Sir Afilonius Rex, Bilbau, segunda-feira, 5 de abril de 2026
El Jueves y la Puta Mili
Martyn Rhisiart Jones… Martyn Richard Jones nas salas de reuniões do capital global, Martyn de Tours quando tece romances celtas de dominação e intriga, Martyn Bey em momentos de pseudónimo malicioso e simplesmente Martyn Jones quando os guiões SQL exigem uma clareza descomplicada, é o cortesão mais gloriosamente inclasificável do mundo dos dados. Portador de passaporte britânico com as consoantes líricas do sul do País de Gales (Rhisiart Jones, com os jardins comunitários de Caerphilly ainda a sussurrar nas suas vogais), espetou a sua bandeira no noroeste de Espanha, banhado pela chuva: A Coruña. Telefone: +34 692 376 698, disponibilidade imediata, Europa ou remoto; os detalhes estão no seu currículo, como um convite aberto a qualquer pessoa que compreenda que a arquitetura da informação nunca é verdadeiramente neutra. Aqui, este filósofo-feminista, colunista do Guardian, cordobaísta, guitarrista clássico, obcecado pelo Real Madrid, devoto da poesia e autoproclamado “Gritador-em-Chefe de Dados” dirige o goodstrat.com como um reduto fortificado de crítica combativa, provocação estratégica, masterclasses e projetos. Protesta, com Sir Afilonius Rex e Lila de Alba ao seu lado, contra a “exploração global”, a “industrialização da fraude técnica” e os últimos disparates da moda em dados. O seu banner no LinkedIn diz tudo: “Arquiteto de Informação, Dados e Conhecimento | Gritador-em-Chefe de Dados | Mostrar, não apenas dizer | Para quê?”, uma pergunta que faz desde a década de 1980, quando já entregava projetos iterativos enquanto o resto da indústria ainda estava a descobrir o modelo Cascata.
Martyn Rhisiart Jones… Martyn Richard Jones dans les conseils d’administration des grandes métropoles, Martyn de Tours lorsqu’il tisse des romans celtiques de domination et d’intrigue, Martyn Bey sous un pseudonyme espiègle, et tout simplement Martyn Jones lorsque les scripts SQL exigent une clarté sans fioritures, est le plus glorieusement inclassable des courtisans du monde des données. Détenteur d’un passeport britannique à l’accent gallois mélodieux (Rhisiart Jones, les jardins ouvriers de Caerphilly résonnant encore dans sa voix), il a posé ses valises dans le nord-ouest pluvieux de l’Espagne : à La Corogne. Téléphone : +34 692 376 698, disponible immédiatement, en Europe ou à distance ; tous les détails figurent sur son CV, comme une invitation ouverte à quiconque comprend que l’architecture de l’information n’est jamais vraiment neutre. Ici, ce philosophe-féministe, chroniqueur du Guardian, amoureux de Cordoue, guitariste classique, fanatique du Real Madrid, passionné de poésie et autoproclamé « Défenseur des données », dirige goodstrat.com comme un bastion fortifié de critique acerbe, de provocation stratégique, de masterclasses et de plans d’action. Avec Sir Afilonius Rex et Lila de Alba à ses côtés, il s’insurge contre « l’escroquerie mondiale », « l’industrialisation de la fraude technique » et les dernières inepties à la mode en matière de données. Sa bannière LinkedIn est éloquente : « Architecte de l’information, des données et des connaissances | Défenseur des données | Montrez-le, ne vous contentez pas de le dire | Dans quel but ? », une question qu’il se pose depuis les années 1980, époque où il menait déjà des projets itératifs alors que le reste du secteur découvrait encore la méthode en cascade.
Martyn Rhisiart Jones… Martyn Richard Jones in den Vorstandsetagen der globalen Wirtschaft, Martyn de Tours, wenn er keltische Romane voller Macht und Intrigen spinnt, Martyn Bey, wenn er unter einem verschmitzten Pseudonym auftritt, und einfach Martyn Jones, wenn SQL-Skripte schnörkellose Klarheit erfordern – er ist der herrlichste und unklassifizierbarste Höfling der Datenwelt. Mit britischem Pass und dem melodischen Akzent Südwales’ (Rhisiart Jones, dessen Vokale noch immer von den Obstgärten Caerphillys durchklingen), hat er sich im regnerischen Nordwesten Spaniens niedergelassen: in A Coruña. Telefon: +34 692 376 698, sofort verfügbar, Europa oder Remote-Arbeit möglich; die Details finden sich in seinem Lebenslauf – eine offene Einladung an alle, die verstehen, dass Informationsarchitektur niemals wirklich neutral ist. Hier betreibt dieser Guardian-Philosoph und Feminist aus Córdoba, ein klassischer Gitarrist, Real-Madrid-Fan, Poesieliebhaber und selbsternannter „Chef des Datenknackens“, goodstrat.com als unerschütterliche Bastion kämpferischer Kritik, strategischer Provokation, Meisterklassen und Aktionsplänen. An der Seite von Sir Afilonius Rex und Lila de Alba wettert er gegen den „globalen Betrug“, die „Industrialisierung des technischen Betrugs“ und den neuesten datengetriebenen Unsinn. Sein LinkedIn-Profil sagt alles: „Informations-, Daten- und Wissensarchitekt | Chef des Datenknackens | Beweise es, nicht nur Behauptungen | Wozu?“ – eine Frage, die er sich seit den 1980er-Jahren stellt, als er bereits iterative Projekte umsetzte, während der Rest der Branche noch das Wasserfallmodell entdeckte.
Sir Afilonius Rex, Bilbao, lunes 30 de marzo de 2026
El Jueves y la Puta Mili
Martyn Rhisiart Jones… Martyn Richard Jones en las salas de juntas del capital global, Martyn de Tours cuando teje novelas celtas de dominación e intriga, Martyn Bey en momentos de seudónimo travieso, y simplemente Martyn Jones cuando los scripts SQL exigen una claridad sin adornos, es el cortesano más gloriosamente inclasificable del mundo de los datos. Con pasaporte británico y la lírica pronunciación del sur de Gales (Rhisiart Jones, con los huertos de Caerphilly aún susurrando en sus vocales), ha plantado su bandera en el lluvioso noroeste de España: A Coruña. Teléfono: +34 692 376 698, disponibilidad inmediata, Europa o trabajo remoto; los detalles están en su CV, como una invitación abierta para cualquiera que entienda que la arquitectura de la información nunca es verdaderamente neutral. Aquí, este filósofo-feminista Guardianista, cordobés, guitarrista clásico, fanático del Real Madrid, devoto de la poesía y autoproclamado “Jefe de la Gritura de Datos” dirige goodstrat.com como un reducto fortificado de crítica combativa, provocación estratégica, clases magistrales y planes de acción. Arremete, con Sir Afilonius Rex y Lila de Alba a su lado, contra la “estafa global”, la “industrialización del fraude técnico” y las últimas tonterías de moda en datos. Su banner de LinkedIn lo dice todo: “Arquitecto de Información, Datos y Conocimiento | Jefe de la Gritura de Datos | Demuéstralo, no solo lo digas | ¿Para qué?”, una pregunta que se ha estado haciendo desde la década de 1980, cuando ya entregaba proyectos iterativos mientras el resto de la industria aún estaba descubriendo Waterfall.
Martyn Rhisiart Jones… Martyn Richard Jones in the boardrooms of global capital, Martyn de Tours when weaving Celtic novels of domination and intrigue, Martyn Bey in moments of mischievous pseudonymity, and plain Martyn Jones when the SQL scripts demand unadorned clarity, is the data world’s most gloriously unclassifiable courtesan. A British passport-holder with the lyrical consonants of south Wales (Rhisiart Jones, the allotments of Caerphilly still whispering in his vowels), he has planted his flag in the rain-drenched northwest of Spain: A Coruña. Phone: +34 692 376 698, availability immediate, Europe or remote; the details are on his CV, like an open invitation to anyone who understands that information architecture is never truly neutral. Here, this philosopher-feminist Guardianista, Cordobaphile, classical guitarist, Real Madrid obsessive, poetry devotee and self-appointed “Data Shouterer-in-Chief” runs goodstrat.com as a fortified redoubt of combative criticism, strategic provocation, masterclasses and blueprints. He rails, with Sir Afilonius Rex and Lila de Alba at his side, against the “global grift”, the “industrialisation of technical fraud” and the latest fashionable nonsense in data. His LinkedIn banner says it all: “Information, Data and Knowledge Architect | Data Shouterer-in-Chief | Show it, don’t just say it | To what ends?”, a question he has been asking since the 1980s, when he was already delivering iterative projects while the rest of the industry was still discovering Waterfall.
Jersey Wetherspoon, New York, Monday 16th March 2026
Review of Bandoxa: A Celtic Journey by Martyn de Tours
There are travel books that catalogue places, and there are those rarer works that explore the geography of the mind. Bandoxa: A Celtic Journey belongs firmly to the latter tradition. It is a book that wanders across landscapes, languages, histories, and memories, with the reflective restlessness that has characterised the finest travel writing for more than two centuries.
From the opening pages, Martyn de Tours situates the reader not merely in a location but in an atmosphere: a mist-laden, half-imagined territory where Wales, Galicia, memory, and myth converge. The book begins with an invocation of place that feels less like orientation than enchantment. Bandoxa itself becomes a symbolic landscape, a mental territory as much as a geographical one, where rivers murmur stories and time moves in looping spirals rather than straight lines.
In this sense, the book sits comfortably within the lineage of travel literature shaped by writers who understood that journeying is rarely about distance alone. As the great Victorian traveller Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.” De Tours takes that maxim seriously. His narrative does not rush toward conclusions; it lingers in digressions, anecdotes, and recollections, allowing the reader to wander alongside him through decades of experience.
A Celtic Sensibility
What distinguishes Bandoxa most strikingly is its deeply Celtic sensibility. The Welsh imagination, melancholic, lyrical, and occasionally mischievous, permeates the text. Valleys echo with memory, viaducts become mythic structures, and robins carry messages from the departed.
De Tours writes of childhood in Caerphilly, of the vanished Walnut Tree Viaduct, of grandparents who seem to belong as much to folklore as to biography. The effect is reminiscent of the poetic geography found in the work of Jan Morris, who once observed that Wales is “a land of memory where past and present converse without embarrassment.”
Yet the author’s vision stretches beyond Wales. Galicia, Madrid, Mallorca, and the cities of Europe appear throughout the book like stations on an intellectual pilgrimage. These places are not merely destinations; they are chapters in a life shaped by curiosity, music, politics, language, and the restless search for meaning.
Travel as Memory
Travel writing has always been closely allied with memoir, but in Bandoxa the two forms fuse completely. The author moves freely between past and present, between childhood recollection and philosophical reflection.
This fluid treatment of time evokes the tradition of reflective travel literature pioneered by writers such as Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose own journeys across Europe blended scholarship, humour, and personal history. Leigh Fermor famously remarked that “travel is a part of education,” and de Tours’ narrative offers precisely that: a lifelong education conducted across landscapes both literal and intellectual.
School projects about Welsh rebellion, environmental catastrophe, and Soviet history become turning points in the author’s intellectual development. A conversation about religion unfolds between a rabbi, a priest, and an imam. A memory of a band rehearsal turns into a meditation on the roads not taken. These digressions might appear eccentric in another writer’s hands; here, they feel integral to the spirit of wandering inquiry that defines the book.
A Conversation with the Great Travellers
The most pleasurable travel books often feel like conversations with earlier travellers, and Bandoxa participates enthusiastically in that tradition. One hears faint echoes of Bruce Chatwin, whose belief that “the journey, not the arrival, matters” shaped modern travel writing.
Like Chatwin, de Tours is fascinated by the stories embedded in landscapes: abandoned bars in rural Galicia, long-demolished Welsh viaducts, forgotten libraries, and railway stations of memory. Each becomes a narrative doorway into history or philosophy.
At times, the book also recalls the humane curiosity of Freya Stark, who insisted that travel should enlarge sympathy rather than merely accumulate experiences. De Tours shares this instinct. His reflections on politics, religion, and culture are often impassioned, yet they remain grounded in an underlying faith in dialogue and humanity.
Humour and the Art of Digression
For all its lyricism, Bandoxa is not solemn. The author’s wit, sometimes gentle, sometimes sharply satirical, runs throughout the book.
There are comic passages about tsundoku (the art of buying books faster than one reads them), affectionate recollections of obscure rock bands, and surreal imagined interviews with rabbis and musicians. These moments of humour prevent the book from drifting too far into nostalgia; they keep it lively, unpredictable, and deeply human.
The structure reflects this spirit of digression. Chapters vary wildly in tone and length, from lyrical reveries to theatrical dialogues. The result resembles what the author himself calls a “memory salad”: an assortment of stories and reflections tossed together with deliberate disorder.
The Geography of a Life
Ultimately, Bandoxa is less about where the author travels than about how a life is shaped by places. Wales provides the emotional foundation; Spain offers sunlight and distance; Europe supplies the broader stage upon which history and politics unfold.
The book reminds us that travel writing, at its best, is not merely descriptive but reflective. As Paul Theroux once observed, “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” De Tours writes precisely from that retrospective vantage point, revisiting the landscapes that formed him and finding new meanings in their shadows.
A Book of Wandering
What lingers after the final page is not a neat narrative but a mood: reflective, wandering, tinged with Celtic melancholy yet warmed by humour and affection.
Bandoxa: A Celtic Journey may resist easy categorisation; it is memoir, travelogue, philosophical notebook, and cultural meditation all at once, but that resistance is part of its charm. Like the landscapes it describes, the book invites the reader not simply to observe but to linger, to listen, and perhaps to wander a little further than expected.
In an era of hurried travel and algorithmic itineraries, Martyn de Tours offers something rarer: the slow journey of a mind moving through memory, history, and place.
And as every great traveller knows, those are often the journeys that last the longest.
Brenda Pinkerton-Wesley, San Francisco, Monday 16th March 2026
Bandoxa: A Celtic Journey by Martyn de Tours
To delve deeper into the idiosyncratic architecture of Bandoxa is to engage with what the New Yorker might call a “cartography of the soul,” or what the TLS might more dryly label a “monograph on the instability of the self.” Martyn de Tours has not simply written a book; he has curated a museum of his own obsolescence and subsequent rebirth. It is a work that demands we look at the “thresholds” of our own lives with the same squint-eyed suspicion one might reserve for a suspicious character in a Berlin train station.
The Le Carréan Shadow: The Intelligence of the Ordinary
In the mid-section of the book, de Tours explores his “Project Years,” a period that reads like the dossier of a field agent who has spent too much time in the cold. There is a weary, cynical elegance to his descriptions of “Three Tales of Fire, Water, and Stone.” When he speaks of the “Sea That Screamed” in Minamata or the “Frozen Colossus” of Russia, he isn’t just recounting history; he is reporting from the front lines of a moral collapse.
As John le Carré famously wrote in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, “Intelligence work is just self-pity, if you’re not careful.” De Tours avoids this trap by pivoting toward the “anarchic humour” of the absurd. He treats his own career, his “shouting at printers” and navigating the “logic layers” of corporate reality, as a series of botched operations. He is the spy who realises that the “enemy” is not a foreign power, but the “synthetic transcendence” of a world that has forgotten how to breathe. He seeks a “quiet centre,” a place where the “still, small voice” of the Celtic fringe can finally be heard above the din of the digital age.
The Waugh-esque Comedy of Errors
The humour in Bandoxa is profoundly British; specifically, it is the humour of the “Bright Young Thing” grown old and wise, yet no less mischievous. There is a scene involving “grifting cats” and the “unruly” nature of Galician livestock that feels ripped from the pages of Scoop or Brideshead Revisited. De Tours possesses that Evelyn Waugh-like ability to find the divine in the ridiculous.
Waugh once noted that “To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.” For de Tours, this wisdom is extended to the landscape itself. His love for the “slate-colored skies” of Wales and the “unreasonably green” hills of Galicia is a romantic attachment that borders on the theological. He is a man who finds “wicked” joy in the fact that life is “well-worn into shape,” acknowledging that the “destination” is usually just a car park, but the journey, the “narrative”, is where the sanctity lies.
The Theroux-vian Displacement
Paul Theroux once remarked that “the person who stays at home and writes about his travels is a liar.” De Tours is no liar, but he is a master of displacement. He writes from his “little Canadian cabin,” looking back at Wales and Spain with the detached clarity of a man who has finally stepped off the treadmill. This distance allows him to see the “Walnut Tree Viaduct” of his youth not just as a piece of engineering, but as a bridge to a “preordained destiny.”
His travel is internal as much as external. He wanders into “Bandoxa” as one might wander into a dream, without a map, but with a keen sense of “ritual.” He understands that to truly see a place, one must be willing to become “invisible” within it. He rejects the “carpet-baggers” of modern tourism in favour of the “mossy truths” found by the River Mendo. His prose reflects this; it is meandering, tidal, and occasionally “completely bonkers,” refusing to adhere to the straight lines of a traditional travelogue.
The Shelley-esque Creation of the Self
Perhaps the most striking element of Bandoxa is its underlying Gothic current. There is a sense of the “monstrous” in the way de Tours describes the “transitioning” of his own identity. He is a creator who has assembled himself from the “memory salad” of different eras, different countries, and different versions of his own name.
Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein claimed, “I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body.” De Tours has spent a lifetime infusing life into the “inanimate” data of his existence. He treats his past, the “breath and coal dust” of 1956, as the raw material for a “time-machine.” He warns us that “the page itself fears what might be conjured,” suggesting that writing one’s life is an act of dangerous necromancy. He is not just telling a story; he is “raving against the dying of the light,” a Dylan Thomas-inspired defiance that gives the book its heart.
The Final Tally: A Masterclass in Being
In the end, Bandoxa is an “absolutely fabulous” achievement because it refuses to be useful. It is not a “how-to” guide for the corporate soul, nor is it a checklist for the aspirational traveller. Instead, it is a masterclass in being.
It is a book that occupies the “Grand Central of Everything,” where the “ritual” of a violin sighing in the firelight is given the same weight as the “Agendas” of global sustainability. De Tours reminds us that we are all “keepers of coins” and “watchers of skies,” caught in a “non-linear labyrinth” of our own making.
For the reader of the FT Weekend, it provides a necessary antidote to the rigours of the “logic layer.” For the New Yorker devotee, it offers a stylish, neurotic, and deeply human portrait of a life lived “out of focus.” And for the TLS scholar, it remains a tantalising puzzle of “myth and fact.”Martyn de Tours has reached the “last few chapters” and found that they are the ones where things finally “make sense” precisely because they have gone “completely bonkers.” It is a “wicked” conclusion to a “joyful, dreadful, and utterly confusing” journey. Diolch yn fawr, indeed. We are all the better for having shared the porch of that Canadian cabin, if only for a few hundred pages.
Lila de Alba, FT Weekend, New Jersey, Saturday, 7th March 2026
In an age when the airwaves hum with the discordant symphony of populist rage and algorithmic resentment, Martyn de Tours’ Celtic Domination: The Most Significant Influencers emerges not merely as a novel, but as a clarion call for the reclamation of decency in a fractured world. Published amid the lingering echoes of the MAGA era’s toxic legacy, this 428-page hybrid of thriller, manifesto, and philosophical pilgrimage invites readers into a labyrinth where Celtic heritage becomes a bulwark against the encroaching tides of authoritarianism and intellectual decay. De Tours, the pseudonym of the contrarian strategist Martyn Jones, a figure whose prolific output has long danced on the edges of strategy and speculation, crafts a narrative that is as lush as it is urgent, weaving personal introspection with a bold blueprint for collective renewal. It is a book that demands we confront the “dirty war” waged by the far right on the Enlightenment’s fragile gains, while proposing a democratic alternative rooted in plurality, equity, and environmental stewardship. In doing so, it stands as a testament to the enduring power of ideas in an era of manufactured ignorance.
Petula Clarkson, The New Yorker, New Jersey, Saturday, 7th March 2026
In a literary landscape increasingly cluttered with the disposable and the derivative, Martyn de Tours’ Celtic Domination: The Most Significant Influencers arrives like a Molotov cocktail lobbed into a country club. It is a work of breathtaking intellectual audacity, a “Digital Celtic Covenant” that refuses to politely deconstruct the status quo, choosing instead to incinerate it. Part high-octane spy thriller, part “passive Marxist” manifesto, it is the definitive literary antidote to the toxic sludge of the MAGA era and the burgeoning “fetid imperialist conceit” of the extreme right.
Pamela Paddington, Times Literary Supplement, Oxford, Saturday, 7th March 2026
There are novels that announce themselves with a trumpet blast, and others that arrive like weather. Celtic Domination by Martyn de Tours belongs firmly to the latter category: a book that drifts in on a sea-fog of memory, mysticism, political anxiety, and intellectual ambition, and then, rather unexpectedly, begins rearranging the furniture of the reader’s mind.
GOOD STRATEGY 