My first publication was a fanzine. Photocopied, stapled, sold hand to hand outside gigs. I was sixteen. Punk was still breathing in the UK, and the principle was dead simple: bypass the machine, make it yourself, get it out there.
Crass didn’t sign to a major label. They built their own. Printed their own sleeves. Ran their own distribution. Not because they couldn’t get a deal — because the deal was the problem. The moment you hand your work to a corporation, you stop being the person who made it. You become the person who made it for them.
I didn’t know that was a business philosophy. I thought it was just punk.
In 1993 I left my job and self-published the International Underground Directory under the pseudonym Rob Taylor. A Yellow Pages of privacy services and wannabe James Bond resources. My first classified ad went into Mouse Monitor, a privacy newsletter. Fax orders came through all night.
The headline was: Get the world’s most dangerous book.
A British MP complained in Parliament. The Advertising Standards Authority got involved. I changed it to Get the world’s most outrageous book. Talk about splitting hairs. Sales continued.
I bought a house on the proceeds. I’ve never gone back to a salaried job.
Fifteen words in a classified ad can build a business. That was thirty-two years ago. And I was the best balsam grower in the industry. Explosive growth. Impressive flowers. Zero roots.
By Christmas 2000 I’d partnered with a marketer who had a big email list of privacy and liberty seeking renegades. He sent a mailing on Christmas Eve. I woke up on Christmas Day to £35,000 in my bank account. Fifty-fifty split. Before affiliate programmes existed.
Then September 11th happened. The privacy publishing market evaporated overnight. Every website pulled, all inventory destroyed. Eight years of work — gone in a week.
That’s what happens when there are no roots. One external event and you’re bare ground. I had no transferable audience, no foundation to pivot from, no stored energy underneath. Just flowers. And flowers don’t survive winter.
I started again from zero. Pivoted into internet marketing. Was coached by Jonathan Mizel — the man who helped create the squeeze page, who consulted for AWeber before sequential autoresponders had a name. I was embedded in the infrastructure of email marketing when email marketing was still a rumour. Made another £30,000. I was good at this.
And I hated it. The craft was brilliant. The people were the problem. Behind closed doors, the contempt for customers was breathtaking. The coercion, the manufactured urgency, the countdown timers ticking down to nothing. What is known as bro-marketing. I’d call it something shorter. But I am in polite company.
Here’s what nobody tells you about growing balsam: you become the root system. When the business has no foundation underneath it — no clarity of mission, no real audience, no deep reason for existing — the only thing holding it upright is you. Your hours. Your willpower. Your nervous system.
Five years, seven days a week, ten to twelve hours a day. One three-week holiday in the entire period. I was the roots, the stem, the leaves, the flowers, and the seeds. All of it. And a human being cannot be a root system indefinitely.
The stress of operating like balsam — the constant rebuilding, the relentless pace required to keep a rootless business alive, the knowledge that one bad month meant bare ground again — that’s what broke me. I developed a serious drug and alcohol addiction. Lost my house, all of my wealth, my marriage, contact with my daughter. Became homeless. Wandered Britain for over a year.
That’s what balsam does. It demands everything you have. And then it dies anyway.
During the homeless years, the one constant was plants. Sitting with them. Paying attention to them. Teaching foraging in exchange for a bed and a meal. The slow kind of learning, where you sit with a plant until it teaches you something your mind couldn’t have worked out on its own.
Plants don’t lie. They don’t coerce. They don’t run countdown timers. They just grow. And if you pay attention, they’ll show you exactly how things actually work.
I came back with a different question.