Adam Woozeer
Written by Adam Woozeer. His main, professional site is woozeer.com; this is his personal one.
The off-duty record, somewhere between Mauritius and Monday. Everything here, the essays, the photographs and the side projects, is written and made by Adam Woozeer.
Now
- Where London, UK
- Next trip Somewhere warm, with good coffee and no agenda
- Listening Movin’ To The Sun, HUGEL, Imael Angel, Ultra Naté
- Reading The Thinking Machine, Stephen Witt, 2025
- Film Past Lives, Celine Song, 2023
- Series The Bear, season three, slowly
Notes
The notebook I started and actually kept
july 2026 · kept
I've started and abandoned maybe fifteen notebooks. The pattern was the same every time: buy something that looked like you'd want to write in it, fill the first few pages with a mixture of ambition and observation, then stop. The blank pages didn't feel like possibility after that. They felt like evidence.
This one is different. It's a cheap Muji softcover, and I've had it for nearly a year. I write in it most mornings, not about anything particular. Mostly it's a warm-up: what I'm thinking about, what's bothering me, what happened yesterday that I hadn't finished processing.
Write it down and it either resolves into something manageable, or turns out to be nothing, which is usually the answer.
I don't reread it much. The writing isn't the point, or it is, but only in the moment. When I've gone back through old entries looking for something I half-remembered writing, it reads like someone else's anxious email. The value is in the act, not the archive.
Write it down and it either resolves into something manageable, or turns out to be nothing, which is usually the answer.
I think more clearly after writing than before it. The writing doesn't surface brilliant thoughts. It forces a kind of order that thinking alone doesn't. You can hold a half-formed worry in your head for days. Write it down and it either resolves into something manageable, or turns out to be nothing.
The cheap notebook helps. A beautiful leather one would feel like a commitment, something to live up to. This one is disposable, which makes it easier to write badly in it, and writing badly in it is the only way I write in it at all.
The app I’ve been meaning to build for three years
june 2026 · unbuilt
The app is simple in my head. It has always been simple in my head. That's probably the problem.
Three years ago I wrote it down in a notebook, one I've since filled and moved on from, in about eight sentences. A way to log the things the kids say that you know you'll forget. Not photos. The weird stuff. The wrong words they use for things, the way they explain the world before they know how the world works. A voice note would capture it but I've never gone back to a voice note in my life.
Some of those are true. The last one keeps me up a bit.
The idea is still there. The eight sentences are in a notebook somewhere. The app isn't.
I've justified this a few ways. I don't have a free weekend. Someone has probably already built it. Reaching for your phone would break the moment you're trying to capture. The kids grow up, the window closes, and maybe not building it is the answer.
Time isn't what's stopping me. I've spent three years adding features to it in my head, and the eight-sentence version is gone. Now it syncs across devices and has a timeline view and exports to something beautiful when they turn eighteen. None of that will ever get built.
The notebook version was better. I should just use the notebook.
Things I believed about travel that turned out to be wrong
may 2026 · revised
I've been travelling long enough now to have a collection of beliefs I held with real confidence that turned out to be either wrong, or right for the wrong reasons. None of this is advice. It's more of a personal audit.
I used to spend weeks before a trip reading about where we were going. History, food guides, the best neighbourhoods, what to avoid, opening hours. The research felt productive. It also, I think, ruined the places. When you already know that a market is famous and what to expect there, you're arriving to confirm rather than to discover. The times we've been most surprised, in the good way, were when we showed up knowing almost nothing.
The best meal we had in Lisbon was in a place that had a laminated menu and was half empty at 7pm. We almost walked past it.
Off-season is quieter and cheaper and sometimes better. But some things only exist because of the crowds, the energy of a city that's full of people, the feeling that something is happening, the chance encounter with another family going through the same confusing thing you are. There's a smugness to off-season travel that I've had to unlearn. Sometimes the season is the point.
This one isn't wrong so much as it's become a cliché deployed by tourists to feel superior to other tourists. The restaurant with the handwritten sign and the locals at every table is, these days, often as discovered as everywhere else It's been discovered by a different kind of traveller. Eat where the food looks good. Ask the person at the hotel if they're from there. Judge by the smell coming out of the kitchen.
The best meal we had in Lisbon was in a place that had a laminated menu and was half empty at 7pm. We almost walked past it.
It's different, not harder. You move slower, which means you see more. You stop more, which means you find things you wouldn't have found. Children have a way of making contact with places that adults have forgotten how to do, and they walk up to things, touch them, ask questions, delighted by things you've trained yourself to be too cool for. Japan with a five-year-old was better than Japan would have been without one. I'm sure of this.
Longer isn't always better. A week somewhere you love, where you're not trying to do everything, is often better than three weeks trying to cover ground. The best weeks we've had were the ones where we gave up on the itinerary by day two and stayed in the same neighbourhood for most of it. The worst trips involved a spreadsheet.
The difference between interesting and useful
april 2026 · ongoing
I read a lot. I retain little of what I read, which bothered me for a long time until I worked out that retention isn't the point. The question is whether reading it changed something in how I see something else. That's the interesting/useful split, and I think about it a lot.
Interesting is easy. Most things are interesting if you approach it right. A Wikipedia article about a niche historical event. A documentary about a sport I don't follow. A long piece about how concrete is made. I find these things interesting and they make me, in some vague sense, a more textured person. They don't, however, help me do anything differently.
The problem with the internet is that it has made interesting things very cheap and useful things no easier to find than before.
Useful is harder. Something is useful if it changes how I act, or think, or approach a problem. Useful doesn't have to be practical in a narrow sense, a novel can be useful if it shifts your frame on something you'd been stuck on. But the bar is: did this change anything? Did I enjoy it?
The problem with the internet is that it has made interesting things very cheap and useful things no easier to find than before.
The trap I fall into is treating interesting as if it were useful. Consuming information as a proxy for doing something with it. Reading about productivity instead of being productive. Reading about travel instead of booking something. There's a comfort in interesting that useful doesn't offer, because interesting asks nothing of you.
I've given up trying to retain everything and started asking a simpler question when I finish something: did I want to tell anyone about this? Not to perform knowledge, but because it connected to something I care about. If yes, it was useful. If no, it was interesting, and I should stop pretending it's the same thing.
I also try to read less and sit with things longer. Which is harder than it sounds when there is always more to read.
On keeping a camera in your pocket
march 2026 · carried
I am not a photographer. But about eighteen months ago I started carrying a small camera everywhere, nothing expensive, a used Sony point-and-shoot, and it changed something about how I move through the day that I'm still trying to explain properly.
The phone camera is better. I know this. The computational photography alone makes my little Sony look primitive in certain situations. But the phone is also the thing I use for everything else: email, messages, work, the endless scroll. When I pick up my phone to take a photo, I'm one notification away from not taking the photo. The camera has one job and that focus is most of the value.
The camera is an excuse to stop. That's most of what it does. The photos are almost secondary.
The other thing is the pause. To take a photo with a phone you hold up a rectangle and tap. To take a photo with a real camera, even a small one, you have to look at something first. You have to decide it's worth stopping for. That pause has made me notice things I would have walked past. Light on a wall in the afternoon. My son's face doing something specific that won't happen again.
The camera is an excuse to stop. That's most of what it does. The photos are almost secondary.
I'm not precious about it. Most of what I shoot is bad. The framing is off, the light is wrong, I miss the moment by half a second. But occasionally I get something that captures what something felt like, not what it looked like, and those photos are worth every missed shot.
I still use my phone for photos at family things where what matters is that someone got the shot, not how it looks. But for the rest of it, walking around, travelling, being somewhere and wanting to remember it, the small camera stays in my jacket pocket, which is where it belongs.
Everything I know about cooking I learned by getting it wrong first
february 2026 · learned
Growing up in a Mauritian household, food was never something you learned from a recipe. It was something that happened around you, constantly, and you absorbed it or you didn't. The problem is I didn't pay enough attention when I had the chance, and now I'm in my thirties reconstructing dishes from memory and instinct and a lot of failed experiments.
The first time I tried to make a proper Mauritian fish curry I added the spices in the wrong order and at the wrong heat and ended up with something that smelled almost right but tasted like a rough approximation. My mother, who I called afterwards, told me I'd burned the masala and that you can't come back from a burned masala. She was right. You can't.
The best cooks I know are relaxed about failure. They treat a bad dish as data, not a verdict.
That failure taught me more than any successful first attempt could have. I know what the spices should smell like at each stage. I know the moment before burned and I know how to pull back. You only learn that by crossing the line at least once.
The best cooks I know are relaxed about failure. They treat a bad dish as data, not a verdict.
Following recipes precisely rarely produces the best results for me. It produces correct results, which is different. The dishes I'm most proud of are the ones where I understood the recipe well enough to deviate from it. I knew that the tomatoes I had were more acidic than whatever the writer used, so I adjusted. That intuition only comes from having made something badly and worked out why.
Cooking is the activity I'm most comfortable being bad at, which I think is the precondition for getting good. I am still bad at pastry. Pastry is still winning.
The recipes from home, on scraps of paper in my mother's handwriting in a drawer in the kitchen, I'm working through them. Some are a list of ingredients with no quantities. That part I don't mind. The quantities were never the point.
The guitar is decorative now and that’s fine
january 2026 · decorative
I bought the guitar in 2019. This was attempt number two. Attempt number one was in my early twenties and ended after about four months when I accepted that I wanted to be someone who played guitar more than I wanted to play guitar. Attempt two had a better start. I found a teacher, practiced consistently for almost a year, learned maybe fifteen songs passably well. Then the pandemic happened, then life rearranged itself, and at some point I noticed I hadn't touched it in three months.
It's been on a stand in the corner of the room since then. I like having it there. The guitar, at this point, is doing a job. It's a pleasant object in the room, it occasionally makes me think I might pick it up, and it holds a certain potential energy that I find comforting. It hasn't been plugged in since 2022.
There is a version of me that plays guitar. He visits occasionally. He is welcome, but he doesn't live here.
There is a version of me that plays guitar. He visits occasionally. He is welcome, but he doesn't live here.
I used to feel guilty about this. There's a whole discourse around hobbies and commitment and not being a quitter that I've worked through. The guitar cost me a few hundred pounds and gave me a year of genuine enjoyment and some calluses that have long since faded. That feels like a reasonable transaction.
Some things I thought were failed hobbies were things I needed for a time. I needed to try to learn guitar twice. I know that now. I don't need to learn it a third time, and I won't.
Life
- Lisbon, spring ’24
- Ramen. Tokyo.
- Puglia, summer ’23
- Market, Wednesday
- Marrakech medina, “we got a little lost on purpose”
- Shinkansen. 07:04.
- Mauritius, home
- London, always
- something I cooked
- Kyoto, early morning
Projects
Radio Moris
A radio station rooted in Mauritius. Music, culture, and a connection to the island, wherever you are in the world. radiomoris.com
Project BENZ
A community for W201 Mercedes owners. The original baby Benz. Still going, still loved. Parts, knowledge, stories. projectbenz.com