'to have & to hold' is not a biography, a lecture, or a historical reconstruction. It is an imagined world — one you step into to feel your way around an idea rather than to learn it.

The album takes place loosely in early-20th-century Cambridge, at the moment when Western thought was beginning to strain under its own certainty. Science had proved astonishingly powerful at breaking reality into parts, explaining mechanisms, and producing results — yet at the same time it was encountering problems it could no longer fully contain. Probability was replacing certainty. Events mattered as much as objects. Meaning no longer sat still.

Out of this tension emerged process philosophy: the idea that reality is not made of finished things, but of ongoing happenings — that love, time, marriage, and even truth itself are not states you reach, but activities you keep participating in.

The album imagines this moment through a human lens. A mathematician trying to complete a system of logic. A thinker insisting that nothing important is ever truly finished. Proofs accumulating. Years passing. A marriage understood first as a statement, then slowly revealed as a practice. Love appearing not as romance in the foreground, but as something quietly unfolding elsewhere — happening whether it is attended to or not.

Rather than explaining these ideas directly, the songs allow you to inhabit them. You hear bells ring. You feel evenings close in. You sense the weight of unfinished work and the relief of letting something continue without control. The philosophy is not taught; it is lived.

This is a soft documentary in sound — an audio quantum leap into a world. Its purpose is not accuracy, quotation, or instruction, but immersion. By the time the album ends, you may not be able to define process philosophy in a sentence — but you may feel why it arose, what problem it was answering, and why it still matters.

To Have and To Hold is an exploration of commitment not as possession, but as attention.
Of marriage not as a conclusion, but as renewal.
Of understanding not as something you arrive at — but something that keeps happening.

If you listen closely, nothing here ever quite resolves.
But something continues.

Eighty Pages

THE SIIN IS NOT A SIN
IT'S A VOICE
FOR A CHOICE!

Church musician, guitarist since I was 15. I worked in the Civil Service, and loved a wonderful lady when I was young.

The tracks on Bells and Leaves and Leaf and Sympathy were recorded mostly in 2021-2022; Oyster Bay I composed in the mid-70s, recorded again in 2025; I wrote the first two verses, chorus and fancy guitar intro of I Will Always Love You, Dear in 1980 or '81, finished and recorded the full song in 2021. Tracks on Gloucester Abbey and East Lane were recorded 1967-1969, and my dear comrade Bill Morriss's genius is well shown. My dear brother Nick Thurlow-Brown is usually on the drums on East Lane, and  also on Anthrax from Oi Wot You Lookin' A'; my dear brother Nigel Thurlow wrote Tin Plated Armour and Anthrax, recorded in 1978 and 1981, and he plays the drums on Tin Plated Armour.

Ever feel like you've been playing quantum leap in your own life?

Eighty Pages

Quantum me