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An island teaches you something about scale. You cannot hurry across it, and you cannot pretend you are the centre of it. The sea is always there, reminding you.

I carried a small notebook that week. Most of what I wrote was not clever. It was grateful.

Looking back, that is the lesson I keep returning to: wherever you land, whoever you meet, be good to people. It costs nothing, and the tide brings it back to you.

— Artem

Be Good to People 🕊️ IslandLife WritersOfInstagram MemoirWriting Kindness

There is a small trick the old houses knew, long before anyone wrote it down.
Before you leave a room — any room, in any home, in any country — touch something in it. The door frame. A cup. The edge of a table. Just for a second.
The mind cannot hold a picture of danger and a picture of touch at the same time. So the hand remembers what the head forgets to worry about, and the house becomes, quietly, a place the body trusts.
I stood today at the Museum of the Home, among rooms built a hundred years apart, and thought: every one of them was someone’s whole world. Every threshold was crossed by someone hoping, simply, to come back to it safely.
So wherever this finds you — London, or a city I will never see, a flat, a tent, a room you are only borrowing for now — I wish this for you:
May your home stay standing. May your door open onto people who are glad to see you. May you be safe, be well, and — when the day allows it — be happy in it.
Be good to people. Be good to your home. It is, after all, the first thing that ever held you.

Rain on Borough High Street, and I find I have missed it.
Stopped at St George the Martyr this morning to say a quiet prayer — for good, for health, for happiness, for you as much as for me. There is something honest about autumn. It asks nothing of you but a coat and a little gratitude.
Cooler days. Wet pavements. Candlelight through old glass. My favourite season, arriving right on time.
Be good to people. 🕯️
Grateful — Artem 🤍

AutumnInLondon
Faith

WritingCommunity Memoir LondonWriter Gratitude NewIdeas
A quiet evening in Kidbrooke, and the notebook is open before the kettle has even settled.
There is something old-fashioned about a Bank Holiday. The shops slow, the trains run half-asleep, and the day hands you back a few hours you thought you’d lost. I have learned not to waste those hours. I sit, I write, I let new thoughts arrive without hurrying them.

My grandmother used to say the ideas come to those who make room for them. So today I am making room.
Grateful for the quiet. Grateful for the page. Grateful for you, reading this.
Be good to people.
— Artem

Kidbrooke BankHoliday AuthorLife WritingCommunity Memoir LondonWriter Gratitude NewIdeas

No grand gesture this morning.
Only a good day, offered up whole.
Gratitude is not a feeling I wait for —
it is a thing I do with my hands.
Be good to people. It is the entire instruction. It gives back more than it takes. 🌟 🤍

“Border Guard with a Dog • Ploshchad Revolutsii station • Moscow, 1937-1938” Do you have a lucky charm you touch without thinking?

Moscow commuters can’t help but rub this border guard’s dog’s nose for luck at Ploshchad Revolutsii station. Installed between 1937-1938 by Matvei Manizer as part of seventy-six bronze figures, this small daily superstition has survived every regime change.

Sometimes the smallest rituals carry the most meaning. What’s yours?

Photo: Dinara Akkujina, December 2025 Thank you 🙏

” Artem

• When a thought arrives, I don’t argue with it — I introduce myself, and it loses interest. Let’s lean toward the things that will go right, rather than the other way. Artem x. WalkingCure AuthorLife Gratitude Chekhovian QuietLife NatureWalk

Be good to people. Small things, done often, add up to something rather grand.

There’s a particular kind of London chaos only heat can produce — trains falling behind themselves, the air too thick to hurry through. Peckham, where even the pavement seems to be waiting for evening.

Still, this isn’t a day for short tempers. It’s a day for water shared, doors held a little longer, a kind word for the stranger beside you.

Stay hydrated. Look after one another.

Be good to people.