Back to Walden (With Bacon and a Lantern)

With war, economic decay, and institutional rot cascading all around us, I’ve found myself thinking less about markets—and more about values. Not the kind parroted by Prime Ministers in speeches or stitched into ESG reports by bankers who wouldn’t recognize a real value if it dented their Range Rover. I mean something older. Something deeper.

Value is a word they’ve cheapened. Overused. Emptied.
But I still know what it feels like.
I know the calm it brings. The pride it stirs. The way it lingers like woodsmoke in your coat long after the fire's gone cold.

This post is different from my usual fare—no charts, no policy takedowns, no central bank sleight-of-hand. Just an honest reflection from the woods. Because sometimes, to understand what truly matters, you have to step away from the noise… and go where value can still be felt, not just calculated.

Not all comforts are soft. Some weigh five pounds and fry bacon like they mean it. In a world chasing status, I'm chasing bannock, Irish, and the crackle of a good fire.

There’s a reason the old ways endure.

Not because they’re quaint or romantic—though they often are—but because they work. Efficient. Durable. Honest.
Whether it’s a Depression-era Wagner skillet, a 100-year-old Coleman lantern, or a bannock recipe that's been passed down for generations, these things weren’t built for nostalgia. They were built to last.

And that’s the point.

This past week, I’ve been deep in what looks like “gear prep”—but it’s more like a quiet rebellion. Checking stoves and lanterns that have not been used for years, sorting through tarps, pegs, rope, knives, oiling cast iron older than most countries. Packing not just supplies, but intent.

This isn’t about “roughing it.” It’s about remembering.
Because comfort doesn’t come from convenience—it comes from craft.
From cooking bacon over fire. From coffee that fights back. From bannock rising slow in the Dutch oven while the wind tells you if the weather’s turning.

Once, value was rooted in utility, longevity, and meaning.
A good skillet could outlive you. A lantern lit generations. Even a chipped mug had a story, not a brand.

But today, we chase novelty like it’s salvation—upgrading phones that already work, trading craft for convenience, meaning for momentum. We no longer ask, “Will this serve me?” but “Will this signal status?”
And that shift—quiet, corrosive—is perhaps the greatest economic folly of our age.

Real value doesn’t scream. It endures.
Like firelight on cast iron. Like a song played on a weathered fiddle in a log cabin you built with your own hands.

It’s the small luxuries in harsh places that remind us what civilization is for—
Not the gloss, but the grace.
Not the flash, but the fire.

I’ve read Shakespeare. Admired Yeats. Quoted Kipling. Wrestled with Joyce.
But when I pack my gear for the wild, only one poet always comes with me: Robert Service.
Not because he was the most polished—because he was the most true.

He wrote for the man who needed a poem to survive. Who lit his fire with verse and his pipe with resolve.
His poetry was meant to be read aloud beside flame, not footnoted beside fluorescent light.

"It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out; it's the grain of sand in your shoe."
— Robert Service

Out in the bush, that line isn’t metaphor—it’s instruction.

Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately.
We go with bacon, bread, and bourbon—not because we’re chasing comfort, but because we’re carrying it with us. Carefully. Like a lantern passed hand to hand through generations.

Every scratch in the skillet, every burn mark on the Dutch oven lid, every chipped enamel on a coffee pot tells a story older than we are. These aren’t just tools. They’re time machines.
They’re the kind of things that feed you twice—once in the belly, and again in the soul.

So we head back to the woods. Not to escape, but to remember.
The way bread smells when baked over coals.
The way cast iron holds heat like it holds history.
The way firelight flickers on canvas, not screens.

Because some things—like bannock, bacon, and a good whiskey poured under stars—aren’t about surviving the wilderness.

They’re about coming home to it.