September 2026

September opened with Suzie refusing to start. Suzie is Sarah and Jordy’s camper, and Jordy had been upset about her not working for a long time. Then Ramon had a look, and between the two of them they had it fixed in about two minutes. I guess Jordy should just go to the mechanic. One day, he might end up blowing Suzie up (#IYKYK).

On the Wednesday, Sarah ran a Bowl of Dreams in the garden. I got to restate my dream, and I was really happy to find it was still the same as the original one I’d talked through with her in April, when we were together. The fact that it’s still the same must mean that it’s a real one!

Friday was a Bulgarian wine tasting, down in the cellar of the house. We tasted lots of different Bulgarian wines, and it was fantastic. Those wines are actually really nice. They aren’t quite as crisp as I’d like them to be, and it made me appreciate the South African wines more, but I enjoyed the tasting. Katya, the owner of the coliving, was a fabulous host.

And that night, I had a surprise visit from a close friend of mine, Brookie. She had the time, so she came, and it made me feel special. We have very different schedules and rhythms, but it was amazing to be around her, because she is full of energy. She is more backpacker traveller, while I am more slowmad.

On Sunday Jordy, Sarah, Brookie and I went out in Suzie to the Fisherman’s Village, Chengene Skele, on the coast south of Burgas. We spent the afternoon at the beach bar. The thing I remember about that day is the light. It was fabulous all day. I love how light can transform a landscape.

Brookie and I found a small bar by the water, looking out as it got dark, and we drank wine. It was just really beautiful. We lost track of time and had to walk to the restaurant in the village where everybody else was. It was dark, we were super drunk, and we were kind of falling over each other the whole way. We finally got there, and we had a delicious meal.

Monday was the Sausage Party, with Jordy and me on the BBQ. We had about sixty sausages and only managed to eat half of them, so there were leftovers for the next day. We played Oktoberfest music, there was a lot of good banter, we told our favourite sausage stories and sang sausage songs, and at the end we had some Hungarian liqueurs Brookie had brought, called pálinka.

It was also Sergio’s last night. He left the next day, so we all said goodbye to him one by one as everybody went off to sleep. It was just a nice barbecue in the garden, and a cute bonding moment.

Food is how this house works, and a lot of that is Selin, the community manager here. The day before we recorded the podcast, her first printed cookbook arrived from the printers: Recipes that Build Communities, Summer Edition. Katya’s moussaka is in there. Ali’s crispy Italian tomato pizza. My chicken recipe will go in soon (#IYKYK). She told me that’s how the cookbook started, as a way to hold onto the memories made around tables in colivings, because when you cook with people you’re not just feeding them, you’re connecting them.

It was very special that Brookie visited, and I missed her when she left.

I like to think that as nomads, if we make opportunities to see our friends, we’ll get the chance to see them. But only if one of us makes that intentional effort. She made that effort, and I really appreciate that she did.

After Brookie left on the Tuesday, I got sick, and I spent a lot of this week in bed.

I’ll be honest: I actually like being sick. Being sick gives you an excuse to do nothing, and that excuse doesn’t come along very often in my life. So when my body tells me it’s time to calm down, take a break, and just lie in bed and do nothing except be sick, I’m happy to take it. So I’d just like to say: thank you, body, for making me sick and giving me this chance to decompress.

I stayed in bed and watched TV. The second series of The Gentlemen had just come out on Netflix, and I enjoyed it. I even rewatched the first series, because I’d forgotten what had happened. Basically, it was nice to be sick in bed.

I wasn’t only watching TV, though. It turns out that lying in bed with a laptop is a very productive place to be, because I spent a lot of that week making AI content. This is what I did with my two hundred euros a month Claude plan: five reels for the nomad channel, most of them cut out of the podcast archive. This is what I came up with.

I did like how it turned out. There’s a lot of polishing left to do, and I think it still feels a bit like AI slop. But the potential of this is great. This is just my first try, in my first month, and I maxed out the plan doing it, in a few days. If I keep bringing more AI editing into the creative process over the next few months, I could really leverage the new capabilities of this amazing tool.

So the week was really about regrouping. Lying still on the outside, and pushing hard on the inside.

It wasn’t just me and the laptop, either. On the Saturday I recorded the podcast with Selin in the courtyard, my podcast guest here in Bulgaria, and it turned out we were on the same page. For her Master’s she chose AI tools and content personalisation, not the safe topic but the one that would teach her something, and in one of the interviews for it somebody mentioned a tool called Lovable. She was managing a coliving’s content at the time, struggling to organise photos out of WhatsApp, and something clicked. It’s like the butterfly effect, she says. That one conversation became her project, Co Club.

She built it with Lovable and vibe-coding. No traditional coding, no computer science degree, just because she wanted to. You don’t have to be technical to build something technical, and once you see that it’s possible, the fear falls away. Which is more or less what I was also doing from my bed that same week.

I was interlacing that with a few other things, though. The house is out at the Burgas Mineral Baths, which are natural hot springs. Suleiman the Magnificent had his own bathhouse built there in the 1500s, and it’s still a pretty famous spa in the Balkans.

These days there’s also a modern, state-of-the-art spa nearby, and it isn’t even that expensive. I went and enjoyed exposing myself to all the different temperatures as I sat in rooms with different levels of humidity.

Aside from that, I walked. The forest around the baths is beautiful, very green and very lush, and lovely to walk in while listening to music.

I haven’t mentioned Andres yet. I met him last year at Cactus Coliving in Tenerife, and I had no idea he was coming here. At the start of the month he walked into the garden, and I was like, oh, I know you!

It’s a very nice feeling when people from other times of your life appear in the present moment and rekindle the good times you had with them. It was nice to catch up with him.

It’s also cool to have a photographer in the house. I like taking photos, but I usually don’t get any of me, so having another photographer around is always a really nice experience.

Andres turning up was another reminder that the coliving world is very small, and that seeing people again is a normal occurrence. That makes me happy, because it means that whenever I say goodbye to people, wherever I am, I’m likely to see them again. That’s a nice feeling.

On those walks I was listening to a lot of handpan music, because my handpan was away being repaired. They told me it could take up to six weeks, which is a really long time to be without my baby.

So, because my handpan was away, I did a tongue drum recording. There’s a drum in the house called a Sonodrum, which is basically a tongue drum tuned to D major. On the Sunday I took it out into the garden, sat down by a fire, and recorded. Fire and music, my two loves, in the same place again. I recorded for almost half an hour and kept six minutes. That’s this month’s music, Tongues by the Fire.

The problem with a tongue drum is that it’s a relatively cheap, mass-produced instrument. The notes are cut with a laser machine, rather than hammered by hand like on a handpan. And this drum fights with you a lot. Or at least, it fought with me.

Some of the notes were out of tune, so I had to really adapt my playing. I had to find my way through those notes and still work them into the song somehow, without letting them spoil my groove. The drum also has a lot of stray overtones. When you play faster, they layer over each other and make a rather blaring sound, which I did not like. And the way it’s laid out, there’s no proper place to establish a central groove, so you have to establish it with what would normally be supporting tones. That was unpleasant.

Effectively, the tongue drum was always fighting against me, whereas the handpan is always fighting for me. In other words, the handpan covers my mistakes, and still makes my music sound good even when I don’t play it perfectly. The tongue drum exposes my mistakes, and it needs a much more thought-out way of playing.

Still, I’m grateful that this drum was in the house and that I was able to play it. I’d much rather play this drum than play nothing. As the old adage goes, when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.

I was meant to stay in Bulgaria for all of weeks three and four. Then I had a call with my friend Andreea, who is running the COLOC Creator Residency in Bruges. Yes, that Andreea, who was on my podcast! She was telling me how she was gathering content creators in a newly opening coliving in Bruges, and we were discussing how fun it would be if I went. So I decided to go!

The problem was that I didn’t have enough Schengen days. Damn Brexit (#IYKYK). So I realised I needed to leave Bulgaria a little bit early.

It was also the week that Sarah and Jordy were leaving. Sometimes in life it feels like there are natural endings to things, and I felt that when Sarah and Jordy left. It felt like my natural ending to my time in Bulgaria. We went out for a delicious meal together. We laughed, we joked, we smiled, we had nice food. It was a very warm moment. And it made me miss my family as well. So I was like, you know what, it’s a nice moment, I need to save some Schengen days, and it’ll be good to go to the UK and see my family. So I left.

Interestingly, Selin has built a platform for exactly this kind of life. Co Club started as a place to archive the photos from your coliving and turned into something bigger: one subscription, credits the way ClassPass does it, and instead of being locked into one place, one experience, one type of community, the whole world becomes your home. With intention. With quality. She’s been to seven or eight colivings herself, and those went on first. Eighteen are on it now, and she has slowed down on purpose, because her name is on every recommendation. “I don’t have to put my hand on the stove to know that it’s hot.”

True to my nature of hardly ever booking flights in advance, I booked my flight the day before I was going to leave.

Before I went, we had some really nice leaving drinks in the local brewery. I told some stories, and we talked about our highlights and lowlights. My highlight of the month was definitely the Sausage Party. It was just fabulous. My lowlight was obviously being without my handpan for an entire month, which was incredibly difficult for me. And the most surprising thing that happened while I was in Bulgaria was Brookie coming. But I think I mentioned all of those in the previous weeks anyway.

So I talked about all this with the peeps, and then I hit the road, flying from Bulgaria to the UK. I arrived late on the Sunday night, or early on the Monday morning, depending on how you look at it, and that’s pretty much where I got to at the end of that week.

This was an unplanned stop at my parents’ place. And because I was going to Bruges before another UK stop, where I’d need some winter clothes, I decided that this was the week I would finally travel with every single thing that I own, and that there would be nothing left in the UK. Before, I always left some winter clothes in the UK and travelled with mainly my summer clothes. Now everything I own fits in my suitcase.

That required a bit of work, and for it to work I needed some good energy. My mum, providing me with delicious food, gave me all the energy I needed to have enough brain power to find a system, an infrastructure, with which I could pack everything I own down into one check-in bag, one carry-on bag and a backpack. Plus my handpans, of course.

So an intense planning session commenced. I went back to my map of everything I own. Yes, I have a map of every single thing that I own. I re-evaluated whether things were in the right packing cubes, because every single item has to be in a packing cube for it to be packed properly and cleanly into my bag. I realised I was missing some cubes, so I went out, measured the sizes I needed for my suitcase, bought the right packing cubes, packed everything in, and it all worked.

The problem first, because nobody shows you the problem: all my camera gear was sat loosely in one bag, getting all scratched. So I bought two packing cubes that fit perfectly with my system and colour scheme to make it all work together.

Here’s the bit I didn’t expect. A good proportion of the weight I carry isn’t clothes. It’s the cubes and the cases. It’s the infrastructure around the system rather than the things the system is for. I used to think that was waste. It isn’t. And I have a big speaker (#IYKYK).

Plus my annual trip to the Denim Doctor, the best denim tailor ever. Crotch blowouts, both pairs. New pocket bags. A patched knee. And he fixed it all up. I love that guy.

I also had a nice meal in town with my parents. We were going to go to my favourite place, Flat Iron Steak, but unfortunately the wait for a table was ninety minutes, so we went to Rudy’s Pizza instead, the famous pizza place next to the Manchester Opera House. It was probably the best pizza I’ve ever had in the UK.

One errand didn’t finish... I legally changed my name years ago, and my passport still disagrees. To change the passport I need proof. The proof they’ll take is a UK bank account in the new name. To open one I have to have some bills in my name, but everyone is upset with me for defaulting on my loans, so no one is giving me the right documents, and so I can’t open a new bank account. A highly inconvenient situation. So I guess the thing is: be good.

Then a few days later my mum, after many, many months of trying to pin me down, finally got me to go to her open mic night with her. It’s basically an open mic run by her friend Woody, who makes Woody Woodpecker noises all the time. We just jam. I played a darbuka for the first time in a really long time, and it was so much fun, playing and jamming with all these other musicians. The darbuka sound is just so fabulous and so unique. When it’s really played, it changes the vibe of the room, and I was happy to practise that craft once again.

All in all, I spent the week in Manchester, which is always an experience. It’s nice to be there with my parents. It’s nice to do things and catch up with people. I go to the jams, and it’s nice to have proper shops, like my tailors, and places where I can get good quality packing cubes. But it’s still Manchester, and Manchester is a little bit shut. So, you know, it was fun.

And that’s pretty much my September.