Hi team.

It’s been some time since I wrote anything here, and naturally that means there’s too much to contain within one blogpost.

But know that I – and we – are still here, and still trucking on. Laura is giving her legs (and everything else!) a rest in Cambodia, and I am in a small Vietnamese town called Hoa Binh, pointed west. I will cross over to Laos in the next few days, and then pedal onwards to Luang Prabang. Then I’ll travel by bus to rejoin her, and hang out with our friend Adam, in Siem Reap. Adventures await, and yet, at the same time, they’re also happening right now!

So much for the geographical stuff. There are a couple of other things – projects! – I’d like to tell you all about, partly because sharing them (as they are) will help motivate me to continue pursuing them. Ideas don’t do well locked away.

The first one, actually, is proving quite easy to work on, as it has to do with our trip. We recently launched a website with the same name as our Instagram handle (@OnOurBicycles) – we’re branding, see. Its purpose is to communicate what we’ve learned, and what we’ll learn in the future, about cycling in different places, to an audience of other cyclists. For this reason, not much of it will be relevant or particularly interesting to people who follow me/us because they’re friends or family. However, if you’d like to look at the photos we’ve been taking along the way, and want a better way to view them than by going on Instagram (I understand!), then the Photo Gallery part of the website may appeal. Just click here to find it, and click on whichever country takes your fancy. We’re working our way through backlogs of photos, which is why there isn’t yet a Vietnam section, and why the Turkey/Georgia photos are raw and unedited.

The second is something I’m working on by myself. It’s more booky, long-form prosey, and at its root its about the long-overdue Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Except, it’s not really about that, is it? It’s about humans and society, and what the so-called ‘second coming’ means. The question that kicked it all off – and the sort of working title, although I’m steering away from it somewhat – was/is: If He came, would we believe Him? As in, what would it take for the actual (second) coming of God On Earth to convince us that he (/He/She/It) was legit? It would certainly take more than walking on water, because David Blaine (or was it Dynamo) already did that.

Or, conversely, assuming Jesus wasn’t actually the Son of God but was instead an excellent preacher who provided humanity with something it didn’t know it needed, what would a contemporary equivalent look like? One of Jesus’ key selling points was that he wanted to democratise the religious experience: bring it inside the home. Slaves made up a huge proportion of Roman society; Jesus said they were made in God’s image as much as the emperor. He offered his flesh and blood, and his devotees really dug it. In an age of multi-layered irony and social media addiction, a poststructural, post-climate change, anthropocene age, what message could we receive that would awaken us? Can any one person provide that? Where should we be looking?

Threads that tie into this whole shebang include Brian Muraresku’s book The Immortality Key, which makes the (very convincing… possibly conclusive?) case that what really made Jesus’ stand out from all the other religious movements of the time was his way of democratising religious experience was by revealing the Eleusinian Mysteries to the masses: inviting everybody to God’s table by giving them wine spiked with psychoactive substances, allowing them to experience god at home, rather than by trekking to Eleusis. There is lots of juice here, but archaeo-chemistry (the scientific study of what people were eating and drinking during periods of ancient history) is a fledgling science – so young it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page!

They (the threads) also include one woman’s claim, published recently in the Pentagon’s UFO files, that she had experienced an ‘unaccounted-for pregnancy’. As in, aliens abducted her and impregnated her. Her claim was included in statistical form in a cache of previously classified documents released (to The Sun) by the Pentagon in April 2022. Which is obviously nuts, right?

But you know, in his 1957 book Flying Saucers, Carl Jung explains that the way we interpret inexplicable phenomena has changed over time. For thousands of years, weird lights in the sky were messages written by the gods – astrology was the ‘science’ of deciphering these messages. Then for a while we called them ‘angels’, then they were evidence of fairies and pixies. Now we call them foreign military aircrafts, or aliens. No one believed the woman from the Pentagon files was really carrying the Son of Aliens. But you know who else had an ‘unaccounted-for pregnancy’, and who was (ultimately) believed? Mary! And all it took was a thumb up from Joseph. Well, no, it took a lot more than that, but the comparison says something, I think.

So anyway, that’s what’s ticking over on my end. It’s a work in progress. And I’d like to open up some sort of dialogue with it, which is why I’m considering starting a Substack dedicated to it, where I’ll post things as and when I write them. Serialise it, sort of. That way, if people are interested, they can read along. And if they have any recommendations for things to consider/read/watch/listen to, they can chip in. I’d love that, and it would undoubtedly help the work. You can probably subscribe to my existing Substack at this link in order to get future updates. But I’ll get round to setting that up properly in the coming weeks. Or months.

OH, and there’s another prose thing I’ve been mulling on, but which I won’t bore you with now.

So for now, thank you for checking in. Be good to each other. We love you.

Bru X