These are the things that feed into everything else - not separate from the work, but the substrate of it.
I completed Basics Level 1 at Storylabor Zürich in May 2026 - a seven-week Tuesday evening course covering Yes And, scene work, listening, and short form games. I am currently in Level 2.
The Yes And principle - accept what is offered, add to it, act on it - is one of the most transferable things I have encountered. It is how good facilitation works. It is how good conversation works. It is how good strategy works. The improv stage is, in many ways, the most honest room I have been in professionally.
In May 2026 I performed at the Climate Storytelling Night - a GreenBuzz, Zürich Storytellers, and Climate Week Zürich collaboration at Jenseits im Viadukt. The cocoa supply chain, a jute sack on a Vietnamese farm wall in 2018, and what happened next. The core line: "The answer to deforestation was never a pledge. It was a price."
I am working toward panel moderation as a professional practice. The skill gaps I am developing deliberately: question architecture, silence management, guest redirection, and the kind of deep pre-event research that makes a moderator genuinely useful rather than merely competent.
Between 2022 and 2023, I drove around 30,000km through ten African countries in a Subaru Forester named Subie. I wrote about it on Substack - dispatches from the road, from campsites, from border crossings, from the kind of days that do not fit into a professional biography.
The Substack is part of my writing portfolio. It is where I learned to write for a reader rather than for a record. It is also where Subie Goes South began - as lived notes that eventually became a manuscript.
A Nigerian author writing about a young woman navigating the weight of expectation and the cost of silence. Sharp, precise, and difficult to put down.
Daily chess - with a specific goal this year of beating my partner, which is both a domestic ambition and a personal development plan. Daily Irish on Duolingo, which is less about the streak and more about reclaiming a part of my Irish identity that I let drift.
A terrace garden near Lake Zürich with a climbing rose grown from a cutting of my grandmother's rose - planted at our homeplace in Ireland eighty years ago, passed down through my mother, now growing here, and a small collection of herbs I tend to with more optimism than skill - an attempt to touch soil and occasionally improve dinner.
Kettlebells several times per week, spinning classes now and again, and lots of time spent in the mountains either hiking, or skiing. I've strong opinions about the correct way to make a cup of tea, which I have never successfully exported...