Black gold. It really is, soft to touch, the smell of the dark earth crumbling through your hands, and the mind-blowing fact that not so long ago it was egg boxes and broccoli stalks. The ultimate process of empowerment, and [...]
2020 Orkney International Science Festival went online. Like many events this year, technology came to the forefront to connect all of us, all over the world. Technicians and assistants normally taking door tickets or working presentations on PCs to projectors [...]
Nature could well be our anchor over the next few months. Such a special time of year… it just carries on ….” – 20 March 2020 Imagine your life as a front room with sofa, table with glass jug on [...]
There’s a storm howling outside and the wind roars down the chimney as the flames lick the birch burning, the heat touching the cold in the room, hailstones dancing on the window. Silver birch, Betula pendula, thrives here. So much [...]
A time of morning mists and still pools, of roaring winds and falling apples, swirling leaves of fiery hue, of dark nights full of stars and screeching owls. Times of dew-covered cobwebs glistening in the dawn light, mysteriously hanging through [...]
Water, the elemental essence of life, of our bodies. A visceral trickle running down the flank of a hill. Yet walking in drought and the bare bones of the hills creak under foot, the brittle and brown grasses, the dusty [...]
About 15 years ago I was living and working in Dubai. A desert with the world’s biggest buildings on it, and a high street which is an eight-lane motorway, where public ‘gardens’ are created and removed overnight, trees in huge [...]
Winter stayed well into April, and as I dug holes for apple trees T. S. Eliot swirled in my head: “April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with [...]
Soaring. That is the word. On top of the world, or so it seems, above the busy valleys below, side by side with the ravens as they soar on the up-blasts of winter blizzard rushing skywards. I soar with them, [...]
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