their 2025 UK shows.

Since missing out, we’ve been following their tour announcements for other countries and have been signing up to all their ticket ballots.

The good news is we managed to secure tickets… in Mexico City in September 2025!

We’ve never travelled across continents to see a concert before, and we don’t take it for granted in the slightest that this is an extravagant expense. But we resolved long ago to invest in experiences over things, and I know we won’t regret this one!

Vamos!

It’s been a while since I’ve driven a really new car, but every few years or so—usually when renting a car—I get paired with one.

We picked up a lovely Mazda SUV here in Aus earlier today, and it’s well suited for Outback driving.

The thing that really impressed me was the car’s Heads Up Display (HUD). It’s a little projector that sits in front of the driver and projects a bunch of information onto a reflective screen on the windshield. This information looks like it’s floating out in front of the car, and it makes it easy for the driver to look at their speed, the speed, and other information without having to take their eyes off the road.

It’s simple, but it feels magical. It’s the kind of product that now I’ve experienced it, I want every driving experience to have it, and I struggle to imagine why I would ever not want it. That’s the best sign of a well designed product.

Maru and I are on the tarmac at Heathrow and are about to take off for Australia. It’s my first time visiting since I lived there nine years ago.

We’re super excited to celebrate the wedding of close friends of ours, and then we’ll spend a week travelling around (a little bit of) Western Australia (it’s a big place!).

We’re heading to Rottnest Island; we hear the quokkas are cute, and that cycling around the 20km ring road and snorkelling in the tranquil bays are a good way to spend a few days. We’ll then head down to the Margaret River region for another few days at the beach. And of course, we’re looking forward to the great Australian coffee and food!

I also recently picked up an inexpensive film camera from the early eighties, a Canon AE- Program, and I’m looking forward to capturing and developing the photos from this trip!

Right-o, let’s go!

Ketchup on a white shirt. A coffee stain on the table. A pen mark on a pair of trousers. We’ve all been there.

There’s no debating it though, stains are best dealt with immediately.

Stains aren’t limited to clothes and furniture. They can also appear in our friendships, relationships, work projects, and mindsets, to name a few. In these situations, the stain reaction time matters just as much. When there’s a problem—a stain—it’s best to deal with it right away.

I wrote earlier this year about how I’m training for a half marathon that will take place this November at the iconic Silverstone circuit.

When I started training, I hadn’t run more than 10kms in a single session. Ever. But now during my long run training sessions, I’m slowly increasing my mileage to get closer to the race distance of 21kms.

It’s really motivating that I get to hit distance-based personal bests as a by-product of training for this half marathon. It’s a buzz to know that I’ve never pushed my body farther on a single run, and it gives me added motivation to keep up my preparation for the race.

There’s a public running track about 3 kilometres from my house. It’s well-maintained with a thin gravel finish, and is set within a pocket of greenery on the outskirts of London’s Regents Park.

I spent an hour and a bit there on Saturday as part of my half marathon training, and I enjoyed seeing the large number of people using the track. There was a personal trainer and their client doing weight training at the edge of the grounds, people doing tempo runs and training for sprints, and couples doing intervals and long runs together.

It’s hard to measure the value of a well-maintain, highly-utilised public good. But I know the community would feel the impact of its absence if it wasn’t there.

There’s a great line from the film Margin Call, “Speak to me like a small child, or a golden retriever”.

Sam Lessin, one of the co-founders of Slow Ventures, builds on it by saying, “if you can’t explain it the way a golden retriever would understand, it probably isn’t gonna work.”

It’s a good reminder that even the simplest, clearest ideas ought to be simplified over and over again before they’re ready.

I was passing the famous Savoy hotel earlier this week. It was raining buckets. However, the valet was in a morning suit and top hat, protected only by his umbrella (which only does half the job on a truly wet day!).

He stood with pride out on The Strand, and with a smile he waved down taxis for guests waiting underneath the covered hotel entrance tucked away from the road.

There’s something about turning up in a morning suit and top hat, rain or shine, with a smile. It’s impressive. It signals an intention. It’s a commitment to doing things well.

There’s a positive correlation between the quality of my writing and how long I let it sit in my drafts folder.

If I’m rushed and post quickly, the quality of my writing suffers.

If I allow a day or two after writing a first draft to let my subconscious do its work, there’s always a glaring error or obvious improvement.

Hurry prevents the rewrite. And the rewrite is essential for good writing.

Plan accordingly.

Forecasts can lull us into a false sense of security about the future. We want to believe them because they allow us to feel like we have a degree of control—or certainty—over a situation that is often out of our hands.

However, a forecast is still a guess. It’ll likely be the best guess we have, but it’s far from certainty.

Once we get comfortable with this, we can use forecasts to guide our direction of travel, but we shouldn’t mistake it for the path.

I came across a crazy piece of data today. The market cap of Novo Nordisk, the creator of the drug Ozempic, is now larger than the GDP of its own country, Denmark.

Although these measures are not like for like, it does illustrate Novo Nordisk’s outsized and impressive role in the Danish economy. It also goes to show how the rise of semaglutide has had a profound impact on the world in a short period of time.

Persistence is admired.

Stubbornness is frowned upon.

There is a fine line that separates them, and sometimes it’s hard to know which side of the line we’re on.

Outsiders looking in will say the cause of our success was persistence, but they’ll also be willing to call our failures a consequence of our stubbornness.

My take is that if you’re going to dance with persistence, someone is inevitably going to call you a stubborn fool. And the strength of our convictions, despite the criticism, is determines how long we’ll keep going.