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 […]
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 […]
Last weekend I was fortunate enough to do something I’d been wanting to do for some time – attend a death cafe. The death cafe movement, which aims to address the western stigma against talking about death and dying, has been going from strength to strength since the first British death cafe was held in […]
The following is an extract from The Secret Life of God On the Sunday closest to the eleventh of November, I set off to see how the Newington Unitarians mark Remembrance Day. This year, the day has acquired an added poignancy, with record poppy sales attributed to a rise in support for the soldiers returning […]
Like a lot of folk, I’ve spent the past few days wondering how I’m going to deal with the turbulent realities of living in Britain in the coming months and years. Recessions aside, the recent history of Britain has been remarkably free of conflict and upheaval; my generation is unused to prolonged political uncertainty and […]
I love this library card. It’s my membership card for Upper Norwood Joint Library in Crystal Palace, where I lived until recently. I’ve had a library card everywhere I’ve lived since the age of eight, but this library was quite my favourite. Housed in a purpose-built building of 1898, it is part of the high […]