Essays from a writing life.
A slower place to read. Selected articles by Wesley on writing, travel, leadership, history, technology, surfing and the quiet reflections in between.
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My Seventh Book Is Coming This September: A Season in the Snow
Just a few weeks ago, this book didn't exist. Three weeks and almost 400 pages later, A Season in the Snow was complete — and this September, Thomas Bennett's journey continues into the Austrian Alps.
Kent Experiences
Chalk streams, sea pools, vineyards, film locations, surfing and aviation — the county in eleven stops.
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Author Experiences
Whitstable, the travel years, memoir, notebooks and the future of the craft — the writing life in ten stops.
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How Writing Books Changed My Life
A hospital bed took away the meetings, the travel and the business — and gave me back every story I had ever collected. This is how writing books changed my life.
The Rise of Author Scams and How to Spot Them
Fake agents, invented book fairs, paid awards and marketing packages that lead nowhere. The approaches are polished, flattering and relentless — here is the checklist worth keeping beside the inbox.
Why Whitstable Suits the Creative Life
The light, the shingle and the short walk to the water matter. But what really sustains creative work here is a community that turns up for one another without being asked.
What Is a Family Office Investment Company?
A family office is not simply a wealth manager with a smarter brochure. It is a private structure built to protect, invest and govern a family's capital across generations.
The Quiet Pleasure of Being a Local Author in Whitstable
Whitstable is not a backdrop I chose for effect. It is the place that formed me, and after years overseas it remains the town that quietly corrects my sentences.
Why I Write Looking Out to Sea
My desk faces the Thames Estuary, and I would not have it any other way. On the ever-changing canvas outside my window, the walks through town, and the cast of characters a whole life provides.
What Is a Social Footprint?
Every business leaves a mark on the people and places around it. The social footprint is how you measure whether that mark is a bruise or a benefit.
The Growth of Business Retreats and Why It Matters
Distributed teams, dead conference formats and a generation of founders who value time over trinkets have created something genuinely new: the business retreat as a serious commercial category.
The 10 Best ChatGPT Commands for Business
Ten prompts that have earned their place in the running of my companies — for briefs, board packs, negotiations, hiring and the dull admin nobody writes about.
Why Kent Is Becoming Britain's Southern France
Kent has always enjoyed a warmer, drier climate than most of Britain. What has changed is the pace: the county is beginning to feel less like an outlier and more like a preview.
The Lost Civilisations of the World
From the Indus Valley to the jungles of the Amazon, entire sophisticated societies rose, flourished and vanished. What they left behind still puzzles us.
Kent Vineyards and the Rise of World-Class English Wine
Thirty years ago English wine was a brave hobby. In Kent it has become a serious industry, with chalk soils, major investment and bottles that stand comfortably beside Champagne.
England's Chalk Streams and the River Stour
There are barely two hundred chalk streams on earth, and most of them are in England. Kent's River Stour is one of the finest — and one of the most threatened.
The Return of the Trams — and Why Kent Should Pay Attention
Across Europe the tram has returned not as nostalgia but as infrastructure. Kent, with Canterbury's traffic and growing districts, should at least join the conversation.
How to Start a Home Soap-Making Business
Low start-up costs, real margins and a product people buy again and again. But soap is a regulated cosmetic, and that is where most beginners trip up.
Kent Steps Into the Frame: Film, Television and the County's New Role
A Hollywood shoot in Whitstable and Hallmark's Christmas in Canterbury are not isolated novelties. Kent has become one of Britain's most useful counties on screen.
The Golden Age of the British Package Holiday
Thomson, Cosmos, Intasun and the great charter brands made the Mediterranean affordable to millions. Having worked inside that world, I still think it was one of Britain's finest industries.
Wild Swimming and the Sea Pools of the Kent Coast
Cold water, community and a chain of Victorian tidal pools — led by the magnificent Walpole Bay Tidal Pool at Cliftonville. How the Kent coast became the centre of Britain's outdoor swimming revival.
Has Technology Gone Too Far?
The question is not whether technology is good or bad. It is whether we have allowed useful tools to reorganise our lives around their own appetite for attention.
The Best Surfing Beaches in Kent
Kent will never be Cornwall, and does not need to be. On the right swell and tide, Joss Bay, Viking Bay, Stone Bay and their neighbours offer real, joyful surfing.
The Rise of the Private Stock Exchange
Companies are staying private longer and their shares still need to trade. A quiet parallel market has grown up to do the job — and most investors have never heard of it.
The Quiet Growth of Britain's Special Interest Tour Operators
As mass tourism became easier to book alone, the most interesting travel businesses moved in the opposite direction: smaller groups, deeper knowledge and journeys built around a shared obsession.
Why Entrepreneurs Are Switching to Small Business Retreats
The best strategic thinking rarely happens between meetings. Founders are increasingly stepping away — briefly, deliberately — to think clearly, challenge assumptions and return with a plan.
The Art of Long-Term Business Planning
Everyone agrees you should plan for the long term, and almost nobody does it. The discipline is rarer than it sounds — and it is the closest thing business has to an unfair advantage.
Manston Airport and What It Means for East Kent
After years of silence on the runway, Manston is set to return as a working airport. For one of Britain's most overlooked corners, the stakes could hardly be higher.
Is Beekeeping a Profitable Home Business?
Honey sells for a premium and the bees do the work. But between the romance and the revenue sit varroa mites, winter losses and some honest arithmetic.
The Quiet Rules of Good Business Etiquette
We hear endlessly about bad etiquette. The good kind is rarer, quieter and worth more — a set of small disciplines that compound into reputation.
America's Most Progressive Cities for Start-Ups
The action is no longer only in the Bay Area. From Austin to Raleigh, a new map of American enterprise is being drawn — and the lessons travel well.
The Wonders of Village Cricket
White flannels, a church spire, tea at four o'clock and a leg-side boundary into the nettles. Village cricket is England at its most itself — and it matters more than ever.
Six-Word Memoirs: Small Phrases, Whole Seasons
A short essay on how the smallest sentences can hold entire chapters of a life — from travel and business to quiet moments of recovery.
Memoir Examples: Real Scenes, Simple Structures, Honest Moments
How the strongest memoirs are built from ordinary evenings, particular streets and the people we can still describe by heart.
How to Start a Travel Agency as a Homeworker in the UK
The licences, the money, the suppliers and the honest arithmetic behind running a travel agency from a spare bedroom in Britain.
The Most Progressive Cities in the UK
Which British cities are actually changing, and what they are doing differently on transport, energy, housing and enterprise.
AI and the Writer: A Tool, Not a Replacement
A working novelist's honest view on generative AI — where it helps, where it flattens, and why the sentence still belongs to you.
The History of a Shutter: A Small Object, A Long Story
How a simple piece of painted wood carries centuries of climate, craft and Mediterranean daily life.
Why Bookshops Are Growing Again
Independent bookselling has been growing for a decade against every prediction. The reasons say a great deal about what people now want from a high street.
AI and the Early Detection of Skin Cancer
Algorithms can now match dermatologists at spotting melanoma in an image. The interesting question is what happens to the rest of the pathway.
A Summer on the Costa Brava, Remembered
The small hotels, the harbour lights and the sound of a scooter at midnight. A short travel essay on the coast that inspired Sunshine Seasons.
Travel Etiquette: The Unwritten Rules
Not a lecture about reclining seats — a working code for behaving well in other people's countries, aircraft and hotels.
How to Start a Tour and Travel Business
Building an operator rather than an agency: designing the product, pricing it honestly, and surviving the cash-flow trap that kills most of them.
Extreme Day Trips from Gatwick
Leave Sussex before dawn, have lunch in another country, sleep in your own bed. The art of the one-day flight abroad.
Andalusian Evenings: The Hour Before Dinner
On flamenco, orange trees, and the particular quality of light that hangs over Seville between seven and nine.
ChatGPT Commands That Actually Save You Time
Twelve practical prompts for everyday work — planning, research, admin and thinking — with the reasons they work.
Has AI Gone Too Far?
A working view from someone who uses these systems daily: where the genuine harms are, where the panic is misplaced, and what should actually be regulated.
The Slow Internet: Rediscovering the Web as a Reading Place
The case for RSS, personal blogs and email newsletters — the quiet parts of the internet where good writing still lives.
The Quiet Boom in Home Jam Making
Preserving is growing fast in Britain again — driven by cost, waste, allotments and a genuine appetite for making something with your hands.
The Lost Cafés of Europe
On the disappearing rooms where writers, exiles and idlers once passed entire afternoons — and what we lose when they close.
The Rise of the British Beekeeper
Beekeeping in the UK has grown dramatically in twenty years. What that means for pollination, for honey, and for the bees that are not honeybees.
Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis: The Childhood Illness Nobody Talks About
My son Thomas was diagnosed in 2017 after collapsing with inflammation in forty-seven joints. He has systemic JIA, the most severe form. This is what the disease is, and why it remains so badly understood and underfunded.
NAT Holidays: The Rise and Fall of Britain's Great Coach Holiday
How a budget coach operator carried a generation of British families to the Mediterranean on a shoestring — and why the model that built it eventually broke it.
Leadership Through Change: What Four Decades Taught Me
Notes on building companies through recessions, technology shifts and the quiet moments when leadership really matters.
Starting a Candle Making Business: A Genuinely Enjoyable Way to Begin
Low startup costs, fast feedback and a product people actually want. What to focus on if you want a candle business that makes money rather than a very expensive hobby.
The Key Things to Starting a Travel Business Now and in the Future
Four decades in travel have taught me which fundamentals never change and which have changed entirely. What actually matters if you are starting today.
Why Solar Panels Are an Ecological Problem We Are Refusing to Discuss
Clean at the point of use is not the same as clean. The mining, manufacturing, land use and waste realities behind solar deserve an honest hearing.
How to Grow a Travel Business in the UK
Growth in travel is rarely a marketing problem. It is a margin, repeat-rate and seasonality problem — and those are the three levers worth pulling.
Spies and Storytelling: The Cold War as Literary Material
Why the espionage novel remains the great modern form for writing about loyalty, doubt and the private cost of public work.
Salt, Seasalter and the Industry Britain Quietly Lost
The north Kent coast once produced sea salt at scale. Today a village called Seasalter is almost all that remains of it — a name outliving the trade that gave it one.
The Grave of Genghis Khan: Where Is the Great Khan Buried?
Eight centuries on, the most powerful conqueror in history has no known grave. The theories, the evidence and the reason Mongolia may not want him found.
Why Eating Fish Is So Good for You
The evidence for fish is unusually strong across the heart, the brain, the eyes and the joints — and the practical case for eating more of it is simpler than most diet advice.
Bad Business Etiquette: The Habits That Quietly Cost You Deals
Nobody ever tells you why they stopped returning your calls. After four decades in business, here are the behaviours that end relationships without anyone saying so.
Surfing and Writing: Two Practices, One Discipline
Why a lifetime spent paddling out at dawn quietly taught me almost everything I know about finishing a book.
AI in Pharmacology: What It Is Actually Changing
Beyond the headlines about machines discovering drugs, artificial intelligence is reshaping pharmacology in ways that are less cinematic and rather more important.
The Notebook Habit: Why I Still Write by Hand
Forty years of paper notebooks, and why the slower medium keeps producing the better sentences.
Cold Water Mornings: A Small Argument for the Sea in Winter
Why a swim before sunrise, in water you would rather not enter, may be the most reliable act of clarity available to a working life.
Hiring Slowly, Firing Kindly
Two of the hardest lessons of four decades in business, and why most companies get both of them wrong.
The Founder's Second Screen: On Technology and Attention
The single hardest discipline in modern leadership is not strategy. It is the ability to close a laptop.
On Solitude, and Why It Is Not Loneliness
A quiet essay on the difference between being alone and being lonely, and why the writing life depends on the first.
The Second Draft: Where the Book Actually Happens
The first draft is a promise. The second draft is the book keeping it.
Mallorca in Winter: The Island Nobody Talks About
Empty coves, quiet villages and the version of the island the summer crowds never see.
The Quiet Founder: Building Without a Megaphone
Not every strong company is built by a loud founder. Some of the best ones are built by the person you barely hear from.
Reading the Tide: What the Sea Teaches About Timing
The tide does not negotiate. It arrives when it arrives. A short essay on rhythm, patience and the discipline of the working day.
Why I Had to Write Echoes of a Season — And Why I Almost Didn't
There is a strange truth about life: it often takes nearly losing it to truly understand what mattered all along.