Silas Jelley's Corner of the Web / Journal

May 19, 2026 6.40PM

2026-05-19T18:40:59Z

I understood then that if I were to relive those scenes in the Conciergerie and Beaulieu as intensely as I had felt them when they occurred, I would have to be alone, completely alone. It was a relief to know this, and I realized that the communal life that lay in store would produce new needs, new responses, new projects.
— Henri Charrière, Papillon, 1968, William Morrow (2012 edition)

A reminder that isolation fosters and enlarges resentment, and that only living communally can drive it out.

6:40pm on May 19, 2026

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May 18, 2026 12.48PM

2026-05-18T12:48:41Z

If you’re too hot, take your socks off.
If you’re too cold, put your socks on.
If you don’t have socks, find socks.

Often we overcomplicate life.

12:48pm on May 18, 2026

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A pale bouquet over the sand

2026-05-17T14:01:28Z

Mushke (my hand cart) rests beside a crumbling dwelling in the desert of the Ustyurt Plateau, Qaraqalpaqstan, Uzbekistan

There is an infinity to the desert that I don’t find anywhere else. Even at sea, out of sight of land, the waves and currents which must after all be going somewhere admit that beyond the horizon there is land, terra firma, people, civilisation, and therefore activity beyond the push of the gulf stream and the pull of the moon. But the desert, more often than not, makes no such admission.

I first fell in love with the desert while cycling around Australia, through such imaginitively named tracts as the Great Sandy Desert but also the Kimberleys, Pilbara, Salinaland, and the Nullarbor Plain. My love of deserts shares a little with my love of mountains, expressed most fully in Bo and the mountain but while a desert may be monumental, the deserts I have known contain few monuments. If the mountain is mother nature in exultation, and to climb a mountain is to feel lifted beyond oneself, the desert is almost the opposite, akin to being pressed into oneself.

All is stillness and desolation. One reflects how many centuries it has thus been, and how many more it will thus remain. Yet in this scene without one bright object there is high pleasure which I can neither explain or comprehend.
— Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, Ch. VIII: Banda Oriental and Patagonia, 1839

A desert is a desolate place, almost barren of features and people, and the Kazakh Steppe, Ustyurt Plateau, and Kyzylkum Desert that have dominated the walk so far this year have been no exception, a naked landscape stretching as far as the eye can see in all directions with no promise but more of the same. For two-thousand kilometres the horizon has lain flat, “the lone and level sands stretching far away”¹, unchanging. Without the intrusion of so much as a hill the days lose definition until the whole experience melts into one continuous march atop a treadmill of infinite sand under a vast blue sky. In a still desert even the ground seems to fall away and the sensation, heightened by the uber fatigue of too much walking and too little sleep, is of endlessly falling fowards.

But the desert is not always still. If I have been aware of anything in these two months it has been the wind. Hot winds from the East, cold winds from the West and North, steady winds, gusting winds, winds that sworl and squall, winds that lift and others that seem to press you down to the earth more than gravity itself. Even an absence of wind begins to feel like yet another of its many voices. For two days a wretched headwind bent me double and pushed me one step back for every five forward in an exhausting tug of war. In the city of Kungrad, at the end of a 400km stretch across Qaraqalpaqstan without more than the slightest of settlements to interrupt the expanse, my host would tell me that those same winds had wrenched roofs from houses and flattened power poles, leaving large parts of the city without power for days.

When the wind blows, that once still sand takes flight, and all of a sudden the eyelashes, dormant and ornamental for much of our lives, become active and essential again. The airborne sand, seemingly immune to the weak protests of zippers, seals, and roll-top bags works its way into everything: into shoes, into pockets, into the ears and into every pore of exposed skin; it finds its way into the threads beneath the caps of water bottles, builds up beneath my watch strap, and collects between the wadded notes of Kazakh Tenge and Uzbeki Som in my wallet. My skin, already scorched by the unrelenting sun and dried by the many voices of the wind, is abraded by this assault of sand until my hands begin to resemble the coarse and cracked surface of the desert itself.

My tent pitched on the cracked surface of the desert amidst a low scrub of desert Shuvoq (Wormwood).

I walk for hours after the sun has set, often until two or three in the morning, and while I steal a little sleep on the sand, all around me the wind and the sand are at work. I sleep deliriously, half-aware of the whip-like lashing of the wind that seems intent on flattening my tent, and of the almost continuous vibrations of the single forked aluminium pole that forms the skeleton of it. With each gust the tent seems to bow lower, as if trying to get beneath the wind itself, either in submission or stoic rebellion, until the fabric of the fly is pressed against my face like a ghostly hand come to suffocate me. At last the dawn, “the appearance of that pale bouquet, of that beacon that rises to the east of the black lands”², lighting my tent enough to reveal the drifts of dust-like sand that have worked their way under the rainfly, over the bathtub floor, and through the mesh of the inner, so that by morning the floor of the tent seems already halfway to being subsumed by the desert floor beneath it. Like this, even within the span of a few hours, the steady work of the desert is revealed, the erosion and reclamation of all that trespass through it, and the erosion and reclamation of me too.

The desert spares nothing, eventually all is returned to dust.

“The lone and level sands…”, a line from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias”↩︎
“that pale bouquet…”, from Bill Homewood’s translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Terre des Hommes↩︎

2:01pm on May 17, 2026

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Umit, chai, soot, and flies

2026-04-29T16:09:25Z

In a building I really thought was abandoned I found a man, Umit, living in rooms blackened with soot. He clearly makes an effort to keep the place clean and tidy, but nothing can wholly outdo the work of a wood fire that vents indoors. The Chorny tea is thin, almost just hot water, but welcome refreshment all the same. He has power but by the length of time it takes to boil the kettle (more than 10 minutes) I suspect it is only 12 volt, not grid. Perhaps he has a few solar panels out the back. On the stove he is cooking something in a large aluminium pot which he periodically gets up to stir. Another massive pot beside it is used for purifying water.

He only has four toes on his right foot, and it doesn’t look like he’s lost one. He is alone here, a long way from anywhere and with no car, and no apparent work. By his manner a part of me wonders if he is simple, if someone drops him supplies from time to time and he just lives out here with the sand and the flies, so many flies, and then I scald myself for letting my imagination make such leaps. I am also alone, a long way from anywhere and with no car, and no apparent work. Am I simple? And would that be so bad?

The heat is destroying me today. I know that every minute I rest here is another minute I must walk beyond midnight tonight, but the relief of sweating merely profusely lying here in the shade atop this hard wooden bench as opposed to sweating sheer buckets out there under the white fury of a desert sun is too much for me to give up.

We eat small pomegranates which Umit quarters with a knife that has been sellotaped back together and looks like a shiv that would turn up in a cell search after a prison stabbing. I am too exhausted to say more than a few words, and Umit seems happy to talk for both of us. My brain of mush grasps enough to understand as he explains that the pomegranates are small here because there is so little water out here. Half the pods inside don’t reach sweetness, so you quickly learn to eat around those parts. He says in Samarkand there is more water and the pomegranates grow large, using his head to indicate (and perhaps exaggerate) their size. Perhaps I too will find water in Samarkand. I day dream of rain, but I know I could be without it for months yet, and when the rains do settle in in earnest towards years end I will yearn again for even this solid air and searing heat.

The rice that has been cooking on the stove is ready. It has fruit cooked in with it yet somehow doesn’t taste of much, that or my tastebuds have suspended their work in protest of the heat, but even still it is divine. Soft, sticky, fat slicked rice. Mimicking Umit and others I have been invited to eat with in the desert, I scrape a small mound to the edge of the plate we share, press it with spoon upturned and it comes up as a perfectly formed mouthful heaped and clinging to the spoon, and then seems to melt on the tongue.

Umit encourages me to sleep and I do for a while. Later, rising from one desert fever dream and stepping out into another, slightly cooler one, thanking Umit profusely, I wander on in the direction of Bukhara, several days ahead.

4:09pm on April 29, 2026 from Uzbekistan

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April 2, 2026 10.01PM

2026-04-02T22:01:59Z

Tomorrow, April 3rd, it begins again in earnest, this fourth summer and final year of the walk. I’ve already walked 240 kilometres since returning to Kazakhstan on a new visa, but that was just a leg stretch, a warm up for what is to come. In some sense, all the 10,000 kilometres of the walk so far have been a warm up. Here in Qulsary, aided by Serik and his father, I have scavenged, pieced, and welded together a makeshift cart in order that I might carry enough food and, most especially, water for the 1600 kilometres of Uzbekistan that lie ahead.

Beginning with the Ustyurt Plateau and the Kyzylkum Desert, I will have, at most, 30 days to cross this harsh tract, for a self-mutilating daily distance of between 55 and 60 kilometres, and I hardly know what to expect but I am comforted by the knowledge that I can do it. I don’t know where this certainty comes from, but I am grateful for it. I’ll likely dip back into Kazakhstan in the West, then some combination of Kyrgyrstan, Tajikistan, China, and Pakistan should bring me to the Indian border. Afghanistan is out, the borders are closed amid renewed fighting with Pakistan.

10:01pm on April 2, 2026

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April 1, 2026 2.49AM

2026-04-01T02:49:37Z

If I remember one thing from this hostel besides Alen and Tamilan, and the wonderful focus of these days, let it be the wonderful door latches. When opened, the latch of the door stays retracted, either by magnet or spring, and only when closed again does an attracting magnet pull the latch back out of the door and into place to hold it shut. This has the minor effect of making the doors look tidier, smoother, when open, but much more resonant with me is how quietly it lets the doors close. These, coupled with a softer closing (dampening) door frame would be a mute dream.

May my future home have such a set of doors, if doors it should have at all.

2:49am on April 1, 2026 from Atyrau, Atyrau Oblisi, Kazakhstan

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March 23, 2026 11.20PM

2026-03-23T23:20:23Z

We find pieces of ourselves in the people we let in.

11:20pm on March 23, 2026 from Atyrau Oblisi, Kazakhstan

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February 27, 2026 9.57PM

2026-02-27T21:57:15Z

India, The Bike Trip, The Book?! by Kyle

Reading just before bed so here’s my little stream of consciousness before I nod off.

This feels like a true Kyle of a book concept. All around you are enriched by your particular ability to digest and synthesise what you read and relate it to us, and this feels like taking that skill to its natural conclusion. As a fellow traveller, and without having read Botton’s book, I feel like I’ve already received the core of what that book might teach me. Not to say that there isn’t likely much more I could glean from reading the book itself, but the right idea at the right time is so much more effective than everything right now (makes me think of Ferriss’ move from reading ahead-of-time to just-in-time).

Creative work, and the communication of it, is a kind of filtering of the world as we perceive it. I’ve read and learned many things downstream of your prolific sifting/filtering of the world that I would not have had the capacity to discover alone. By reading these filtered outputs we get glimpses/tastes of a broader set of experience than we could consume individually and from there we can continue to pull on just the thread that feels like it has more for us.

I think knitting this directly and imminently into the sharing of a journey feels like a good fit. Where a lot of self-help shtuff is so prescriptive, this feels more humane, gives us more to engage with when inevitably some chapter (thinking book form) doesn’t grab us as much as another had.

As always, I love the frankness (and humour) of your writing, looking forward to the chapters to come!

9:57pm on February 27, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom

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February 13, 2026 3.20PM

2026-02-13T15:20:20Z

adapted from an email I sent to Matt Webb

Just a quick mail to say I loved this. It’s a weird, fascinating, far-fetched, and slightly-dystopic-but-not-in-the-ways-we-might-have-guessed future we’re being conveyed into. This paragraph:

With domestic robots, what will the new continuous repetitive micro task be? Will I have to empty its lint trap? Will I have to polish its eyes every night? Will I have to go shopping for it, day after day, or just endlessly answer the door to Amazon deliveries of floor polish and laundry tabs? Maybe the future is me carrying my robot up the stairs and down the stairs and up the stairs and down the stairs, forever.
— Matt Webb, 90% of everything is sanding e.g. laundry, Interconnected, 2026

conjures the experience of taking care of a loved one, of service; beautiful amongst humans but oh how wretched to give that too to the machines. Sometimes it seems so much of what we’re doing here in the future is taking care of machines, asking machines, answering machines, our every thought a footnote or reaction to some energised filament thrown off by the ur-machine, that pseudo-sentience come substrate that binds it all together: the Internet.

Maybe a day comes when we really are fully in service of the machines, not because they took over but rather because we woke up one day and realised (or didn’t) that we could no longer distinguish ourselves from them. And maybe if that day comes we’ll be so exhausted by it that we’ll throw in the towel of our humanity and willfully succumb, make every desperate attempt to lower ourselves into that infinite binary pool of suspended animation, that we might be free at last from the machines we have become.

But! Like us, the machines are brilliant but, like us, made in our own image, they are also stupid. We worry that with their arrival some simpler time has come to an end. We worry because the limits of our memory & empathy let us believe that this vague and amorphous “simpler time” ever existed. Life has always, and ever will be fraught, confusing, and rife with external affairs of fickle malice that loom on dystopic horizons; and has always, and ever will be full of love, charm, and beauties so dazzling we wish we could linger ever in their embrace.

The Humanist Plumbing is not gone from this world.

3:20pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom

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February 13, 2026 12.22PM

2026-02-13T12:22:27Z

I don’t understand anything about flavour, that’s the problem. My taste buds are like a child’s. I’m perfectly happy with convenience store bento boxes and curry from cheap restaurants.
— Rika in Asako Yuzuki's, Butter, Ch. 1, p. 9, 2023, Harper Collins

I’m a little like Rika. I lack taste and, at times, I am self-conscious about that lack of taste.

12:22pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom

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February 12, 2026 9.07PM

2026-02-12T21:07:07Z

The way that Reiko spoke made it seem as if her baby already existed in the world, Rika thought – as if they were all just waiting for it to appear in the room. It was the previous summer that the obstetrician had told Reiko it was likely that stress was to blame for the fact that two years into her marriage she still hadn’t conceived, and Reiko had promptly quit her job in the PR department of a major film production company […]

When Reiko had resolved to give up the job that she was so good at, Rika had thought it a waste. Not just that – her friend’s decision had produced in her a sense of loneliness and resentment that had left her sleepless. They had argued about it several times over the phone.
— Rika in Asako Yuzuki's, Butter, Ch. 1, p. 5, 2023, Harper Collins

There’s a quiet expression of loud truth, that the world is so caught up in the identity of work that we’d run ourselves to ruin in its name.

9:07pm on February 12, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom

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January 30, 2026 2.35AM

2026-01-30T02:35:58Z

Have my parents forgotten that they were young once? Apparently they have. At any rate, they laugh at us when we’re serious, and they’re serious when we’re joking.
— Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, p. 235, 1947, Penguin Books (2008)

I just noticed that I am reading page 235 of The Diary of a Young Girl at 2.35am.

2:35am on January 30, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom

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January 28, 2026 10.00PM

2026-01-28T22:00:26Z

The time has come to commit to something.

10:00pm on January 28, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom

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January 22, 2026 10.38AM

2026-01-22T10:38:09Z

Dearest Kitty,
I’m seething with rage, yet I can’t show it. I’d like to scream, stamp my foot, give Mother a good shaking, cry and I don’t know what else because of the nasty words, mocking looks and accusations that she hurls at me day after day, piercing me like arrows from a tightly strung bow, which are nearly impossible to pull from my body. I’d like to scream at Mother, Margot, the van Daans, Dussel and Father too: ‘Leave me alone, let me have at least one night when I don’t cry myself to sleep with my eyes burning and my head pounding. Let me get away, away from everything, away from this world!’ But I can’t do that. […]

Everyone thinks I’m showing off when I talk, ridiculous when I’m silent, insolent when I answer, cunning when I have a good idea, lazy when I’m tired, selfish when I eat one bite more than I should, stupid, cowardly, calculating, etc., etc. All day long I hear nothing but what an exasperating child I am, and although I laugh it off and pretend not to mind, I do mind. I wish I could ask God to give me another personality, one that doesn’t antagonize everyone.
— Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, p. 81, 1947, Penguin Books (2008)

I imagine this is how mum feels in the face of my critical nature.

10:38am on January 22, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom

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January 10, 2026 11.48PM

2026-01-10T23:48:04Z

Don’t forget to tell people how you feel.
I think I do that a lot. I’m not totally clear on why, perhaps it’s on account of being a little bit further along the spectrum than most folk, but I never really learned that skill that lots of folk seem to have of just… telling people how they’re feeling, and what they’ve been up to, and yada yada. What I do know is that it is (probably) possible for me to learn this simple, connective art form. I just need to remember.

11:48pm on January 10, 2026 from Bristol, South West England, United Kingdom

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December 27, 2025 10.33PM

2025-12-27T22:33:04Z

As children we fume that our parents just don’t understand us. As adults we are afforded the gift of trying to understand our parents.

10:33pm on December 27, 2025 from Ilfracombe, South West England, United Kingdom

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December 9, 2025 12.02PM

2025-12-09T12:02:49Z

Back to paper! This life is the experience of repeatedly thinking I have figured something out, only to realise again and again that I haven’t. More charitably, it is the experience of figuring out what is needed for the given moment and then discovering that that moment was not destined to last forever.

12:02pm on December 9, 2025 from Ilfracombe, South West England, United Kingdom

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November 26, 2025 1.17PM

2025-11-26T13:17:36Z

We either accept life with all its complications or not at all.

1:17pm on November 26, 2025 from A plane flying from Tbilisi, Georgia to London, England

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November 25, 2025 9.46PM

2025-11-25T21:46:59Z

The trouble with writing is that it seems to imply that all that is can be written. But it can’t. What is written here in these (digtial) pages is less than a crease in the fabric of this life.

9:46pm on November 25, 2025 from Tbilisi, Georgia

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November 22, 2025 10.34AM

2025-11-22T10:34:03Z

“People is very normal”

This is how Nato says people are fine/good/same everywhere.

“In Georgia, Russia, Britannia, all country… people is very normal.”

It’s unfortunate that she sometimes follows it up with a racial jab — “Not Chinese, not young Chinese, but every other people is normal” — but the core of the thing, that everywhere people have much the same wants and warts, is an idea that I love and have long held dear.

10:34am on November 22, 2025 from Tbilisi, Georgia

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