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 […]
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 […]
School’s out, and as my summer offer begins – details below – my own summer reading is well underway. So far this year, my holiday reads are not so much the result of conscious choice as chance – books that turned up serendipitously in my life, embedded in their own little stories. The first, Love […]
Amid the mass of coverage spewed out by my radio the day after the election, I was struck by one voter’s reason for rejecting the incumbent Tory government. It was the Tories’ plans to repeal the hunting ban, he told the interviewer; he just couldn’t stomach them. The hunting ban, which became law under a […]
This spring, I’ve been getting closer to birds than I ever dreamt of by volunteering at the wildlife rescue centre Secret World. At this time of year, the centre is full of young birds who need help from humans to make it to adulthood. Generally orphaned and sometimes injured, they will be cared for […]
The first British Christmas tree was not the perfectly proportioned Scandi fir that adorns the ideal living room. It was a single yew bough, introduced to the English court by Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, decorated with ribbons and candles. She went on to display an entire yew tree and from that the Christmas […]