---
id: about-interests
area: about
level: 3
title: "Artefact — Interests · one honest line each"
claim: "Fourteen pursuits with one true sentence each — and the invented venues · results and trips from the previous version of this site deleted rather than restated."
confidence: running
period: "1980–"
tech: []
metrics: [{label: "pursuits listed", value: 15}, {label: "bands played in", value: 2}, {label: "bee hives kept", value: 2}]
artefacts: []
public: true
last_verified: 2026-10-26
tags: [about, interests, artefact]
---

# Artefact — Interests · one honest line each

**Status: stub for the visual treatment.**

## Music
Blues and jazz piano and blues harp; played in two bands. Studied music composition at university and kept the piano as the thing that resets the week.

## Fine art
A fine arts degree and a continuing practice. Drawing and painting taught patience with iteration, which is most of debugging.

## Philosophy
A degree's worth of it, and it is where the habit of asking what a thing is actually for came from.

## Skiing
Italy, France, Japan and Australia. Six months based in Meribel in the French Alps as a chalet chef, including the Vallée Blanche glacier run.

## Camping
Hiking, camping and canoeing, mostly in Victoria. Most recent: a two-day hike through Wilsons Promontory with a group of teenagers in tow.

## Canoeing
The Yarra, the Otways and the Murray.

## Horse riding
Grew up riding in the Otways; broke horses from track work back to dressage; guided tours in the Victorian high country; competed in dressage for two years.

## Surfing
Grew up between Lorne and the Otways, on waves and horses.

## Hiking
The walking version of the camping answer: long days, small pack, no phone signal.

## Global politics
The master's was in it. Reading it is a habit, not a credential to display.

## Reading
History, philosophy, politics, economics — the same four subjects as the degrees, which is either consistency or a rut.

## Cooking
Worked in many restaurants and as chef in a five-star chalet in Meribel, France.

## Gardening
Permaculture and a wood-chip, low-input approach to self-sufficiency, with sensors and automation doing the boring parts.

## Food production
Bees, salami and cheese. Two hives, and salami made annually from four pigs with Italian friends in Benalla.

## Italy and travel
Five years spent overseas, travelling extensively, with Italy as the standing preference.

## What was deleted, and why

The previous site claimed venues, competition results, swell sizes, distances and named restaurants. None of it could be traced. It has been cut rather than corrected: a single true sentence is worth more than ten specific ones that cannot be substantiated, and an interviewer who asks a follow-up question is entitled to an answer that survives it.

## Coverage limit

Everything above traces to Sam's own notes. Anything not in those notes is absent, not paraphrased.