JOURNAL 5 août 2026

Alors nous voici en direct d'une espèce d´izakaya locale, repère des surfeurs de la plage. Ils ont fini par nous draguer gentiment légèrement

« Olala on vous voit souvent ici, vous nagez drôlement bien, vous savez prendre les vagues, Vous surfez ? Vous devriez Vous habitez où ? Ah c’est c'est pas loin Vous travaillez où ? Olala une sensei Olala c'est pas possible vous travaillez pour le gouvernement, mais comment ça se fait ? Vous parlez drôlement bien on croirait une japonaise Ah vous vivez ensemble .................. Ah vous êtes mariées .................. .................. ..................vous êtes drôlement sympa, venez on va vous montrer notre quartier général. »

Le fait est, c'est plus sympa que l'hôtel moche. Et nous voilà devant des bières, tout le monde veut nous offrir à boire, On n’a pas fini. Ils sont gentils avec leurs cheveux décolorés et leur allure de collégiens. Ça faisait un moment qu’ils nous reluquaient, surtout quand on était à poil, évidemment, ils nous le disent naïvement. Ils admirent notre décontraction, évidemment le style français c’est plus cool que le japonais. Allez, la nuit commence…

#surf

While reflecting on voice recently, I found myself arriving at an unexpected conclusion. The question was not where my voice came from, but where it should go. Over the years my writing has gradually organised itself into distinct territories. Marshall on Policy deals with policy. The Marshall Review provides a home for commentary and reflection. Marshall on Essays explores essaying itself. My music sites have their own purposes and audiences.

These boundaries are useful. They help readers find what interests them and avoid what doesn't. We do not read newspapers from cover to cover; we navigate them by habit and interest. Websites are no different.

Yet life continually presents things that sit beyond such categories. A queue. A speed bump. A campervan parked outside the house. An overheard remark. An assumption nobody seems to question. A small irritation that turns out to reveal something larger.

These things rarely justify an essay. They are often too slight for policy and too personal for review. Yet they are frequently where thought begins. That realisation has led to the creation of INQ. Unlike my other sites, INQ is not organised around a subject. It is organised around attention. The working strapline is:

INQ.ie Marshall on Things.

It is a place for observations, questions, curiosities, irritations and occasional convictions. A place where the subject need not justify itself before it is allowed onto the page. Perhaps the simplest way of putting it is this: INQ is where I intend to write in my own voice, unboxed.

Not recklessly. Not carelessly. But without feeling obliged to fit every thought into a pre-existing category or publication. If Marshall on Policy asks what should be done, and The Marshall Review asks what should be made of something, INQ asks a simpler question:

What's going on here?

The answer may sometimes turn into an essay. It may occasionally become a policy piece. More often it will remain simply an observation. And that is enough. As a reminder to myself, should I ever become too polite, too cautious, or too eager to self-censor: Speak up, man.

And, oh yeah, it's pronounced ink.

Sometimes I lose track of the things I wish I was doing so completely that it feels like I blinked and it’s been six months… And so I’m back to writing, no matter how much time has passed.

It’s the beginning of August, and we’re in the middle of a second heatwave when stepping outside feels like living inside a hot oven.

It makes me question this anticipation we seem to reserve for summer and the “living to the fullest” mode it’s supposed to bring.

Every year, someone has to say “It’s finally summer!” with an accompanying picture of something summery. I feel like there’s a social obligation to spend the summer happy, active, and “maximising” your time.

By the end of July, all that anticipation usually leaves me feeling inadequate instead.

Because every time someone asks me about my plans, it seems like they expect some exciting answer. And the last thing I want to do in +37 degrees is be outside. Like, hello, at this point staying inside is practically a public-health recommendation.

I spend much of the year waiting for warmth, only to discover that when it arrives, it has no sense of moderation. Sun, tone it down a little, will you?

On days like these, staying inside, I feel slightly guilty for missing “it”. When I go out, I try to pretend I’m not miserable.

There are a few things to be grateful for today, though. First — that this annoyed me enough to pull me out of the writing slump. Second — the laundry dries really fast on the balcony.

---

— until the next thought.

Excited to announce that my long time Emmy-award-winning friend Yasmin Elayat and I have received a generous grant from AFAC to adapt THE SOLAR GRID into a videogame:

THE SOLAR GRID: VIDEO GAME is a narrative adventure set in a post-collapse Earth powered by solar satellites. Players unearth speculative objects revealing buried histories of climate collapse. Knowledge is power. Will the players restore balance or fuel the forces of exploitation?

This is a two-year project that will see a playable demo based on THE SOLAR GRID developed, before we can tap into additional funding sources to take the project further.

#work #tsg

Voice

Looking back, I realise I spent decades trying to acquire something for which I had no name. Beginning in my teens, I found myself drawn not to answers but to relationships, not to conclusions but to unfolding processes.

Only much later did I understand that what I had been cultivating was a mode of attention. My writing voice was not something I invented. It was something that emerged from that attention. What emerges from my thinking here is a distinction that feels both simple and significant:

Voice is what readers hear. Attention is what produces it.

Perhaps, too: Style can be learned. Voice can be developed. But a mode of attention is cultivated over a lifetime.

I suspect that my development as a writer owed much to skills learned elsewhere. As a motorcyclist, and later as a volunteer RAC examiner, I was trained to observe systematically. Good riders do not merely look. They follow a disciplined process of observation, anticipation and continuous reassessment. Over time I seem to have applied similar disciplines to perception itself. The road became the world. Hazards became questions. Observation became inquiry.

University lecturing taught me another form of attention. I learned to observe not only what students said, but how understanding emerged within them. Often one could sense comprehension taking shape before a student had the words to express it. Teaching required attentiveness to thought in motion, to the subtle interaction between explanation, confusion, recognition and insight.

Social action taught me yet another form of attention. If advanced motorcycling trained me to observe situations and lecturing trained me to observe understanding, social action trained me to observe underlying conditions. It encouraged me to look beyond individual events towards the forces that made them possible. Repeatedly I found that what was visible was only the surface expression of deeper relationships and structures. This habit of looking beneath appearances became part of my writing. It reinforced a tendency to ask not merely what is happening, but what conditions are giving rise to what is happening.

Taken together, these experiences seem less like separate chapters in a life than different expressions of the same discipline. They cultivated habits of watching carefully, tracing relationships, recognising patterns and resisting premature conclusions. If I were to sketch the progression, it might look something like this:

Observation → Systematic Observation → Disciplined Attention → Insight → Voice

The voice comes last. What comes first is the trained capacity to see what others overlook. That capacity was not developed primarily through writing. Writing became the place where the results of that lifelong training found expression.

I was reminded of this some years ago while trying a guitar amplifier in a music shop. Another customer, a landscape gardener in his fifties, recognised my name and struck up a conversation about writing. He told me he wanted to start a blog but had been attending a creative writing course and had come away with the belief that he first needed to acquire a voice.

This took me aback.

Within minutes it was obvious to me that he already had one. He had spent half a century working, observing, thinking, solving problems and making sense of the world. He had a perspective. He had a way of seeing. In short, he had a voice.

What he lacked was not a voice but confidence in it.

He began talking about grammar. I told him to forget grammar for the moment. Write about what you know. Readers will come for your perspective, not your punctuation. Grammar and style can be learned. What mattered was that he had already spent decades cultivating a way of seeing the world. The writing would develop in time.

The encounter stayed with me because it revealed a common misunderstanding. Voice is often treated as though it were a literary technique that must be acquired before one can begin writing. Yet my experience suggests the reverse. Most people acquire a voice through living. They acquire writing through writing.

I do not suggest that every essayist arrives at a voice in this way. This is simply an attempt to understand how my own voice emerged. What continues to deepen it is a subject for another note. Yet the reflection does raise a further question. If my voice emerged from a lifelong mode of attention, what lies behind the voices of other essayists?

I suspect the answer is rarely a matter of style alone. Behind every distinctive voice there may be some equally deep disposition, habit of mind, preoccupation or way of attending to experience. Long before the pen touches paper or the fingers strike the keys, the writer has already spent years, perhaps decades, learning what to notice and what questions cannot be left alone.

Perhaps a mature voice is not something a writer acquires. Perhaps it is what becomes audible when a lifelong way of paying attention finally finds its form.

David Marshall Sna Sceirí

This is an ambition for three websites.

Together they publish essays, explore the craft of essay writing, and encourage others to engage in the practice. Each serves a different purpose...

esy.ie · The Essayist's Notebook. A personal notebook with public access. A place to record thoughts, notions and realisations as they arrive. Fragments, observations and questions. Nothing more. The notebook is already underway, with several new posts appearing each week.

essayist.ie · Learning the Craft. A record of what I have learned about essay writing. Part reflection, part practical guide, it explores the craft of constructing and delivering essays, and the lessons discovered along the way. Planned launch: before the end of 2026.

essays.ie · Essays. A home for essays that do not naturally belong elsewhere. The more reflective pieces. The longer explorations. The essays that sit outside Marshall on Policy, The Marshall Review, and An Activist's Notebook. The foundation essays are already in place. The next essay, The Espadrilles, is currently emerging through the process that gives essays their value: following a question wherever intellectual honesty leads.

Progress

esy.ie: active and growing. essays.ie: foundation collection established, new essays in development. essayist.ie: planned and expected to emerge before 2027.

Together, the three sites explore not simply essays as a form of writing, but the essay as a way of thinking. David Marshall Sna Sceirí

The best policy writing does not corner politicians with gotcha questions.

It changes the terms of the conversation so that simplistic answers become harder to give.

David Marshall Sna Sceirí

L asked me what the stupid joke video I posted worked out, and I assumed that she knew that it was forearms and I kind of got excited to show off a little bit and so I sent her the video of my forearms I took after, and apparently it was so much of a thirst trap that she was fighting off demons, and talked about it on her story, and her friends were all saying that she should go for it, and that they would, and that she had talked about me already. She was saying that she was trying to be friends with me and at one point posted a small joke image saying when he’s not into you. I don’t know honestly what to do because I don’t want to potentially hurt anybody and I don’t want to lead anybody on and I also don’t know if I’m really comfortable or capable of being the object of someone’s desire because of my own issues and the need for my own emotional safety, which is more than I think a regular person’s for things like sex. And I also haven’t really had friends with benefits or things like that. I’ve only really had sex in hookups or dynamics where I kind of disassociated the whole time and then didn’t really stay as friends with them.