As the new hunting season gets underway, so too the latest phase of the campaign to persuade the National Trust to stop issuing licences for trail hunting on its land, as reported here. Earlier this year I resigned my membership of the National Trust, a decision driven in part by my helping to foster fox […]
When my first book was published a little over a decade ago, I was chuffed to bits. Finally the hard slog of researching and writing a book and getting it out there was over. It had been a long journey from having the idea to realising it, and one that had cost me in every […]
Packaging, fellow-plastivists remind me, is not just about plastic. The current zest for over-packaging involves a range of materials, including paper, all carrying an environmental cost. One particularly bad example comes via the sale of hot drinks on trains, which I was reminded of on a recent GWR journey. I was sitting in the same […]
Britain is a divided nation. Some of us hate foxes; others of us love them. It’s a split reflected in the literature on which we grow up, from the sandy-whiskered trickster in Jemima Puddle-Duck to the enterprising altruist in Fantastic Mr Fox. In modern Britain, foxes seem to get the brunt of our ambivalence about […]
The letter from the National Trust bearing my card for another year of membership oozes emotive prose. The buzzwords promise experiences and memories I’ll want to treasure – ‘inspiring’, ‘special’, ‘brilliant’ – while the small print details the new subscription fees and my payment schedule. But I won’t be continuing my membership of Europe’s largest […]
Heard of The Timewaster Letters? The spirit of subversive comedy and the character of the concerned, fussy British consumer that they capture make them just the thing to lift your spirits on a dull winter day. Sadly, the responses to the first batch of Plastic Waster Emails are not so funny. In the first few […]
First, a confession. I never watched Blue Planet because I’m scared of fish. But sometime in the middle of the series, with so much talk about plastic use in the air, I came back from the supermarket and had a kind of negative epiphany. Suddenly I saw that almost everything I’d bought was swathed in […]
Every year, at some point during Advent, I remember. Having re-established itself in my mind, the thought recurs throughout the Christmas season before fading away as the festivities come to an end. The thought goes something along these lines: ‘It was not like this.’ Or: ‘That’s not right. The reality is different.’ What I’m experiencing is […]
It’s that time of year again. The supermarket aisles are filled with plastic pumpkins and however many other Halloween spin-offs the buying team was able to order from China. It always irks me to see an ancient and interesting festival being used to relieve consumers of their money for yet more junk to fill our […]
I’ve finally fulfilled a long-held desire to be a pilgrim and got my compostela (official certificate) for having completed a section of the Spanish pilgrimage route the Camino de Santiago. I’ve long wanted to do the Camino, a contemporary form of pilgrimage which is undergoing a resurgence, attracting 21st-century pilgrims of all faiths and none. […]