Small Beds and Large Bears

Last week I went skiing with work. How lucky am I? Well, given I’m not the sort of person who would necessary like skiing—an extrovert’s sport, with potential for showing off and excessive consumption, both of which I grumpily frown on—then the jury would be out. But I loved it.
Obviously the fact that it was [...]

The past four weeks we’ve been spending more time in—and I suppose on—the garden. Any proper gardener would be warning us to begin in earnest right now (and probably sucking in his teeth when he did so) but as we have no potting shed, and no desire to actually plant anything until we’ve worked out [...]

Continuing to live in Oxford and its shire, first as a graduate, then as a publishing junior, now as a senior geek, has meant that many of the Proustian experiences that might call forth some halcyon day or other have largely been diluted over time. Ten recollections often crowd around the single, sharp, painful one [...]

We don’t have much of a garden, in both senses: the plot behind the house isn’t particularly large; and what there is of it isn’t much of a garden. The previous owner’s dog burnt off much of the lawn with strategic urination, leaving a patchwork of petulant looking grass drooping across bare mud like a [...]

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 [...]