August 2026

The month opened with Zahra. It’s not often I find such a kindred spirit, and I felt we had a special connection. Sometimes things just feel easy and unforced, and I don’t always feel that with people when I’m travelling. The rarity of this experience really made me cherish and appreciate our connection, and in some ways reminded me that sometimes deep connections can form in only a matter of weeks, such a short space of time. She was in the house until about the middle of the month.

We had a lot of mornings at the Oranjezicht market. I was working M&A on UK hours, but not working massively hard. It was a period of deepness: artistic exploration on one side, a new friendship on the other. Both felt creative and inspiring, and both made me super happy.

None of that happens in a vacuum, though. A house either makes those connections easy or it quietly gets in the way, and I’ve stayed in enough colivings now to know that the difference is the host. Matt, who runs this one, calls himself a community facilitator rather than a host, and I think that’s the more honest word. He brings the frameworks. There’s the Monday meeting, where everyone lays out their week, and a small trick I really liked: when someone suggests an activity, their name goes next to it, so the plan belongs to a person rather than to the house. Then he steps back. He doesn’t try to control the experience, and that’s the part most places get wrong.

So much was crammed into that one week. I was still working, but with slightly less to do because of the holidays in the UK, and it was really intense.

There was the photo shoot trip with the friends launching ArmourView, a new sunglasses company. The shoot was simply content of us wearing the glasses. I hadn’t really planned to go that day, but the fact that I did made it one of the nicest days I had in Cape Town. Zahra was with us too! The scenery was beautiful, and I took some excellent photos. I really felt I was coming into my own as a photographer. I’d felt that for a long time, but it was nice to see people launching their own venture seeing real value in the photos I was taking. After dinner, Zahra and I were treated to a delicious meal at a hidden gem of a restaurant that our friend Ryon had introduced us to. The food was amazing, the nicest steak I had in Cape Town.

That week, we also went on the wine tram in Franschhoek, because it’s one of the big attractions around Cape Town, and it was a fabulous day. I don’t remember the trip much … though I remember it was really damn fun.

Next was the short trip the four of us took: Ryon, Robyn, Zahra and me. We went to West Coast National Park to see the flowers, which bloom only in spring. It was a sign that spring was coming, and it was one of the nicest things I’d ever seen, just waves of flowers everywhere. It reminded me of what spring means. I lose track of the seasons sometimes, from always changing location, and knowing what spring was and what it was bringing me made me really happy. Spring this year was a special time, despite it being summer coming on autumn for the rest of my friends and family back in Europe.

Robyn had also booked us an amazing experience at somewhere called the Strandloper in Langebaan. It was such a unique experience: a seafood feast in the middle of nowhere. It was dragged out in the best way. It didn’t finish quickly. It went on for a long time. There was a musician with a really weird voice playing guitar and songs at every table. I thought his name was Mr Tins, but it was actually Martin and I read his name wrong. We were on a lagoon where the water was super green, it was very windy, and the sand was flying everywhere. The whole experience just made me really happy.

It took me a while to work out why that afternoon landed as hard as it did. In the middle of it all there was a huge open fire they were cooking the seafood on, and we didn’t need it. It was the middle of a bright day. Nobody was there for the heat or the light. The fire was doing something else entirely, which was gathering people around itself. And there was music moving from table to table at the same time. Those are my two loves, fire and music, and when they collide in the same place I get a very pure kind of happiness out of it. I’m always a little shocked by how much. I came away wanting to recreate it deliberately: light a big fire, gather people around it, play for them.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself during that short trip, and I was really happy about where the deep friendships I was building were going. But there were downsides too. There was some stuff happening in my family, close personal issues for people very close to me, and I was dealing with that and trying to be a safe place for them. Some friends were also going through their own issues and speaking to me about the problems they were facing. I felt happy that we had such a good connection that they felt safe and comfortable enough to talk to me. It also mattered because it meant I was giving from a place of surplus rather than deficit. In parts of my last year I felt I was giving from deficit. Now I feel I’m giving from surplus.

Then we went out on a catamaran, and the ocean did something I still don’t quite believe. The sun was going down and the light was lying flat across the water, and then the dolphins arrived. Not a few of them. Two or three hundred, in layers, running a couple of hundred metres out towards Table Mountain. For the next half an hour nobody on that boat looked anywhere else. I’ve watched a lot of sunsets. I had never had one serenaded by dolphins.

When Matt asked me later for my three highlights of Cape Town, that was the one I finished on. The other two were the drive around the Cape Peninsula, where the winter light was so clean that everything looked like it was glowing, and the baboons and the penguins were out; and my birthday at Gold, which had drums and storytelling and strangers dressing up and dancing, and was the most complete African night I’ve had anywhere.

Another thing I was reflecting on was the feeling of excitement throughout the month because I knew I was going to Bulgaria to see close friends from my time in France. It made me feel I was coming into a new type of Digital Nomad world, my own space, with enough of a network that wherever I went next, I’d see people I already knew. It felt like going from family to family, which is a nicer feeling than solo travelling by yourself.

Overall, I’d say that week was one of the best weeks of my year.

This was my decompression week, the last week in Cape Town. I felt I’d done so much that I really had to catch up on work and reconnect with it, and that took up the bulk of the week.

So I went to a camera store to stock up on some supplies for my Fuji, and then I went up Table Mountain, found a nice spot, and recorded some beautiful music. That was my month’s handpan piece, the Table Mountain Groove. It felt good that it was a deliberate action for a whole day to just go up a mountain and record music. It was a special place, and I was alone on the mountain. I had all my recording gear, and I didn’t even know whether it would work, because I’d never used it in that context before. But it was fabulous to be up there alone, in the middle of nowhere, feeling the instrument become an extension of me.

I know about myself that if I play for a couple of hours, I might only get a five minute stretch where I really feel that I am the instrument and the instrument is me, that we’re connected in some way. On the mountain I managed a good five or ten minutes where it really felt like that. I was ecstatic in that moment. I felt I was self actualising, and I felt hunger for more. It made me feel I was playing music again. It’s launching me into the next part of my life: the start of a journey where I make more music, record regularly, play with other people, and enjoy and grow in my music. That’s going to be a big focus in the coming months.

Recording up there also made something click that I’ve been circling all year. I’m trying to move towards creation and away from consumption. Consuming is natural enough, we have to consume in order to survive, and I suspect I inherited an extra dose of it from religion, from the idea that the world was put here for us to enjoy and to eat from the bounties of. But that is consumption at its core, and at some point I fell into doing only that. What I want now is to leave the thing better than I found it. Music is the purest version of that I know of. A handpan is a sheet of metal that somebody hammered in exactly the right way, and if you then strike it in the right way it gives back something beautiful that wasn’t in the world before.

Then, later that week was the podcast with Matt Davison. We had a really nice chat about South Africa. It was an interesting one for me because it was the first time I’d podcasted so casually. The previous episodes were more intentional, with a clear purpose, focused on the strategic and value building side of nomadism. This time I was just being myself, podcasting with a friend, talking about what was meaningful to us, or at least meaningful to the moment, which in our case was South Africa, because that’s where I was.

It was nice to have such an easy flowing conversation. We bounced off each other well, and I liked how our stories merged and melded into each other. There was a cohesiveness to it that really made me happy.

His own story is a good one. He travelled for ten or fifteen years, and the honest reason was that South Africa has a tainted past and he wasn’t sure it was the right place to bet a future on. So he went looking for somewhere else to live. What he found instead, about ten years in, was a coliving in Palma, and it rearranged him. He’d always fancied running a backpackers or a hotel, and here was a third thing that was new and old at the same time, giving him and everyone around him a kind of fulfilment he hadn’t seen a place produce before. He nearly invested in that one. It closed, so he didn’t, which he now counts as a dodged bullet. Then he came home and spent a whole year looking for the right house in the right area, one that would actually pull people together, and when it all lined up he opened. That was two and a half years ago, and it’s the house I was sitting in while he told me.

There was a lot of reflection on Africa, my thoughts on it as a continent, and my experiences in Cape Town, which were very impactful on me, especially the periods where I was meeting people living in poverty. It humbles me. It makes me less arrogant. It makes me realise my place in the world a bit more.

Matt has to think about this more practically than I do, because he’s the one letting people into it. He told me one of his favourite questions on an application is simply whether you’ve been to Cape Town before, and if not, whether you’ve been to Africa at all, usually meaning Morocco or Egypt. He’s not gatekeeping. He’s trying to work out whether you understand what you’re walking into, because there is a level of desperation for money here that catches people out. He’s had guests land in Joburg and go wandering into the CBD looking for street art, which is not a thing you can do here and expect to keep hold of yourself or your wallet. Even the electric fencing is an adjustment, all that visible security. I’d always wanted to touch one. He offered, on the condition he got it on camera.

One thing I reflected on was that an experience like visiting Africa doesn’t have to give you a clear answer. It just has to give you part of an answer and show you part of the truth. You don’t need to go somewhere, figure everything out, and then make life changing decisions off the back of it. Instead, I feel that it builds responsiveness. When you have a good general understanding of things and a challenge arises, your subconscious brings that understanding to the fore. It knows you’re trying to solve something, and it has more data points to work from, so it gives a better informed answer. With fewer data points, the answer is less informed, and the decision made in that moment of reactivity is worse. That was the real learning for me.

I wish I could have had longer with Matt to talk about the more practical topics, like work and his love of SEO. But conversations are short. We don’t have time for everything, and sometimes it’s nicer to see what comes out and enjoy that small piece, because there’s no guarantee you’ll ever get to the next thing. You can only enjoy the specific thing in front of you.

Friday night was my leaving party. I went back to the restaurant at Durbanville Hills Winery. It wasn’t as good as the first time. The views were stunning, the place was stunning, and the wine was still really good. The food, which had been phenomenal last time, was a bit average. That’s okay. It wasn’t a big deal. Maybe that’s how we experience things: we taste something for the first time and it’s shocking and out of this world, then we go back and realise it wasn’t actually that amazing. Maybe it was the people that made it amazing, or the experience, or the smiles in the room, and that made the food taste better. Or maybe they had a different chef that day. Who knows? What I do know is the food wasn’t as good, but it was my leaving dinner, and it was still an amazing and special night with friends.

It was a very connecting moment. The whole crew was there, and it was Alba’s leaving dinner too. I wanted to make it special, to get everyone around one big table and have a proper party, and I had an amazing time. It was a fitting farewell to Cape Town, surrounded by loved ones, including friends I’d met in colivings in different parts of my life. It was heartwarming and full of love. I saw everyone together for the last time, bringing people together, connecting them, being that glue. Being part of that in that moment made me super happy.

On Saturday 22 August I flew out of Cape Town to Istanbul. It was a super long trip, and I regretted it, because I’d been very drunk the day before and had hardly slept. Then I took an overnight flight, which was even worse, because I couldn’t sleep the whole journey. When I landed there was still onward transport: another flight from Istanbul to Burgas, then a long taxi ride. It was intense, and it took me a while to recover. I arrived in Burgas on Sunday 23.

By the time I got there I was properly hollowed out. Three hours of sleep across two days, no food in me, and no cash either, only a card I wasn’t sure the local place would take. Two of the friends here gave me food. That was the whole event, and it landed enormously, and it made concrete the thing I’d been chewing on all month. Giving from a surplus is a completely different act from giving from a deficit. When you’re in deficit you take what’s offered with both hands. When you’re in surplus you have almost no idea how much the person in front of you needs it. It’s an obvious enough thing to say. It stopped being an abstraction the moment I was on the receiving end of it.

I’d always wanted to come to Burgas Coliving. I’d heard about it for a long time as a special place with special people. The cool thing is that a lot of the people here I already knew, or had built connections with through previous colivings. The more of these places I go to, the more I run into the same people and cross paths with them. I’m networking in a closed group, and that makes me super happy. It makes me feel I know a lot of the people around me.

Matt had said something about this that I keep turning over. He reckons Cape Coliving has built up enough of a brand that people now understand what it is they’re getting, and that the guests who understand it will follow them to whatever they open next. They’re looking at the Garden Route, which almost nobody thinks of as a place to go and stay, on the grounds that it’s beautiful and empty and was recently voted the best road trip in the world. He kept nudging me to tack an extra week onto Cape Town to go and see it, even though that costs him a week of my booking. My honest view is that people would come. Not everybody. The committed ones.

It was nice to be back somewhere with people I loved. Honestly, though, there were a few days of adjustment, which I think is natural in a completely new place. I hadn’t had a chance to do my groceries properly, I was still recovering from the flight, and I was still catching up on work. I arrived on a Sunday, so Monday to Friday I was working, and the weekend was the first time I really felt I was here.

On Saturday we went out on a catamaran on the Black Sea with the new group, and it was the first bonding moment. Not super deep, but nice. There were a lot of people on the boat, and I built a relationship with a few of them. It goes to show how hard that first week is when you’re new in a place. You really have to put yourself out there to build connections, even when you’re surrounded by people you share so many second connections with. Over time it balances out. It took a week, and I was coming back into my own self.

Somewhere in that week the shape of the whole month showed itself. I left Cape Town surrounded by people I loved, and I landed in Bulgaria among people I loved, and both of those were true on the same weekend. I’m going from family to family. I genuinely didn’t know it would ever be like this. For years I assumed travelling this way was a fundamentally lonely proposition, and that the cost of moving was that you kept starting again. It turns out that isn’t the deal. Which changes the maths on everything, because the reason not to invest in someone you meet on the road is that you’ll probably never see them again, and that reason is just wrong. I will see these people again. So it’s worth putting the work in now, and it makes me wonder how much deeper this all gets in another few years.

There was a close friend I’d wanted to surprise by getting here early, but they left for an unrelated reason before I could see them. It reminded me that sometimes we get lucky and sometimes we don’t. As long as we keep creating the intention and the opportunity to run into people again, there’s a good chance we will. Sometimes we won’t. But who knows what will happen instead, or who we’ll meet in their stead.

The important thing is, I settled. It took a week. Now I’m feeling comfortable.

The only other thing that happened this week was realising my handpan had gone out of tune on the flight, probably through my own neglect. I wasn’t treating it as well as I should have. It was in a heavy duty case, but I’d been throwing it around a bit on the travels, just to make things easier, because I was exhausted. I could have taken more care. At some point, I was jumping over a fence because a door was locked during my travel to Burgas, and I landed on the handpan. That probably wasn’t good for the tuning. Now I have to arrange for it to be sent for repairs, all the way back to the Netherlands, which will probably take three weeks, so I’ll be without my baby for a while. That’s difficult for me. But it’s just the ebbs and flows of life, the way the tide and the wind move. It was mostly bad luck. I thought it was invincible because of that big amazing case. Now that I know it isn’t, it’s a sobering thought, and I’ll work to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

I’m ending the month bonding with a nice new set of people and looking forward to a new month together. I’ll be here for the whole of September, start to finish. It’s just about to begin, and I’m excited to see what comes.

I’m feeling good. I’m feeling strong. My body’s feeling good, and all my internal checks are checking out. I’m looking forward to the end of the year, when I can fully focus on my work outside the corporate world.

And, yeah, that’s my August!