I started this blog in 2013 as a way to document a six-week road trip across the United States. By the time I got to Pittsburgh (three days into it) I was already tired of blogging. There was too much pressure every day to write and post pictures about my travels. So I stopped blogging and used Facebook instead, which worked out much better. More people got to follow the trip and it was easier to upload photos and descriptions.

And then I ignored this site for seven years. And to quote everyone’s favourite hobbit Sam Gamgee: “Well, I’m back.”

Lots of things have changed both in my own life and the world around us. Even as I write this, we’re in the middle of one of the most significant (and bizarre) events in history – a worldwide global lockdown due the COVID-19 pandemic. So let’s see how blogging in the ‘new normal’ goes. This time I intend to write more generally – articles about topics of personal and professional interest, like architecture, design, cities, art, and education. I may also throw in my thoughts about media I like – books, movies, television, and so on.

The first thing you’ll see over the next few days is a migration of a bunch of stuff I’ve written in the past year or so from Medium.com, a site that I now find to be slightly better than useless in terms of getting people to discover and read what I write. After that, I hope to write more frequently, formal as well as informal stuff. So watch this space. And if what I say sparks any thoughts, do me a favour and post your comment. I like to think of writing as dialogue – thoughts and ideas improve when they’re discussed, debated, and revised. If I wanted “likes” I would just keep writing on Facebook. So if you have a response to what I say – a comment, a question, a critique – then let me know right here where I can see it.

Oh, one more thing. Back when I started this in 2013, the blog was called “long division”. Don’t ask why. I’m not even sure I remember exactly. I changed the name to palimpsest, which is one of my favourite concepts in design and abstract thinking. Technically the world palimpsest refers to a phenomenon that occurred before the printing press was invented, when scribes used to write manuscripts on parchment paper. Since the parchment was expensive (usually made from animal hides), when they wanted to write new pages, they would scrape off the original writing as best as they could and write new text over it. Over multiple instances of this, one could see several faint layers of the old text beneath the new, forming a sort of abstract pattern of lines that no longer looked like written language.

This idea of layers of information added continually on top of each other fascinates me. The word is now used abstractly to describe any kind of layering of elements where the previous layers can still be discerned. One sees this in cities and settlements, in architecture and habitation, in objects and images. If you look deeply at anything, there is a palimpsest there that enriches and illuminates the entire history of the thing being observed. The term also refers to the idea of repurposing and reusing something, which, aside from being a generally good way to approach an otherwise wasteful world, is a fitting reason to use it as the name of this site – a digital space that was initially meant to do something else entirely. That’s why I’ve decided to keep my old posts from the original blog. There’s only four of them, and nothing’s wrong with them. You might even like reading them.

Hopefully as this space fills with new thoughts, new ideas, and new information, it will add to and enrich the palimpsest of thoughts we encounter every day.