Small Beds and Large Bears

We’ve both just returned from Copenhagen: a conference trip for me, a birthday holiday for K. Denmark is an oddity: much as Finland looks Scandinavian when you squint, Denmark looks a little Germanic when you don’t.
The capital city is wonderful in a lot of ways: it has London’s green lungs, and a brilliant public transport [...]

We soon come to the end of our first year of owning a garden. I have learnt since starting to fumble around in the earth that you should take at least a year after acquiring a garden, to merely dutifully weed and water and nothing else. That way you can see what really grows in [...]

Over two years ago, I called out Dorset Cereals on their use of palm oil. Moving house and other nonsense intervened, and it was only recently I was able to start chasing them again. Their packaging still had palm oil listed among the ingredients, so in the aftermath of a Panorama programme about palm oil [...]

I said a couple of weeks ago that I was worried about fixing a shed. I had qualms which centred around how someone as ignorant of DIY and other practical matters as I could possibly supervise events to a sufficient level of safety and productivity that it would be suitable to ask any of my [...]

With luck, mid- to late autumn can yield a real treat. The few weeks before the clocks go back exhibit an odd societochronological phenomenon (bless you!) whereby one can commute in the light of first a rising, then a setting, sun. Timing is all and by the grace of the gulf stream the weather has [...]

Early autumn sunlight is like an orange spacehopper bouncing round the garden. It cheers up and buffets the landscape, turning it golder and golder as the sun sets, bleaching it back to normal colours as it rises again. This morning was weighted down under a low, misty raincloud, but as it cleared up the landscape [...]

Paris was lovely, apart from the food (more on that later.) With alternately gloriously late-summer sunny and heartlessly mid-July rainy—like the most Parisian of love affairs—and with beautiful parks and fantastic architecture, it was a city to melt the heart. The métro was a smooth and cheap experience, with trains running till well after midnight. [...]

An employee at the hilariously named company immediately behind our offices—think, say, “Pony Avengers”, or possibly “Livestock Squadron” and you have a rough idea—takes a dog to work. Nothing unusual about that: this is the countryside, after all, and at least two people where I work for bring their dogs to work, either occasionally or [...]

I love the prospect of sunny days in the early summer: the brightness of the light, everything coming into bloom, the remaining moistness of spring adding a vital air that’s absent later in the season. But rather counterintuitively all of this also make me want to stay indoors. I’m inspired by the dynamic, thrusting nature [...]

There’s a set of animals which, on my journeys home, have a particular quality that I’d describe—if pushed—as eldritch. Horses, deer, barn owls. All of these animals stir some atavistic sense of wonder and fear inside me, and when they fleetingly flash past me I can see how my ancestors thought of them as ghosts, [...]