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The Second Who
Last night was one of those properly wild October evenings, rain thrown sideways at the windows and the wind making a decent attempt at the roof. Inside, the cats and I were warm, fed and parked in front of the telly with a Poirot rerun, which is about as cosy as an evening gets. One… — read more
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The Butterfly That Needed an Ant to Raise It
The large blue butterfly was declared extinct in Britain in 1979. Reintroduced from Swedish stock in 1983, it has since increased in recorded abundance by 1,866 per cent, according to figures published this September as part of the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme’s fiftieth anniversary report. It is now established at thirty three sites across south… — read more
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Borrow a Jumper Like You’d Borrow a Book
Lizzie Dibble started With Love From… in 2023 as a simple clothes swap between friends and family. It has since grown into a lending collection of around four hundred garments, checked out with a barcode for three weeks at a time and renewed exactly like a library book, run out of a public library in… — read more
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Nobody Is Coming, So Get Up
I spent this week standing on a pavement in a small market town with a stack of flyers, trying to persuade strangers they need a haircut. All day, every day. Behind me was an empty shop and a chair nobody sat in. I’m a few weeks into building a grooming business under the Rolf Skeldon… — read more
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Garlic, Sunlight and a Valid Licence
This year I found out that a few photographs on a blog can cost more than the blog will ever earn. I put them there in good faith. I thought a picture on the internet was a picture I could use, I had no idea I was wrong, and I’m certainly not the first person… — read more
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The Danger of Being Needed
Most people would consider being needed a good thing, and in many ways it is. To be genuinely useful to the people around you, to have something real to contribute, to be the person others turn to when something matters, these are not small things and the Stoics were not arguing against them. What they… — read more
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Less Often, More Honestly
For a long time this blog has published something new every single day. From today it won’t, and I’d rather tell you why than let it quietly happen. When I started posting daily I paid freelance writers to help me keep up. They did good work and I’m grateful to them. But Rolf Skeldon is… — read more
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What Illness Teaches
Seneca wrote some of his best work from his sickbed, which is either an impressive act of discipline or a testament to how much enforced stillness can clarify a mind that had been moving too fast to see itself properly. Probably both. He was ill for much of his life, suffering from what sounds, reading… — read more
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Why We’re Proud to Be on the Map: Buying British This Christmas
Every December, millions of us promise ourselves we’ll shop local and support British makers. Then life gets busy, the deadlines creep closer, and the easy option wins. A few clicks, a next day delivery, and another year of good intentions quietly slips away. That’s exactly the problem a new website called Grown and Made UK… — read more
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The Wool Under Our Own Hills
Cambrian Wool sources its fleece from farms across the Cambrian Mountains, the same range of hills that sits behind Gwynfryn, traced back to individual farms with a premium paid to every farmer who supplies it. I hadn’t quite registered, until reading into this properly, that the wool industry Wales is now trying to rebuild is… — read more
