It was hot on Sunday morning. It was, in fact, so hot that neither Jacqueline nor I felt like going out birdwatching. We instead went to the walled garden of the Poets House Hotel in Ely and drank coffee, after coffee, after coffee, and just talked.

There is a joke within our relationship that when I asked Jacqueline out, I asked her if she "wanted to continue this conversation over dinner", and the conversation has never ended since then. There is a lot of truth in that.

One consequence of that conversation appeared yesterday, here. Another is a three-part series on pedagogy that I began on Substack this morning, because that feels like the place where a discussion of this sort belongs.

Let me provide some background, though. Within the next week or so, I will celebrate 20 years as a blogger. I have now been creating content on YouTube for more than two years, and in both cases, the exceptional nature of this publishing is that the content is produced daily. Our research suggests that I might be one of only a handful or so of people in the world to have done that for twenty years.

Despite that, the process of writing and producing content has never become routine. There is no fixed formula for how or why I produce material on any given day.

Sometimes it is an obvious reaction to events.

On other occasions, and this morning provides an example, the content arises because of issues that I have been thinking about. That, right now, seems particularly important when so much of the news agenda, serious as it often is, appears tediously predictable and devoid of hope.

The discussion on this occasion did, amongst other things, focus upon where inspiration comes from and what motivates it. That is the basis for this series, which will be published over the next week. It is an attempt on my part, more than ably assisted by Jacqueline, who has observed and quietly contributed to this process over the years, to both explain and understand what makes me want to present material to you each and every morning.

The first article in the series is entitled “Ooh, it makes me wonder”. Given that I know many readers here are of a certain age, the origin of that line requires little explanation, but it was, in fact, almost the first input I made into our conversation, and it is appropriate that it is the focus of the first article because it describes where this process begins, and why.

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