🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 The Soft Transition

Hello Adventurers, 

The Clash released ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go?’ in 1982, the year after I was released into the world from Mum’s loin. Back then, the song didn’t reach the top 40 charts, but its dilemmatic title is reaching me now—charting here in my mid-forties, where a predicament has been top of mind lately, trending.

And not because I’m sitting in the office spinning an original pressing of Combat Rock, a record my ex-military Dad gave me decades ago—although I’m sure this has something to do with it—but, because I’ve been grappling with how to navigate the brinkmanship of stiff upper lip British boomer masculinity, where the code—and all the coding—is so difficult to decode.

Does their, “I’m okay” ever really mean they’re okay? Like, do we accept someone’s claim about their health and wellness on face value…or do we face the fact that it could be counterfeit so as to unhealthily place greater value on our wellbeing over theirs?

I don’t know, but knew Dad wasn’t doing too well over there. So, should I stay in Canada or go to Wales? A furrowed brow deliberating, doing the calculus and all the mental gymnastics. And perpetually puzzled by the fact that Dad has always called me Darling (rather than calling me by my name), so I deferred back to the puzzle pieces in those Clash lyrics for some direction. And Strummer sang back: Darling / be here.

So I went. Last minute. On a trip that wasn’t in the plans.

This—the 60th issue of my newsletter—was made on 158 kilometres of treks through Wales as well as on 48 kilometres of treks ‘round Manchester, with a marathon banged-out in each. While I’ve written about these places before—nearly a year to the day—I’m not revisiting them. Rather, I’m feeling ‘em out from an altogether different space as well as from a different angle: from the crossing of the Rubicon, from dependent child to indispensable son. Or so I believe.

Even if you question the merits of whatever follows, I hope we can agree—that when it comes to life—it’s better to be punctual, as in safer to be unnecessarily early than painfully too late.

- Ben Pobjoy

P.S. Thank you to my colleague Leanne. In the lead-up to all of this, she’d find me daily and ask, “So, when are you going?” until I was gone.

TREK TRACKER

World by foot and/or footnotes

• Countries marathoned to date: 75

• Marathons completed this year: 42

• Kilometres trekked by foot this year: 5,970.7

• Marathons completed since 2015: 948

• Total kilometres trekked since 2015: 87,054

• Next stops wish list: In Q4, I renewed my NEXUS and got brand new Canadian and UK passports. They’re full of blanks pages, so I’ll happily accept stamps from anywhere that’ll have me in 2026.

RAPID RECAP

A speedy synopsis for time-crunched readers

• The Wildest Thing: I’ve never worn one—and have no affiliation with Whoop— but I bought my Dad their model with the EKG function earlier this year (after he announced he was going on a serious health kick). It detected some irregularities, he shared its data with his doctor, and was expedited to get a pacemaker installed last month. I can’t say the gift was lifesaving, but it did play a role in getting Mikey P into the hospital and out from behind the eight ball😊

• The Biggest Obstacle: Going over to the UK then holding down 2PM-10PM working hours to synch with the office back in Canada😣

• The Lesson Learned: Go, even if it ain’t outwardly requested😘

FIELD NOTES: POWYS, WALES

An expanse for meditations

Powys is the largest and most sparsely populated county in Wales. And it is there where my Dad lives in a named but numberless house, in what claims to be the smallest town in Britain. Population 850, either by last count or by last estimate.

If you’ve ever watched Countryfile or Escape to the Country on the Beeb, then you’ll be able to fill in the details of your imagination with surprising accuracy: think rolling lands mottled with earthy colours, hedgerows as far as the eye can see, and infinite sheep: eating tufted grass down to a munch-manicured state akin to putting greens on golf courses. For expediency, Mid-Wales—at least in these parts—meets the definition of words like idyllic and bucolic.

There, I’m most present. And not because of the countryside’s peacefulness, but out of precaution: it is deceptively dangerous, comically so. Locals recommend that you be ‘tied off’ when hiking through its breathtaking backcountry—with at least 40 feet of rope between you and a partner—to function as emergency extractor should one of you fall into a peat bog (which’ve swallowed individuals whole for millennia, and have preserved them intact for just as long—thanks to the anaerobic conditions that prevent material decay). Bog bodies, they’re a thing.

And then there’s the narrow, winding, undulating country roads where hedgerows obscure your sightline as they dampen approaching sounds—from the cars that drive at 60 miles per hour—in both directions, on the single-carriageways, coming within a foot or so of you…because there’s no sidewalks or paved shoulders.

Masochistically, I effing love-it-hate-it. And this has nothing to do with misplaced bravado, and everything to do with real-world functionality: a ‘road work bootcamp’ for my nervous system as well as for the fine-tuning of my senses. The combined calamity of it all forces me to override my innate ‘flight reaction’ to instead force an unnatural state of calm upon myself where I must fight to hold a line, stay surefooted, and cultivate spectral hearing (which is needed to process how much unseen time one has to throw one’s self into thorny hedgerows to avoid the cars coming up your backside that’d otherwise kill you).

The twist—this time around—was the heavy artillery fire and the shelling at nearby SENTA. It could last up to 15 hours some days, and be constant for a week straight. Unsettling stuff. In all my years visiting here, I’ve never heard it this active before, which gives the impression the UK is readying itself for a different reality. Paratrooper Pa says it’s the sound of war planning—and when it comes to this subject—Father knows best.

Anyway, to redeem myself from categorisation as psychopathlete or war worrywart, I will admit that I’m a relatable big baby who can do without all the Welsh rain. The sheets? The sogginess? All the shivering? Insufferable! Honestly, there’s no upside to getting caught in downpours. Not only did my waterproof socks fail me (they got auto-binned thereafter), but the lumber and livestock lorries kept spraying manure-y mist my way from the wet farm roads (‘tis a bit of a Christmas miracle that I didn’t get pink eye or dung lung, although I’m ironically typing this whilst sick as shit).

While trips to this remote part of Wales provide me with a yearly near-death experience or two or four, I find the landscape to be ultimately life-affirming. It’s alive, always. Lichen growing on all things stone and slate. Babbling brooks. Raging rivers. Moss covered trees. Berries on bushes. And red kites circling above the pheasants down below.

It all combines to make me feel wonderfully insignificant, just a tiny part of something bigger, something way beyond my control. It’s needfully humbling stuff, to be reminded that you’re but a blip in the cosmos, a speck in eternity.

Now squint. And do so to look past the pavement and the power lines—to set your eyes on a valley vista, where the rugged lands roughhouse with both the gruff hills and the perennially dramatic sky—it’s the stuff of Turner landscape paintings.

Majestic. Transportive. Making you feel like you’re in the yesteryear of an earlier century: 19th, 11th, BCE or before. It’s hard to pinpoint which exact era you feel you’re in, but the impression is of one being stuck in time, in parts largely unchanged by time. And this is truly what I love most about Wales.

On this trip—which wasn’t a holiday—the days were long despite the fact that daylight was in short supply (8AM-4PM at best, this time of year).

Most days, I’d rise at 5AM or 6AM to squeeze in a 10 kilometre run or a half-marathon hike before serving as ‘lacklustre farmhand body double’ for my Dad who was recovering from surgery. This meant harvesting frost-fucked spuds from the soil on his behalf, turning over the various compost pits (or are they piles?), bringing bits and bobs down the ladder from the attic, and walking the dog to and from the 11th century church down the road. All small things.

I’d then put eight or nine hours into working my office job virtually, before plonking myself in front of both the fireplace and the boob tube with the missus to gleefully gawk at an episode of Naked Attraction ‘til midnight, a program that has gotta be the most salacious of all British reality television.

All in all, I basically functioned as a helpful hindrance: pitching in when I could, but screwing up most weekday dinners due to schedule conflicts from online meetings with colleagues and clients. Trying my best, but open to interpretation. And something to remedy on the next trip over.

FIELD NOTES: MANCHESTER, ENGLAND

A hardened city of brick and stone

We accidentally locked eyes at half past eleven, right when she was yanking her pants and underwear down to reveal her bits—to piss, bum pressed against a wall, in the alcove outside of my hotel. It wasn’t to her liking, so the stranger drunkenly stumbled onto the ground-level stairs of a nearby fire escape, laid on her back, and pissed her light jeans dark…before awkwardly climbing through a handrail back into the street, back into the night.

Greetings.

Welcome to the north.

A version of England I love most: rough, cranky, unapologetic, textured, real. And the dingy domain of Et and Ger, my working class grandparents who were each cut from this lovably ratty Mancunian cloth. God bless ‘em, forever.

Chosen, this place—without a doubt—is my spiritual home, one that’s made me howl with affectionate laughter since boyhood: so peculiar and enchanting, because I could never predict what’d happen next. Still can’t.

Serving as terminus on this trip due to airport proximity, we only had one day and two nights in The Manc. So I rose early on a Saturday to circle it once, to lap up some of its one-of-one, nothing-else-like-it character. And don’t be fooled by Deansgate, rather, go explore Manchester’s many nooks and crannies as well as its outer edges; especially the shithole parts of Salford. It all combines to be one of my favourite places on the planet for ingesting bygone industrial architecture: the old factories, the old mills, the old warehouses, so grand, so colossal, so ornate in their masonry.

Here, I never have much of a plan or any coordinates to guide my treks. Rather, I just wander in the direction of whatever catches my eye: drunks out front of a pub, a cut hole in a fence through which to explore something crumbling and abandoned, someone illegally dumping bald car ‘tyres’ in a shoddy park, mosques in industrial estates, etc.

No marathon here is ever complete without first dipping out to Gorton to smoke a couple of darts as I cough up a lung then hock a phlegmy loogie out front the flat of my long-dead Grandparents. They’d love it, seriously. Look, I’m not into woo-woo, but I know they turn the kettle on when I arrive as they hand-roll cigs to join me in sharing some smoke signals together, from wherever they are in heaven, no doubt raising hell.

I envision Nan inside the flat—from an imagined cross-section cut through walls, of memory—with curlers in her hair as Grandad clips his bonsai. But, back outside in the real-world, standing there, I’m always fighting back a tear or possibly shedding some, indistinguishable from the rain on my face. And then I move on—over the dog shit, over the litter, and over the broken glass shards…which are the rough-edged diamonds of these parts. Until next time.

When the time in Manchester is limited, the playbook with the missus is fairly rote by this point: the Arndale Shopping Centre for M&S first, maybe Boots or Primark or Next second, and likely some Selfridges last. In true ‘Portuguese Tia / Madrinha’ fashion, the wife never shops for herself—just for the boys, her nephews. Socks and jumpers, always.

Anyway, we hit much of the Ganso Picante’s hit-list on Friday evening, as we wandered some of the Christmas Markets, which seemed to be an excuse for everyone to get pissed on pints in the street stalls while eating tonal variations of fried brown foods—all enjoyed without any risk of getting arrested for being drunk and disorderly, for it was simply seasonal and Crimbo celebratory to get this blasted.

I did, however, go on one side quest—to Private White V.C. Based on its exterior, you likely wouldn’t believe that the King had just been in for a new raincoat. But, this place is absolute tops: so much so that you have to be buzzed in from the street. I couldn’t bring the missus with me ‘cause the prices would’ve made her eyes bulge right outta her head / smash right through her eyeglasses. And unrelated, but this trip did leave my spicy wife cross-eyed for a hot minute. Not joking, you can ask her about it!

The most important thing to relay from Manchester—which pains me to share, since I’m really not fussy / hate naming-and-shaming things—is that no one should ever stay at the Whitworth Locke, unless you fancy insomnia as well as being ripped-off. Conceptually, I thought it would be ‘of place’ to stay in a 19th century textile warehouse converted into an aparthotel (their term, not mine). But, in reality this was a two-star joint masquerading as a pricey four-star; where the hot water in the shower lasted about 47 seconds, and where the single pane window from the 1800’s didn’t close.

The cold draft blowing into our room didn’t bother me per se, but the raucous 9PM-6AM street noise—both nights—in through a window ajar, emitted from packs of drunk chavs chanting, yelling, fighting each other, getting arrested and/or needing ambulances on the street out front—it meant no chance of any sleep inside. Annoying, but lying in bed awake—listening to the sounds of those raving lunatics—while staring up at the siren’d lights bouncing off of the ceiling, it put things into perspective:

Dead grandparents here, my temporarily fragile seventysomething Dad over there, my wife’s eye going inexplicably wonky soon afterwards, and—silly, of course—but, the ever-widening bald spot on the top of my dumb-ass head. All were / are a cold reminder that Father Time is fair and impartial: he spares no one.

And it beckoned Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage…

Wishing you a belated Merry Christmas and an early Happy New Year.

May we all be like those young Mancs and go ungently into 2026 raging—living life to the fullest. And if we need help, a colleague of mine just published some thoughtful prompts to guide us.

BEST LOCAL THING-Y

I have no intention of murdering anyone in an American Red State. But, if I did—and had to choose a death row meal there—the choice would be easy: beaners (aka baked beans in tomato sauce). They were a staple of my upbringing, and remain a comfort food to this day.

So, when I’m in the UK, it always warrants at least one ancestral chip and bean butty; being no less than two pieces of heavily Flora-buttered toast as foundation for a pile of chips under a generous puking of beans, always topped with lotsa fresh-cracked black pepper and then further sauced-up with some tangy HP (which is the undisputed king of brown sauces, according to me).

Ideally, you get this from a short-order caff for maximum greasiness / full day-ruining indigestion. However, it can be easily made at home…since British cuisine requires absolutely no skill whatsoever (hence why even Gordon Ramsay can’t make Pad Thai).

Now, I was going to wait ‘til Manchester to get my butty fix, but the missus pointed out a Brit-side innovation—unavailable back home—to me in the bean aisle of a Welsh Tesco: beaners with integrated vegan sausages. GTFO!

Admittedly, the sausage count / size was skimpy: only six of them in a can, and smaller than tradish canned Vienna sausages, but they were lo-fi luxurious insofar as they had that delectable ‘mystery meat’ umami flavour like that Frankenstein-filler inside Chef Boyardee ravioli. In sum; novel, tasty, and therefore an easy write-in—as clutch butty component—for best local thing-y.

POBJOY'S GLOBAL PRICE INDEX

This is an on-going documentation of how much things cost in different places around the world. Here are some of the things I bought around Great Britain (all prices converted to USD):

• A pack of Marlboro Golds from a gas station in Beulah: $22.65

• A pub dinner for six in Llandovery with lotsa pints: $207.55*

• A soy latte and and an Americano from the Shrewsbury Coffeehouse: 9.72*

• Three vegan sausage rolls and a 500ml bottle of Coca-Cola from the Greggs at Manchester Piccadilly: $6.12*

• A restaurant dinner for six in Didsbury with lotsa wine: 320.44*

*Prices do not include tips, because tipping isn’t customary in the UK.

MARATHON MUSINGS

On the bigness of some small walks

For more than a decade, I’ve done everything in my power to create the time and space for the pursuance of long distance treks. I prefer to do these in unfamiliar places, full of strangers, and to do them alone—so I am unencumbered, able to investigate my curiosities to their extremes while chronicling things that catch my attention—as I go to great lengths to challenge my abilities, comforts, biases, and whatever else. But, long—and lone—they don’t necessarily equate to better.

2025 is winding down, and I’ll be closing-out the year having banged-out 6,000-ish kilometres by foot (walking, hiking, running, hobbling)—which, for comparison, is the flight distance between Toronto and Paris—as I did 40+ marathons in four countries across two continents. Meaningful, memorable, sure.

But, the biggest treks this year were some of the smallest, shortest, slowest walks. Recently done in familiar places, done with familiar people:

November. Wales. 2.29 kilometres at an 18:35 km/h pace for a 42:30 duration. Me and Dad put on our outdoor clothes, rain gear, and wellies to walk the dog in the lands behind the house—which was a thinly veiled excuse to help Dad get some light daily exercise / test his heart and stamina as he recovers. We went up the yard, through the field where they grow the veg, across some pastures then along some 11th century bridle paths…where everything was waterlogged and sloshy. Bella the Boxer chased some sheep and did a Mexican standoff with the brown one, it was either that or her about to eat some sheep shit that caused my Dad to do his hilariously guttural ‘dog yell’ that me and my little bruv always laugh about. Mike then pulled a knife and an apple from his jacket to cut slices to hand-feed Polly, a neighbour’s horse, currently wearing her giraffe-patterned winter coat. And then we rambled a little further to the Eriskay Ponies, a rare treat since there’s less than 300 registered ones left in the world today. Sensing I wasn’t a threat—likely because I was full of beaners and plant-based sausages—the Ponies walked over to my extended hand and let me pet them, which baffled Dad since they’ve never once approached him in five years. Onwards and upwards thereafter, to some old cottage on some hill that Dad wanted to show me, because it’s being faithfully restored to some ‘no electrical, no indoor plumbing’ state of yore. Whether double-wide or single file, I’d let Dad dictate our walking pace, so he could stop every now and then for a few minutes when he felt light-headed to discreetly look at his Whoop to let his heart settle back down to some sort of acceptable rate or beat. Through it all, we talked about nothing of significance, but it spoke to me—telling me everything I needed to know.

November. Wales. .21 of a kilometre at a 12:30 km/h pace for a 2:34 duration. Auntie Nicola aka Nic aka Pudding and Uncle Cliver, in from Bristol for a visit and a check-in. A short walk around the corner to the too-wordy-titled Llanwrtyd & District Heritage and Arts Centre to take a gander at a free art exhibition, as a nudge for Nic to maybe exhibit her artwork someday.

December. Didsbury. 1.51 kilometres at a 15:04 km/h pace for a 22:41 duration. Me and the missus exited the West Didsbury tram station to walk around the corner to stop at my aunt’s house for some margaritas, gather the fam for a dinner, walk over to the restaurant together, eat / drink / get merry, then have the lot of them walk us to / see us off at the Burton Road station (so we could tram back to Manchester’s city centre). Debate on whether we needed brollies, lots of chatter amongst the ladies with Auntie Catherine always being so dry and funny and bubbly Auntie Debbie being so talkative and inquisitive, Deb’s Graeme telling me about all the competitive fishing he does, and me—as always—badgering Uncle Foxy, a barrister and my resident intellectual with a million questions on British law, the state of British politics, and his future predictions for Britain (I can talk to him for hours, and often do). A slow group walk, a dinner, lots of banter to feed the soul.

And me—now at that age, and at that inflection point in life—where I slip over to the UK to help tend to family matters or slip away from tables to pay for family meals, paying it forward to my elders and/or settling debts of gratitude.

That soft transition—from cared for to caretaker. A big changing of the guards, confirmed on some recent small walks.

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