My mother likes to tell people that in twelve years of school, I never lost a single pencil or eraser. I had a pencil box, everything had its place, and everything came home. It's a small thing to be known for, but I think it explains most of me.

I take care of my things. Not because they're expensive, most of them aren't, but because I like things that last, and things only last if someone looks after them.

For twelve years I rode my mother's Kinetic Honda. A two-stroke, bought right around the time I was born, so it was exactly as old as I was. It took me from school to college and well beyond, and it was beaten and worn in every way a scooter can be. To keep it alive I used to sit in mechanic shops and learn how two-stroke engines actually work, and help out, so I could maintain it myself. People in my neighbourhood knew me by it. The engine finally seized about three years ago. I still use the helmet my dad bought to go with it, all those years ago. It's very well taken care of.

Right before I left for the US, my mother gave me a Swiss Army knife. I've used it for everything since - cutting an apple, and assembling and reassembling every piece of furniture in every home I've lived in, one move after another. It's never let me down. It still works today.

I'm sitting on a chair my dad made for me when I was a teenager as I write this. You can see all the scratch marks from years of anxious fidgeting, the places where it's been rocked back and forth, where the wood's gone smooth from friction. It's perfectly worn to my body, and it's grown with me from before puberty to my aching thirties. I sit the same way in it every single time.

Music comes with the same care. Once, in Melbourne, walking down the street with a colleague, I spotted a record store and dragged us in. I asked the guy if he had any Porcupine Tree, and he pulled out Fear of a Blank Planet. A first pressing. This one record had somehow made its way around the world to a little shop in Australia, and I got to find it. It's still one of my most prized possessions. My turntable at home runs through an old Technics stereo amplifier that my dad was gifted by my uncle about a decade before I was born. When I was a toddler, I stuck a sticker on one of the speakers. It's still there. In the US I kept buying old equipment from the eighties because it was built to last, unlike most of the technology we make today.

I'm a utilitarian at heart. I care about what a thing does, and whether it'll keep doing it for a long time. But I've come to realise that's only half of it. Things that last carry memories with them. My mother's scooter, my father's helmet, a sticker from when I was three. You can't download that.

My days are spent inside very fast things. Models that answer before I've finished thinking the question. Pipelines that chew through hours of footage while I make a cup of tea. It's exciting and I love it, and I also notice that by the end of some days my head feels like a browser with forty tabs open, all of them playing audio.

The analog things are how I close the tabs. Cleaning a record slowly, following the grooves, before the needle comes down. Chopping vegetables, where the task takes exactly enough attention that there's none left over for anything else.

And photography, especially at jiu-jitsu and MMA competitions, which might be the slowest thing I do even though a shutter lasts a fraction of a second. You can't rush it. You wait for the right angle, the right timing, the right frame. A move that's about to land, a finish, the emotion on someone's face in the middle of a roll. Most of the time you miss it. When you get it, it's one of the most fulfilling feelings there is.

I spend my working hours trying to get machines to be both fast and slow. I've started to realise I need the same balance myself.

The needle's down. The chair's rocking. All is well.