Dan Cullum

I bought some shallots the other day from Tesco and was surprised to see a label at the bottom of the bag: “Grown in Norfolk UK by Chris Kitchen”.

It’s a small detail, but there’s something about public accountability and knowing the source of our food. Whether it makes us feel closer to our food, or more mindful of its journey, or that there is always a name and face behind the packaging.

It’s a welcome addition.

When I was 11 years old I started taking guitar lessons. The way we picked my first teacher was simple: we got a single recommendation from the local music store, did a trial lesson, and that was that—he became my teacher for the next year. There was no comparison between teachers, no assessment of his skill level, and no way of knowing (without a lot of work) if there were better suited teachers out there.

The above was normal 20 years ago, but it’s a huge contrast with my recent search for a guitar teacher. I’ve become interested in a very particular 5-string tuning developed by Jacob Collier. Via YouTube I found a musician in Colorado that has put a lot of time and effort into understanding this tuning. So when I found out he gives lessons over Zoom, it was an easy decision for me. Within 24 hours of emailing him, I had paid for, and booked, our first lesson.

The internet is amazing.

Rugby and American football are similar. A team of people try move a ball down a field, there’s a lot of tackling, they score tries or touchdowns, and they kick goals.

There are also many differences, such as backward-only passing in rugby versus forward-passing in American football, Another difference is the topic of today’s post: Blocking vs. Obstruction.

In American football when the ball carrier is running up the field, their team mates can run alongside them and “block” opponents from attempting a tackle. The more opponents blocked, the better.

In rugby when the ball carrier is running up the field, their team mates cannot block opponents from attempting a tackle. If they do, this is considered an “obstruction”. In contrast to American football, the rugby player needs to face the opposition alone. If a defending player obstructs repeatedly, they get a yellow card and are sent to the “sin bin” for 10 minutes.

I love how in one sport an action is celebrated, whereas in the other sport the exact same action is considered foul play.

Extending this idea beyond sport, it always pays to know what game we’re playing.

A number of you messaged me after I wrote about my big A0 calendar, and there was a quite a lot of interest in doing the same.

The main reason why I got the calendar was to visualise upcoming events, and it’s been really useful for that purpose.

However, an unexpected benefit is being able to look back at all the things that have happened this year: friends and family visiting, trips taken, and shows we’ve gone to. Those little markings on my calendar give me a snapshot of my year so far, and serve as a reminder to be grateful.

It’s widely known, and proven, that brushing our teeth for a minimum of two minutes is required for good oral health and hygiene.

And although electric toothbrushes are widely regarded by dentists as being superior to manual toothbrushes, I think they stand atop the podium because of one simple thing: the two-minute timer. It removes the need for measurement and thinking. It turns an action critical for our health into something automatic.

Although the invention can’t be attributed to a specific person, I’m grateful that someone, or some group of people, back in the 90s pushed for this to become a standard across all electric toothbrushes.

The benefit to cost ratio is difficult to calculate, but I bet it’s insane.

You know how your phone gets sluggish and slow when its battery gets down to 5% charge? It takes a moment for apps to respond, and there is a noticeable lag between input and response.

Our bodies are the same. Hard tasks, difficult conversations, and deep thinking should be saved for when the body battery is fully charged.

If you read my post from a few days ago, you’ll know Maru and I were hoping to get Oasis tickets. Unfortunately, we missed out.

Even after waiting for 3-4 hours to get into Ticketmaster, there were 400,000 people ahead of us in the queue for our chosen concert date. There was no chance we were getting a ticket.

There’s been a lot of complaining online about how poor the ticketing experience was. Millions of hours were wasted by hundreds of thousands of fans who missed out.

It made me think that “live” ticket sales are antiquated, not to mention an impossible task for a ticketing company to manage at the point of peak demand.

Why not just have a ticket ballot that’s verified by mobile phone number? People can have many email addresses but are less likely to have many phones. And it would save millions of hours of wasted time.

For the past six years, Maru and I have been playing poker with the same group of friends.

In all that time, our buy-in hasn’t changed: a token £5. And our collective poker skills have not improved; at all.

But now we spend much longer having dinner, and much less time playing poker. I think that, and the lack of poker improvement, says a lot about what’s really important.

We’re in Wales for the weekend, and on our way out of London there was a huge traffic jam on the motorway. The cars were backed up for what seemed like a few kilometres at least.

Thankfully, we won the coin flip and the jam was on the other side of the road.

It got me thinking about how if I was caught in the multi-hour jam, I’d likely be complaining during, and for many hours after.

However, because I was on the side with free flowing traffic, I was grateful for a few minutes but quickly moved on.

It reminded me of one of our human tendencies to feel loss more acutely than we feel gain. It’s an instinct worth fighting against.

The recent Oasis announcement—the reunion of the famous, feuding Gallagher brothers to play seventeen shows together in the UK and Ireland in 2025—has sent music fans around the world into a frenzy. It will be their first show in 16 years since splitting in 2009.

Since Maru and I met in 2010, she’s been ever consistent about her favourite band: Oasis. I couldn’t believe it when she showed me the official live concert video of Oasis at River Plate Stadium in Buenos Aires where during Wonderwall the camera zooms in on Maru waving her arms and singing along.

Coincidentally, we were at a local Italian restaurant in Kentish Town about three months ago when Noel Gallagher sat down at the table next to us. Maru told Noel how much she appreciated his music, and after her being called “one of the most polite fans he’s ever met’, he insisted they take a photo. She was over the moon.

All this to say, we’ll be hoping for some good luck this Saturday at 9am when tickets come on sale.

I learned recently that a dog’s sense of smell is more than 10,000 times more acute than humans’. That’s order of magnitude difference is hard to fathom.

We have about 6 million olfactory receptors, whereas a dog has over 300 million. I thought this would imply that their sense of smell would only be 50x better, but when I asked Claude AI it told me, “The number of olfactory receptors alone doesn’t directly translate to the overall sensitivity of smell. It’s an oversimplification to assume a linear relationship between receptor count and smell acuity.”

A dog can tell so many things through its nose. It can identify individual humans and dogs; including their gender. They can detect health conditions, like if someone has low blood sugar. They can smell emotions and pregnancy. They can tell when there’s a change in the weather, and how long it has been since someone or something has been in the area. It’s really quite mind-blowing.

So next time you’re out on a walk with your furry friend, remember to let em smell.

The idea always sounds better in our head.

And there’s a temptation to leave it there; to let it remain a dream, a vision, and a possibility. That’s because when it stays in our head, we still get the joy of thinking it’s good idea, but we don’t have to deal with any of the criticism.

However, when we put the idea down on paper or share it with others, we’re inviting challenge, criticism, and rejection. And that’s precisely what’s needed to turn a dud idea into a gem.

I enjoy Celtic music, in particular the bagpipes. There’s something intriguing and captivating about low drone and the melody that sings over the top.

A friend recently recommended Brighde Chaimbeul’s album ‘Carry them with Us’, and I was struck by the fourth song: Banish The Giant of Doubt & Despair.

It’s a bold name that feels like it has a textured and complex story behind it. The mystery is part of the magic too.

If you enjoy Celtic music too, give the album a listen!

On his podcast, Steven Bartlett asked Jimmy Carr, the British-Irish comedian, what was his top piece of advice to become a better speaker.

Carr replied, “Speak at 92 beats per minute.”

There’s a rhythm to the words when they come out at 92 bpm. Carr is such a believer in it that he listens to playlists with only songs at 92 bpm prior to going out on stage to do his set.

There isn’t an exact science here, but Carr is a fantastic orator, and I think there’s something here.

There’s a baseline set of things we do every day to stay healthy and feel our best.

We sleep, we eat, we brush our teeth, we floss, we shower, we change our clothes.

Fitness—or some form of physical activity—should be on the list too. But it’s all too easy to skip, to find an excuse, or to push it to tomorrow.

And don’t think I’m on my high horse here. Most of the musings on this blog are lessons I need to hear. I didn’t want to run today, nor did I want to lift.

But then I thought: fitness and flossing.