『Voices From The Crow's Nest』のカバーアート

Voices From The Crow's Nest

Voices From The Crow's Nest

著者： Alexander M Crow
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Here, I share the voiceovers from my letters as a podcast, with occasional extras. I talk about being a part of nature, not apart from it, I talk about ancestral skills, or bushcraft, and I talk about our possible futures as a species living in uncertain, often dangerous times. One day, I might even narrate my fiction. All with hope, joy, and kindness.

alexandermcrow.substack.comAlexander M Crow 社会科学 科学
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  • AI Policy

    AI Policy
    2026/09/07

    tl;dr version: I don’t use Generative Artificial Intelligence, or Large Language Models, or anything connected with these. I even turn off the grammar check and I occasionally have issues with spellcheck.

    I will never use AI in the writing process. Never.

    Living in the Future

    Teenage me would have loved the fact that I am having to write this document. He was very much into cyberpunk, whether the works of William Gibson or the roleplaying game Cyberpunk 2020 (now repackaged and better known as a computer/console game, Cyberpunk 2077). Artificial Intelligence is something I’ve long been interested in, long imagined, long read about.

    However, to be living in the now—in the future—in a world where unscrupulous, greed-driven Dark Triad types have stolen the words and images and art of an entire species, then reframed this as something you need to pay to use—is not just alarming and deeply concerning, but also mildly ridiculous.



    Get full access to The Crow's Nest at alexandermcrow.substack.com/subscribe
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    13 分
  • A Celebration of Scent: 49 Favourites

    A Celebration of Scent: 49 Favourites
    2026/06/08
    A while ago, back in March, Sarah Crowder shared a list she’d crafted about 41 of her favourite smells. (She is certainly charmed, having a birthday on the 21st of March. There’s power in that.)At the time, I thought this a great idea, and set myself the challenge of doing likewise once I reached the semi-mystical age of 49 years. Since, I have been keeping notes on this and, a few weeks after my birthday, it’s time to share my own list, in no particular order. (Note: I’d originally intended to do similarly to Sarah, a note listing things but then, as I kept my list of ideas, it turned into an obvious post.)I try not to include anything too universally admired (it’s hard, though, and I’ve sneakily snuck some of those smells into others below. There’s no petrichor, though, which is a shame).Before we begin with my own, here’s Sarah’s excellent list, with a frankly fantastic photograph (I’ve illustrated my own piece with photos of my own, linking to some of the scents I’ve shared):Finally, before we begin, I’m not including any scents deemed too adult by nature, as I know some of you might not appreciate that (also, my Mum reads this, hi Mum!). I’ll let your own imaginations fill in the blanks on these. Blimey! Your head went there?! (Shut up, Alex—Ed.)(This post might be cut short in some email clients, so do make sure you read it all!)The List. 49(+) Favourite Scents. 1. The scent of webbing straps left out in the forest. For example, those of my hammock and that of my wildlife trail camera. They absorb something of the spirit of a tree, something not quite bark, nor moss, but beyond both. 2. Similar to this, the scent of my principal tarp, the one I used for my extended stays out in the woods. It is rich in campfire notes, with hints of the forest itself, rain, sun, wind, cold and heat, falling leaves and fragments of lichen. Made from a sort of poly cotton, over the years the material has become something else, grown into a Thing, with a scent of its own. 3. The particular smell of knapping and abrading a flint. I think I prefer this to the scent derived from striking a light from a flint, but that is also delicious. 4. The dark rocks of the cove by Little Burrageo in Deerness, when there has been sunshine for three days and little wind. A rare phenomenon in Orkney, this warms them and traps and distills the sea and land and, particularly, the coast into one distinctive smell. It has top notes of crumbling sandstone, iodine, and salt, with a rich body derived from the more volcanic, harder rock. Other places on the same coast don’t quite capture the same depth of scent and, when I lived near there, if they did have the scent, it would have been lost beneath tonnes of guano from the tens of thousands of seabirds who used to nest there. Last time I visited in spring, those cliffs lay comparatively silent, many of the birds dead or gone northward. 5. Evening, night-blooming jasmine, and frangipani, after a hot tropical day. Before the night mosquitoes appear in force, but as the day ones are going to bed. 6. Old books, obviously but, to make it a little more personal, I’ll be a touch more specific—the scent of a particular journal, once a chunky ledger for a company back in the 1800s, a company who only filled in five pages of 2000+, before abandoning that ledger. Now, it has been passed to me and, every time I open her, the scent is transporting. And, if I’m honest, a little off-putting. I want to use her pages, fill her in some way, but I’ve yet to quite learn how and I find the ancient smell akin to an elderly mystic sitting silently and peacefully, yet somehow also judging me. 7. Tulsi I’ve grown, harvested, and dried myself. Particularly Ethiopian tulsi. It is a bit tutti-frutti, a bit sharp, a bit wonderful, all its own thing. 8. Otter spraint, or poop. Yeah, I know, but to smell this as you walk a river or a coast is one of those times where the nose can sometimes confirm an animal before the other senses, and I love that. (See also—the scent of deer in a thick wood, but not the scent of wild boar, despite being an awesome thing, knowing they’re hiding up in that thicket, on that ridge, just from smell alone—it ain’t as nice as deer—and neither can touch the otter poop for sheer sort-of-jasmine nose joy.) 9. Givenchy Very Irresistible For Men. My go-to scent back in the mid 2000s through to the early 2010s, criminally deleted by the company, it fit me and my skin so well. Somewhat chocolatey, although the middle notes are actually coffee and sesame. Top notes included mint and grapefruit, with a base of Virginia cedar and hazelnut. Absolutely my favourite manufactured perfume for men, hands-down, and I mourn its loss still. (Honourable mention over the years for Issey Miyake L’Eau d’Issey pour Homme, and [vintage] Burberry Men [and, to a lesser extent, vintage Burberry Weekend for summer.]) These days, I wear nothing, have no added scent—I...
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    26 分
  • Isère, France. July, 2021.

    Isère, France. July, 2021.
    2026/05/26
    (After you have read these introductory paragraphs once, you can skip to the new/old content below. If you are listening, then the time stamp is around the two minute 45 second mark.)IntroductionThe word settled, to me, carries connotations I am keen to avoid. I have never felt settled or, perhaps, I cannot recall a time I felt settled. I do not feel settled now, writing this, and I’ve lived in the same house for three and a half years. Without even discussing the obvious issues of colonisation, I just don’t feel like I could, or should, settle; better to keep my constituent parts shook up, agitated perhaps, rather than separating and stagnant.Instead, I feel as though I have been travelling for years, maybe because I have not lived in my ‘home’ nation of Scotland for eight and a half years, perhaps because I know I won’t stay here forever, or maybe because I carry that concept of home in a way which differs from many?More precisely, I still think of myself as a slow traveller, globally feral. Recently, I have been revisiting places through the photographs and words I recorded when my feet crossed their soil. This is a way of reminding myself of where I have been, not just in space and time, but in mind, too. It is a wonderful thing, to come out of a low and rediscover myself through words I crafted, through the lens of a camera, when memory has wandered in the fog for too long. Thank you, past me.When I first started sharing letters with the world in this fashion, six or more years ago, I usually began them with a vignette of where I was, a sort-of travel diary, mixed with nature observation, locking in the setting for the reader, before I spoke of other things—and, by so doing, ensuring that place fed into the whole. It was a useful device, for reader and myself both but, as these letters were sent to so few readers, and now languish archived behind a paywall, I thought it a shame not to share these snippets again.As such, I am going to share a short series of these sketches, accompanied by a photograph from that time, sent to you in date order.I shall include the above paragraphs in each of the letters in this series, but I shall also include a link at the very start, so you can skip ahead once you are familiar with the above words. If you are listening and similarly want to skip, then the timestamp you want to navigate to will be in the same place.Taken without these paragraphs, each is a short read, and I hope you enjoy them.Isère, France. July, 2021.Moving through a natural woodland is different from passing through any other environment. You cannot rush, you cannot allow yourself to miss the little details. The more time you spend amongst the trees, the more you realise this and the quicker your pace alters: slow, slower, pause, repeat. Essentially, you return to a more natural state, a rhythm as old as our species itself.You listen, you look, these senses you already know well pulling in huge amounts of data. For most people, the vast majority of their information comes from sight and sound, but spend time in the woods and you learn to touch things—that tree bark, that rock or leaf, for example, you learn to inhale in a different way, deliberately sampling the air and all the varied perfumes it brings. You can even learn to taste that same air, or pick a leaf or fruit and chew.Then there are the senses we don’t always realise exist, let alone consciously utilise. Some of these can be a little unnerving when you first start to actively use and acknowledge them—some people call them a sixth sense which, quite frankly, is silly. We have far more than five senses, after all. Learning to listen to that little voice in your head, the one which tells you something is watching you, or that there’s something ahead on the trail, these things take time, but it is time which is well spent indeed.Of course, this isn’t supernatural at all, but simply your brain processing different information and picking up on tiny details you have consciously missed. Perhaps a change in the air brought a tendril of scent? We often fail to use our noses as we can—try it, now, sitting reading this, open your nostrils wide and inhale slowly and deliberately, you may be surprised what you can sample. Similarly, learning to snuffle like a dog at a scent trail is possible too, involving faster inhalation and sampling, your sense of smell actually being worked properly. Both these things can seem like strange magic, but also seek to remind us how civilisation can dull our own bodily functions.The woodland is a complex machine of many parts. It exists on different scales and even across time. I have walked across Scottish hillsides, devoid of any tree cover, but have known from the wide flourishes of native bluebells and anemones that I was walking through the ghost of a wood. If you look closely at the ground around you, you can often see small depressions, pockmarks from where trees were once blown over,...
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    9 分
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