Welcome to my blog!
I spent most of my working life writing things that were never meant to be read for pleasure — policy papers, technical reports, project assessments. The work took me to places that stayed with me: Moscow in the final years of the Soviet Union, post-Apartheid South Africa, development projects across three continents. I took notes. I always meant to do something with them.
This site is what I did with them.
The centrepiece is Triple Edge — an espionage trilogy I have been writing for the better part of a decade, set between 1989 and 2016, serialised here and on Substack. Alongside it you will find my continuing work on SDGs and human rights, a few children’s stories, and the research and references that underpin all of it.
I built this for readers who are curious about how the world actually works — behind the press releases, the institutional façades, and the official versions of events. If that sounds like you, you are in the right place.
Triple Edge is serialised on Substack, where you can follow the story as it unfolds, read the background dossiers, and join the conversation. Free subscription is open — a paid tier follows after a trial period, with a proportion going to organisations working on SDGs and Human Rights. In the meantime — take your time, explore, and do get in touch.
Triple Edge
Fiction Writing
Triple Edge is a literary espionage trilogy spanning 1989 to 2016 — the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Brexit referendum, when the consequences of 1989 began to be fully felt and very few people were paying the right kind of attention.
The trilogy follows Charles Keane, a leading sovietologist seconded by. MI6, Laura Pellegrino, a French-Italian DCRI operative, and the Cambridge Group — an unofficial network of analysts, field operatives, and researchers who have concluded that the intelligence establishment cannot be trusted to investigate itself. Their adversaries include the SVR’s Viktor Pavlov, the Butler Britain network around Lord Horatio Friggington, and a kompromat database whose full contents no one person understands.
The core thesis — stated plainly at the outset and tested against every event in the series — is this: no side in this story pursued purely principled goals. There are no good boys and no bad boys. Only people making decisions under pressure, with incomplete information, in a world where the structures they believed in were already compromised.
The story was inspired by the author’s visit to Moscow in January 1990, It has taken thirty-five years to write.
Triple Edge – Reading Guide
The Substack publishes a mix of narrative fiction, in-world documents and dossiers, and historical background.
Here is the hub, all about Triple Edge.
Triple Edge Index
Provides a chronological overview of the post to date and is continually updated.
- Narrative posts follow a small group of characters as they investigate, remember, misinterpret, and revise their understanding of events. Published on Mondays.
- Dossier drops reconstruct institutional histories, financial structures, legal mechanisms, and intelligence architectures using real documents and research. Published on Fridays.
- Memos and field notes act as connective tissue — fragments that link narrative and archive. Published on Wednesdays.
- Diaries reflect uncertainty, memory, and emotional cost. Every other Saturday.
No single post is designed to stand alone. Meaning accumulates across formats.
Built to be reread. Television writers have learned that the old fear of overcomplication belongs to a vanished audience — one assumed to be half-watching. Today’s viewer pauses, rewinds, and goes back to episodes from months or years earlier to check whether a detail was planted deliberately. (Jed Mercurio calls overcomplication one of the three fallacies of writing drama.) A serial published here can go further: the archive is one click away, timestamped and searchable. So treat this Index as a map, and treat anomalies as deposits. When a character notices something she cannot yet interpret — and notices that she cannot interpret it — that observation will be repaid, sometimes a book later. Nothing out of place is decoration. Triple Edge is complicated on purpose, but the characters carry the confusion so that you don’t have to: whatever tangles the story, someone inside it feels the tangle first.
Listening to Triple Edge. Posts can be listened to in the Substack app: tap the play icon at the top right of a post and the audio starts in the app player, continuing in the background like a podcast episode until you pause it or fully close the app. Two limitations are worth knowing. Text-to-speech works only in the app, and only on posts written in English — if English is not your first language, the player’s speed control lets you slow the reading down. On the web, your browser or device can substitute: Edge’s Read Aloud, iOS Speak Screen, and similar tools will read a post aloud, and can be combined with your browser’s translation feature for a rough rendering in your own language. Where a post carries a recorded voiceover, that recording plays instead of the automatic voice.
Triple Edge Resources
Resources provide context, not conclusions. The full library — several hundred documents, organised by section — lives at together with the record each Dossier was built from. The resource base is being continually updated, as URLs of currently some 1200+ references from material collected more than fifteen plus years have to be verified. You will be informed of updates on a regular basis.
SDGs and Human Rights
The Sustainable Development Goals and Human Rights are inseparable. Agreed for 2015–2030 and applicable to all countries, the SDGs build on the earlier Millennium Development Goals (2000–2015). The WAITRO Summit 2022 examined how both frameworks are incorporated into project design — and how the MDGs shaped water democracy in post-Apartheid South Africa.
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Empowerment
Empowerment is one of the most used and least understood words in the vocabulary of… read more
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WAITRO Summit 2022
Project Cycle Management/Results Based Management – A focus on Monitoring and Evaluation in the context… read more
