writing – The London Druid

This blog post was inspired by this piece by Isabel Brooks in The Guardian:

Why am I filled with nostalgia for a pre-internet age I never knew?

Reading Brooks piece on growing up just before the internet became a way of life, I felt a strong pang of recognition. I’m part of that small and slightly haunted generation sometimes labelled xennials – old enough to remember dial-up tones and landline phones, but young enough to have adapted to smartphones and streaming. It’s not quite nostalgia I feel when I look back, but a kind of reverence for a world where everything wasn’t so immediate.

That’s why, for me, the ache isn’t for the pre-internet world. It’s for the pre-social media world. The world before we were expected to perform ourselves constantly, before everything we did needed to be witnessed to feel real.

In 1999, I moved to New York City as a student. New city, new country, new continent. There was no Instagram to scout out potential friends or TikTok to show what kind of person I was. No swipe-based apps to filter people into categories. Making connections was harder by today’s standards – but also deeper. You met people through shared spaces, not shared hashtags. You had to show up in person, not just in pixels. The friendships I made that summer – formed over late-night conversations, record shop excursions, and mismatched pub crawls – are friendships that have lasted 25 years.

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The first time I sat beside the Thames and felt its breath moving through me, I didn’t call it Druidry. I didn’t call it anything at all. There was no ritual, no robe, no sacred chant whispered into the wind. Just a stillness. A sense that I had stumbled into a conversation already in progress – between water and stone, current and moon, memory and presence. That moment wasn’t a beginning or an epiphany. But if I were to map my Druid path from here to there, it might be the place I’d draw the first spiral.

I’m often asked, now, what Druidry is. Not academically, not even always spiritually – just… what is it? Is it a religion? A philosophy? A kind of nature-based mindfulness? Something old and mysterious, or something new and made-up? And where do I, a queer neurodivergent man living in suburban London with a Labrador and a growing collection of fox folklore, fit into that?

This is my answer – or at least, a glimpse of it.

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Tag: writing

What Is Druidry?