There is a word we lack in most languages; a word for the feeling of being exactly where you want to be, doing precisely what you chose, with no gravitational pull toward anywhere else. We have assembled entire vocabularies for its opposite. We have built industries, economies, whole architectures of digital life around its opposite. But the thing itself, that rare, settled sufficiency, that quiet fullness, resists naming, and so resists pursuit.

The UK’s Financial Times could not resist some mild sexual innuendo in the headline of a front-page article in its 30 May edition: “Durex sales deflate as China withdraws condom tax break to revive birth rate.” China announced last December that from January 1 condoms would be subject to a Value Added Tax of 13%, reversing a tax-exemption dating from 1993. Sales of China’s leading condom brand, Durex, owned by British company Reckitt, drooped 5% in the first quarter of 2026.

Most of the early part of my career was spent working for a City tycoon who built up in fifteen years a very significant business. Eventually he judged that it had peaked and agreed its sale. One evening he called me into his properly tycoonish office (view high over the Thames, his own Regency furniture, enough space if needed to address all his loyal employees and simultaneously swing several cats) to discuss a few loose ends; but then got to the point: “Stoker, if you ha

Next time you pass a florist or garden centre in the USA or Europe, stop for a moment and think where those flowers originated. All of them were once wild flowers and were transported to the ‘Western world’ over the last century or two, where they were propagated, selected, bred and multiplied so they could adorn your house or garden.