HeyJaredDiana’s Substack - Inroads
Reflections on island life, books, writing and the environment. No recipes!
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 4
- Latest publication
- Sep 9, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 16, 2026
Latest issues
The Lives of Old Houses (opens the original)
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In June 2026, I visited Dr Johnson’s House in London. As is normal for me, I got hopelessly lost. I meandered around the general area, holding my phone this way and that, asking passersby if they knew either the house itself or the address. Eventually I realized I was on Gough Square, but I could not find number 17. Feeling deeply incompetent, I asked a man in a high vis vest who was unloading a truck. “Well,” he said, “you would be able to see it if I wasn’t parked in front of it.”<a class="ima
On Becoming a Remnant (opens the original)
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Once, during my environmental activist years, I was driving along Jamaica’s north coast near the fishing village of Salem in St Ann when I saw a small stand of mangroves being burned. It was close to a new subdivision, and while I could see land clearing had already taken place for the roads and lots, I didn’t know for sure what had been there before. Surely, however, mangroves were not supposed to be burned. I pulled over and called Anthony McKenzie at the National Environmental and Planning Ag
Power from the Sun (opens the original)
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I’ve long wanted to power our house with a solar system but because we’ve been so serious about energy conservation, our light bill is low. Our friends think our house is like an unlit cave. going so far as to ask if we have moved out due to the lack of a flicker of illumination from the outside at night. I wanted solar for environmental reasons, but the math just didn’t work out – payback periods, depending on the size of the system, were eight years or more. And we are not young people.<a clas
Kingston is a Mess (opens the original)
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arly in July, I saw a news story that a new flyover would be built over the Sandy Gully to connect traffic from Dunrobin Avenue to East Kings House Road, close to where I now live. And that took me into pondering the state of my hometown, Kingston. Here’s a link to the story on the flyover. Sandy Gully flyoverSome background for non-Jamaican readers:1. Kingston is Jamaica’s capital city, built on the Liguanea Plain, named for the once common iguanas. The plain itself was laid down
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