Normally, in this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.
But today I am putting on one of the above hats and inviting you (yes, YOU!) to join me on Night Shift.
Night Shift: A Therapeutic Journey Through Darkness For Men
Today I am launching A Thing.
A Thing called Night Shift.
Night Shift is a therapeutic journey through darkness, in one of our most beautiful National Parks. It is designed for men to help them redefine their place in the universe, with a little help from midnight: stars, moon, owls.
I would LOVE your support getting this Thing off the ground. Please share abundantly — or apply to join us!
This could be you: New Forest, at night, with horse and moon.
The mission of Night Shift is to reveal the awesome mystery of nighttime, and support men to:
Redefine your place in the universe.
Commit to your deep purpose.
Restore your resilience.
The programme consists of three stages:
Four evening preparation sessions at our woodland base camp.
One 15-25km therapeutic night hike from dusk until dawn. (Yep: an all nighter.)
One evening integration session back at our base camp.
This first trial will be held in the New Forest National Park — but keep reading if you are interested (or know someone who will be).
There is a waiting list for future editions, held literally anywhere there are enough people who need the journey.
More moody photography: the right place for a Night Shift.
Stage 1: Preparation
These 3-hour preparation sessions will take place on four consecutive Thursday evenings in July at our woodland base camp in the village of Burley in the New Forest, Hampshire.
The activities will be tailored to the therapeutic needs of the participants and will cover a range of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ skills, which we will use during our night journey.
Soft skills may include:
Self-reflection: who am I?
Intention-setting: who do I want to become?
Mapping our past, present and future and our spheres of influence.
Working with our archetypes.
Looking into the Wilderness Mirror.
Hard skills may include:
Foraging and plant identification.
Fire-lighting and management.
Wood craft, including knife work if appropriate.
Astronomy and natural navigation.
The final session will end with the Fear Council: what are you afraid of?
Stage 2: The Night Shift Journey
Starting at dusk on Saturday, we will hike 15-25km overnight across the New Forest, arriving at a sacred space at dawn.
Along the way, we will use all the skills and awareness that we developed together during our preparatory sessions.
There are no guarantees with this work, but expect to be tested, not only physically, but psychologically and emotionally, as darkness and wilderness work their magic.
These conditions are perfect for finding those ‘thin places’ where we might catch a glimpse of something far greater than ourselves — and return home changed.
Stage 3: Integration
A few days after our night journey, we will gather for one final evening back at our woodland base camp.
Through a series of collaborative and individual meaning-making exercises, we will integrate our nighttime experiences into our everyday lives.
What lessons will I take home with me?
What wisdom did I glimpse in the darkness?
How have I changed?
If you choose, things will never be the same again. This is your opportunity to decide for yourself: where will you go now?
There are still a couple of places available on this first trial Night Shift. The participation fee is £75, which just about covers my costs.
I will never have the opportunity to run this course so cheaply again (unless I get a big fat grant to do so 😂).
Why not take a step into the unknown? (Or share with someone who might need that kinda thing 🙏)
Thank You
Huge thanks to all the paying subscribers who helped make this story possible. You know who you are. Thank you. 💚
If you enjoyed this one, then go ahead and tell me. It’s the only way I’ll know. You can tap the heart button, write a comment, share the newsletter with friends, or simply reply to this email.
If you’re not into the whole Substack subscription thing, then you can also make a one-off, choose-your-own-contribution via PayPal. That’d make my day.
Last night, I dreamt that a friend was leading a snazzy bikepacking tour to the Arctic Circle.
I saw her face in a high-end outdoor magazine, looking all adventurous, surrounded by trendy black and white photos of expensive kit and moody Arctic landscapes.
I won’t lie: I was jealous.
I messaged her the next day and this is what I got back:
In this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.
Sometimes, like you, I see the future in my dreams.
A Tale of Two Entertainments
I’m too hard on myself. That much is clear.
Entertainment 1: Reading on the Beach
A novel I was given by Jessie, a woman we met at the Gaza Sunbirds fundraiser a couple of weeks ago. Improbably, her partner is called Jay. Jessie J. Jessie had bought the book earlier that day, quite forgetting that she’d read it before. The book, she said, was forgettable. I’m enjoying it. It’s by the same author who wrote Orbital, with the same driftingly pretty language. This book, unlike Orbital, does have flow as well as meander: a plot is in sight, just around the bend.
I actually didn’t read this book on the beach yesterday, but it looked better in the photo than the other book that I was reading on the beach.
And, in fact, I probably read no more than four pages before C called. We chatted for about fifteen minutes, then I stood up and left the beach with a dizzifying headrush-headthrob — not caused by our conversation, I hasted to add, but because of the cold still clinging to my throat.
I was on the beach for about twenty minutes in total and I read four pages. It was the highlight of my day.
Entertainment 2: A Football Game in Front of a Football Game
In the evening, while watching a football game on TV, I downloaded a football game called Retro Football Manager 24 and played that on my phone for about an hour.
Awful, addictive.
I was on a six-game winning streak with 1995-era Liverpool, lifting the boys from the relegation places after a disastrous start to the season, when I finally deleted the app.
It was 9.40pm. I felt like crap: tired, but wired.
After a day of working on screens, a nourishing evening snatched away from me by myself.
I’m too hard on myself — that much is clear — but that’s how I felt.
Lock Me Out
In immediate response to my phone-tethered self-disgust, I downloaded another app: Lock Me Out (Android only), and set up my phone to lock me out of itself when I have unlocked the demonic device fifty times in a day.
Regular readers will know that this is not my first attempt to limit my screen time.
I’m too hard on myself, etc., etc., but, my sweet lord, what a list:
And every new strategy I’m convinced is going to be The One.
Here’s how that all panned out:
I am at least very good at keeping records of how much I use my phone. 😂 You can see from this that my phone use has stayed pretty stable since I started a full time job in August last year, reliably varying from 4-12 hours per week every week. You can also see the one successful experiment I had, back in January, when I managed to slash my phone time to 2 hours for, er, 1 week. It took 8 weeks for that habit to wear off and for me to return to baseline.
But I tell you, reader: Lock Me Out is The One.
My intention is to gradually reduce the number of unlocks I allow myself per day, hoping to not be too hard on myself again, but rather become more comfortable in discomfort, in silence, in boredom.
Let Me In
Helping me on that path is yet another app (oh, the irony): The Way by Henry Shukman, travel writer, novelist, poet and Zen master in the Sanbo Zen lineage.
(Hat-tip to Tim Ferriss — his referral link will get you 30 free meditations instead of the usual 12.)
I’ve never managed to stick to meditation, despite trying off and on for what must be decades. (But let’s not beat me up about that, eh.)
I feel today, however, that I am reaching a point of, if not emergency, then perhaps urgency: my immune system is struggling, I feel overloaded and time-crushed. I know life isn’t going to get any simpler — that’s not how life works (thank goodness).
But life isn’t my experience of life. My experience of life is my experience of life. And that can be changed, or at least nudged one way or another. (Hat-tip to the Stoics there.)
And so: The Way arrives at the right time.
Superficial, Revolutionary
There are two things I particularly like about The Way, quite apart from the high production values. The first is superficial, but important. The second is revolutionary, insofar as a phone app can be (which isn’t very far).
Firstly, and superficially: Henry Shukman has an English accent — Oxford, to be precise. This shouldn’t be important, but it is. Familiarity, to humans, is familiar. And what is familiar is reassuring and what is reassuring is authoritative.
This is as much a warning as it is a recommendation.
Firstly, the teaching still has to be good. A teacher who gains authority through familiarity is a dangerous entity unless they back their authority with wisdom.
(I’m looking at you, certain politicians right now 👀.)
But secondly, if you’ve been raised — by Hollywood or, I don’t know, colonialism — to find English accents sinister, then maybe you won’t get on with Shukman.
Your ‘meditation’ will begin shortly. Excellent.
But unless you have a full-on panic attack when your ears ingest The Queen’s English, I’d still recommend you give The Way a chance, for my second, moderately revolutionary reason.
One Choice, Endless Variety
The conceit behind The Way is that the acolyte (app-olyte?) is on a journey of a thousand steps. Each step on The Way is a meditation, and one step follows another in sequence.
When you are on a mountain hike, you can’t take one step forward and then magically skip to another step six miles away on a different mountain. You must take the next step on this mountain: you have one choice alone.
Similarly, The Way is presented as an inexorable sequence of meditations: one session per day, with each day intentionally designed to follow the last, as you gradually build the foundations of a sustainable meditation practice.
(Foundations only, yes. As all outdoor guides know, reaching the mountain summit is never guaranteed: beware those who promise thus.)
Having said that, the content on The Way isn’t locked. You can repeat old meditations or even (I haven’t actually tested this, why would I?) skip ahead, out of sequence, to any of the other 600-odd meditations further along the path.
This makes The Way exactly the same as all the other apps: a huge steaming pile of content stored on your phone. But its presentation, its default mode, its user experience is unique: this is today’s meditation — no other.
There is no choice — unless you choose choice. But why would you take away that magic?
It feels as close to having a teacher in the room as a stupid phone app could: Shukman himself has decreed what meditation you will do today. The only thing you know for certain is that it will be different from yesterday and different again tomorrow.
Like life: one choice, endless variety.
Even after a whole seven days of using The Way, I’m still too hard on myself — that much is clear.
Nevertheless, with time, I will become more comfortable: with one choice for life, and the endless variety, each step as it comes.
Three Tiny Big Things
1. Credit: Obsidian
Today’s newsletter (and my experience of life in general) has been supercharged this week by using Daily Notes on Obsidian, a free notetaking app that syncs between my phone and my computer.
Double hat-tip to Jenny and the Facilitation Pharmacy for making me actually sit down and do it! 🙏
Thank You
Huge thanks to all the paying subscribers who helped make this story possible. You know who you are. Thank you. 💚
If you enjoyed this one, then go ahead and tell me. It’s the only way I’ll know. You can tap the heart button, write a comment, share the newsletter with friends, or simply reply to this email.
If you’re not into the whole Substack subscription thing, then you can also make a one-off, choose-your-own-contribution via PayPal. That’d make my day.
Two things that I don’t hold against people using AI:
Single-handedly destroying the planet — AI chatbots aren’t too bad ‘compared to most of the other stuff you do’. That friend having a go at you for using ChatGPT? Send them this chart and a year’s supply of tofu:
People using AI to replace people. People need people more than people need AI. If you’ve got a question, AI might give you the answer. But if you’re questioning everything, people won’t give you the answer — people are the answer.
People not using AI.*
*Actually, I don’t really care if you use AI or not. But I do think that most people should probably give it a whirl, if only so that they can develop a more robust critical theory around its potential outputs. Otherwise bad things can happen.
In this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.
Sometimes I marvel at humanity in a world of imitation.
Not The Right Books
If you’ve not got time to read, you’re not reading the right book.
No, not the words of Marcel Proust or Maggie Smith — the words of me, the other day, in my head.
(Yes, this really is how newsletters are born.)
The words-in-my-head (thought?) came to me as I skipped up the stairs at Battersea Park station1 and, to my delight, saw that I had a TEN minute wait for my train.
Normally, in London, a TEN minute wait is the precursor to apoplectic breakdown — I’ve seen otherwise straight-laced, shoulder-padded clerks-of-the-court reduced to hands-and-knees licking the live rail to alleviate the boredom when the board flickers inexplicably from —
Mill Hill East 2mins
to —
Edgware 9mins
But, to me, this TEN minute wait meant TEN more glorious minutes reading my book.
The book title is less important than the feeling that this book was, right now, the most gripping way I could spend my life.
So, as the words-in-my-head suggest, if you feel like you’ve not got time to read, then find another book.
Find another book: one that screams READ ME READ ME READ ME at you until you find yourself thrilled at inconvenient commuter delays because it means ten more pages of commune between you and your puppetmaster.
Oh — and, while we’re here, you have my permission to draw a big thick indelible marker line through every title on your ‘I really should’ reading list.
Books are damn hard to write — years of grind with no pay and no praise until, maybe, if the author is lucky, right at the very end, perhaps years more after they themselves gave the book and all its ideas up for dead and dull.
That means books only ever exist because an author was eaten up — for years — with something improbably important to say. If that book ain’t speaking to you right now, that book ain’t for you right now.
Move on.
There are millions out there. Find one that grips you by the heart and doesn’t let go.
On Tuesday, I went to a fundraising dinner hosted by Gaza Sunbirds paracycling team, the centrepiece a lip-smacking maqluba prepared by Chef Nour.
Before I’d digested the last of my rose pistachio rice pudding, the money was already in action:
Yesterday, we celebrated Maqluba and our rich culinary heritage, and today we are distributing food to underprivileged children in the most marginalized camps in Gaza.
If you’ve never had Palestinian speciality maqluba — literally ‘upside down’ — you’ve not lived. It’s not only delicious, but a piece of culinary theatre that, on Tuesday, was accompanied by jubilant hand-claps, darbuka and mizmar.
Stuffing my belly in a hipster-friendly Hackney eatery might be a jarring way to financially support a starving population in an open-air prison, but as Gaza Sunbirds co-founder Karim Ali pointed out, ‘Our food is our culture and, when we share our culture, we bring all people together.’
If you fancy getting in on the act, then you can donate a fiver to fund a Gaza Sunbirds Pizza Party — because ‘there is no reason Aid shouldn’t be fun!’
Headlines warn of a world in collapse, but solutions journalist Angus Hervey finds the overlooked triumphs that never make the news — from the rollout of malaria vaccines to the recovery of sea turtles. With hard data and stories from the frontlines, he reveals the hidden progress that perseveres even as it feels like the world is falling apart, and challenges us to decide which future we’ll help write.
Yep — it’s a TED video, but it’s a TED video that’s not full of crap. 10 minutes worth your time today.
Thank You
Huge thanks to all the paying subscribers who helped make this story possible. You know who you are. Thank you. 💚
If you enjoyed this one, then go ahead and tell me. It’s the only way I’ll know. You can tap the heart button, write a comment, share the newsletter with friends, or simply reply to this email.
If you’re not into the whole Substack subscription thing, then you can also make a one-off, choose-your-own-contribution via PayPal. That’d make my day.
And a warm welcome from the Palace gardens, where the parakeets cry and the coots pick plastic from the pond.
Shamefully, it’s two full months since I last unfurled a story at your feet — forgive me — but since then much has occurred.
I went to see the world’s longest running play, written by the world’s most successful author, a woman dead and buried in my home village graveyard for almost fifty years. Contrary to rumour, no, the butler didn’t do it. He’s not even in the cast.
Talking of graves, I stood at the foot of Marcel Proust’s and failed to summarise for my companions the plot of the world’s longest and most unsummarisable novel. Unsummarisable not due to the complexity of its plot, but due to its soporific effect on the reader — I always fall asleep somewhere between goodnight kiss and the madeleine.
I didn’t quite throw up on the teacups at Dreamland in Margate.
I completed an overdue Outdoor First Aid course, meaning that I am now officially signed off as a Hill & Moorland Leader and have the framed certificate to prove it.
I spent a sunny afternoon watching Liverpool win the Premier League title (although Brentford are romping away with the wages-per-point crown) and another sunny afternoon watching Crystal Palace win the FA Cup. I’m on call for work this weekend so can’t make it up to Liverpool on Monday for the celebrations — my consolation is that the Eagles’ victory parade is a short ride away. A year for the birds indeed.
I attended the second Nature Therapy Conference, got inspired, and, on the four-hour drive home, listening to Cosmo Sheldrake on repeat, designed my pilot wilderness therapeutic programme from ground to sky — watch this space for launch day soon. I’ll be looking for men looking for change in their lives. Message if you’re interested.
One morning, I left home without my phone or house keys. I learned that receptionists will do anything for a slice of banoffee pie.
All this happened, and so much more, but for this week, I’d like to tell you a little story about Albania, home of hands down the best flag on planet earth 🇦🇱. In April, I visited for the fifth time, but how could it possibly live up to my hyperbole — favourite country in the world, really?
In this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.
Sometimes I neglect you, dear reader.
Fluent in Welcome
The first time I went to Albania, I was met on the train platform by armed police, who marched me directly to the home of a little girl, no more than eight years old.
In 2007 Gjirokastër, now a notable tourist town, this eight-year old was the number one local English interpreter.
Perched awkwardly on the edge of a corduroy sofa, I cleared my throat and enquired whether this primary school pupil knew of any hotel or similar where I might be able to rest my head. The television showed adverts for missing people.
Without ceremony, my diminutive interpreter put aside her toys and led me through the streets, up the hill and into the old town, where, with gesticulations and smiles, I was passed into the care of a family — mother, father and an older daughter, probably seventeen, none of whom spoke English beyond, ‘Yes, welcome.’
Albania 2007. I actually don’t know what town this is. Maybe Gjirokaster?
Their home was built of stone-on-stone and could have been there since the days of Skanderbeg, resistance hero of Albanian medieval folklore, and contemporary of Romanian counterpart Vlad the Impaler.
Dark timber beams held the low ceiling on whitewashed walls. Thin carpets covered the flagstones, everything cold to the touch and the faint scent of mildew in the air.
Evening was falling and the daughter escorted me to a nearby restaurant. I was the only patron, shown to a six-person table in the square middle of a large dining room.
In short order, I was presented with nameless soup, followed by nameless stew, both courses served with a sort of dense white bread with thick crusts, like a baguette that’s let itself go.
There was no ambient music. The seconds ticked by to the rhythm of metal spoon on bowl, slurping, the occasional caesura as I struggled to tear off another hunk of loaf.
The daughter sat with me, ate nothing, drank nothing, but watched on, politely unresponsive to my repeated attempts to express satisfaction with her choice of hostelry.
That was my first encounter with Albania and I loved every awkward moment.
~
I have now visited Albania, Shqipëria to locals, five times.
In 2019, 2022 and 2023, Albania was the hospitable high point of Thighs of Steel’s rides from the UK to Greece — and the only time I’ve been chased by an ostrich.
Three times I’ve cycled the length and breadth of this, the thirty-fifth largest country in Europe — a country barely larger than the Turkish patch of Thrace that holds hands with the continent.
But as much as I loved those rides, they were manic, journeys without pause (except once, for a bout of food poisoning), and Albania, however generous, however beautiful, was a mere staging post on the road to Athens.
Albania is, I frequently announce, my favourite country in the world. But this year’s holiday was my first time back as a proper tourist since that first encounter in 2007.
I was nervous that I might have oversold it to my girlfriend. Favourite country? Really? Better than literally all the other countries? Better than croissants, better than sand dunes, better than elephants?
I needn’t have worried. Albania delivered to the mark — and more.
For those of you right now hoping for an armchair tour, I’m sorry. I want you to discover Albania on your terms, with whatever magical fairy dust the country sprinkles your way (and it will).
What I will say is that, in 2025, we were helped, housed and hosted everywhere we went in English — all those interpreting eight-year olds now fully grown, ready to invite you into their world.
Shqip: A Short Primer
I am full of admiration for the youth of Albania, fluent in a language as alien as English. I wish my mastery of shqip would grow beyond ‘faleminderit, thank you’, but even ‘hello — përshëndetje!’ hasn’t stuck.
If you’re looking for help from the kind of lexical and grammatical interbreeding that makes French, Spanish, German and even Flemish so familiar, then you’re out of luck with Albanian.
Shqip split from the Hellenic branch of the language family tree about 4,500 years ago and has zero surviving siblings — Messapic having gone extinct in southern Italy after Romans overran the area in the second century BCE.
That makes shqip quite hard to learn, but really fucking cool.
If standing alone in its family tree isn’t enough cool for you, then how about:
There are 36 letters in the alphabet, including ë, nj and xh.
These six sentences all mean the same thing: Word order is fluid. Word order fluid is. Fluid is word order. Fluid word order is. Is fluid word order. Is word order fluid. Yoda your heart out eat.
Verbs change if the speaker is expressing shock, surprise, irony or doubt. It’s like shqip has a whole other tense that adds ‘wtf’ to any sentence.
If you missed them: accounts of my cycles across Albania in 2019, 2022 and 2023.
Free by Lea Ypi. The personal story of a childhood in Albania as it clattered from socialism into capitalism, written by a woman who was there, a woman who is now a professor in political theory at London School of Economics. A healthy tonic for your arguments with neoliberals.
Anything by Gjirokastër native Ismail Kadare, Albania’s most famous novelist. I loved The File On H, a political satire about two Irish-American Homeric scholars mistaken for spies.
I left my heart here, but it’s in good paws.
Three Tiny Big Things
1. Multimillionaire hedge fund manager loses case to stop public enjoying a night under the stars
The judgment is worth hearing in full — Lord Stephens looks pissed that his time was wasted on this rich boy’s appeal and that the High Court ever passed a verdict that curtailed the rights of the public without consulting the public.
2. Is there such a thing as ‘responsible trespassing’? This man walked 500 miles—and says yes
During the British summer of 2024, I walked 505 miles—1,040,360 steps—from Hastings on the south coast of England to Gretna just over the Scottish border. Along the way, I responsibly trespassed and illegally wild-camped to raise awareness—and a few quid—for the Right to Roam, a campaign that advocates for greater access to nature in England and Wales.
3. Stoop Coffee: How a Simple Idea Transformed My Neighborhood
This is magical.
Hanging out on a stoop is not a novel concept. Unfortunately, an increasing trend of isolation has resulted in fewer and fewer neighbors gathering to connect with one another. Stooping has provided benefits to so many communities. Why not bring this concept to my own neighborhood?
Tyler and I were already having leisurely weekend morning coffees in our house, so it was an easy pivot to sit outside with our coffees and enjoy the sunshine. And thus our tradition began.
Every weekend, we would bring our folding chairs out onto the street — we had to make do since our house doesn’t have a stoop — and enjoy our caffeine.
As we saw people entering or exiting their homes, we’d enthusiastically wave them down, introduce ourselves, and write down their names in our shared spreadsheet.
18 months later…
Our neighborhood community is now a group of people that we rely on and who rely on us for emotional support, last-minute childcare, home-cooked meals, general comradery, and much more.
The best part is that I can tell we are still early in our growth, there are still many people to meet, and I feel a palpable sense of awe when I learn about a new skill or talent that exists right next door.
Huge thanks to all the paying subscribers who helped make this story possible. You know who you are. Thank you. 💚
If you enjoyed this one, then go ahead and tell me. It’s the only way I’ll know. You can tap the heart button, write a comment, share the newsletter with friends, or simply reply to this email.
If you’re not into the whole Substack subscription thing, then you can also make a one-off, choose-your-own-contribution via PayPal. That’d make my day.
British Summer Time begins in TWELVE days. We’ve made it!
Last weekend, driving home from the Lake District, I was introduced to a 2021 episode of This American Life: a whole hour devoted to embarrassing stories.
They’re not always just little moments – funny, daily stuff that we laugh about later. Some can change you for the rest of your life.
In this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.
Sometimes, like all humans, I find myself hilariously covered in my own excrement.
The Scent of a Thousand Miles
Someone cried out — ‘Brimstone!’ — and in a moment I know more than I ever knew. The logic of the universe was revealed.
What to me looked like a scrap of yellow plastic blowing in the wind was in fact a brimstone, named for sulphur, the first butterfly of spring. The original ‘butter-coloured fly’.
My first sighting of brimstone.
The same brimstone, captured by one of our fellow wild wanderers. I guess this is a female: more greenish white than sulphurous yellow.
I was on a Wild New Forest guided walk with my dad and we had barely left the car park, seeing with new and noticing eyes, relishing two hours wandering barely two miles.
Here is a short list of some of the wildlife we encountered:
Buzzard, stonechat, chiffchaff and siskin.
Skylark and meadow pipit, side by side, singing and parachuting a-merrily.
Lesser spotted woodpecker (scarcer with softer, longer drumming) and great spotted woodpecker (common with louder, shorter drumming).
Teeny tiny eyelash fungi (on horse poo), yellow brain jelly fungus (on gorse) and gorse mites (on gorse).
Butchers broom (antibacterial, good for cleaning butchers’ blocks).
Comma (not a , a butterfly).
Goshawk, rockstar of the forest, flying low over the canopy, hunting for prey, or perhaps adolescent play.
Butchers broom. I didn’t even know flowers could grow in the middle of a leaf. What the actual fuck?
Most of the fourteen names on that list stretch me far beyond the limits of my awareness.
I know that there exists a bird species they call ‘siskin’, and they told me once or twice that we were in the presence, in the soundscape, of one siskin in particular — but I couldn’t pick out a siskin from a lineup, nor from a ten second intro in the music round of a natural history quiz.
I am at my limit today, merely proud to have recognised the goshawk on its third pass over the trees, when others missed him (I think it was a him — smaller and more timid than the dominant female).
One thing I did not notice: crows. In the forest, crows and rooks and pigeons and other wildlife of the city were prominent by their absence.
The moment my dad and I took to the motorway: there they were again, dive-bombing empty chip wrappers, scrapping on the gutters.
Where did that burst of forest diversity go?
Not for the likes of us.
I returned to London disheartened, feeling a long way from the sunny-sandy heathlands, where the adders would be sloughing off their winter-hardened skin.
Walking to work, Monday morning, running on time to late. I passed two French women huddled over a nondescript bush in a corner of Hyde Park.
Curious at what they’d found, I made sure to eavesdrop.
‘Ahhhh!’ one of them gasped, ‘Ça sent très bon!’
Her friend inhaled the proffered flower scent, practically transported with pleasure: ‘Les fleurs! Jolies, eh?’
Being thoroughly British (and late for work), I left les dames gathered at their altar — but I made sure to note the location of this wondrously scented bush and returned the next day with camera and plant identification app in hand, nostrils a-quiver.
Reader: I was not disappointed. Behold the winter daphne!
Daphne odora: the Latin epithet means ‘fragrant’. Better still, in Korean, the epithet is ‘thousand-mile scent’. Ahhh…. Merci!
As I continued my pavement walk, I noticed that a light dusting of the sparkle from Sunday’s forest walk lingered with me, even amid the grime of the City.
A woodpecker hammered unseen from the top of the London plane in a pocket park hemmed by parked cars. Blossom dripped from street cherries and crocuses exploded up from any scrap of grassy soil.
The list of New Forest wildlife that I wrote earlier had fourteen species on it. London is home to at least ONE THOUSAND times more.
I still have so much to discover here — yes, even here, even here, and why not here?
Especially here, on my doorstep, with the magnolia.
Doorstep magnolia.
Three Tiny Big Things
1. The Sound of Freedom – The Role of Music in Political Change
Part of intangible history, music has long played an important role in historical events. Long a tool of protest, thousands of songs across the globe take aim at repression and authoritarianism and have done so for centuries.
On one hand, it feels a little crazy to be out here, tippity-tapping away on my laptop, sipping tea, sticking my hands in my pockets, listening, watching the morning shadows shorten. But on the other hand, nothing feels more natural than being under the actual sky, not a ceiling, and feeling actual fresh air, not the stuffy indoor canned variety.
3. One of a small handful of rainforest nations on Earth
The Woodland Trust are using 110kg drones to dump 75,000 seeds onto Bodmin Moor in an attempt to re-establish temperate rainforest.
Rainforest once covered 75 percent of Devon and Cornwall but we have lost 90 percent of it. These are among the most threatened ecosystems on Earth. They are biodiversity hotspot, home to over 2000 species of lichen. Sadly, rainforests cover just one percent of the Earth’s land surface, and we are one of only a small handful of rainforest nations left on Earth.
Thank You
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I’ve been fortunate to have worked with and for many, many brilliant leaders in the course of my life.
To name — and so embarrass — a few: Harri and the core team at Thighs of Steel, Nic, Grace and the leaders of New Forest Off Road Club, Beth Granville, my co-writer and co-producer of Foiled, Sarah at Young Roots youth club, many of the outdoor adventure leaders I’ve worked with, especially those at Off Grid Adventures, and of course many other family, friends, teachers and mentors, including (not least for inspiring this Substack).
These are people who, most often, lead from the middle. They listen carefully, they communicate clearly, and they laugh easily.
These are the people who I remembered as I picked a path through my Hill and Moorland Leader assessment last week, in thick rain, wind and fog.
And these are the people I credit most for the positive feedback I got from my assessors: that I was the only person on assessment who showed strong group management skills.
Conditions were horrible; it was easy for us all to turn inwards, to focus on ourselves and worry more about ‘getting there’ than about group spirit and togetherness on our journey.
Remembering all the brilliant leaders I have known — what would they have done? — I did my best to bring the whole team together: listening, communicating, and leading from the middle, rather than marching off into the misty moor.
In this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.
Sometimes I stand on the shoulders of giants.
Young People Need A New Kind Of Adventure
Earlier this week I wrote a short piece for Alastair Humphreys about what the charity I work for, British Exploring Society, is doing to address the current crisis in young people’s mental health. Here it is: short, sharp and bittersweet.
The Mental Health Crisis Among Young People
The rise of social media, exacerbated by pandemic isolation, has created what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has coined ‘The Anxious Generation’.
Building Resilience: The Proven Power of Adventure
Despite these challenges, young people who participate in British Exploring Society expeditions report significant improvements in confidence, resilience, and overall wellbeing.
Using the Short Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (SWEMWBS), we have seen post-programme wellbeing scores increase each year since 2021.
A New Kind of Adventure: Evolving to Meet the Need
But as young people increasingly absent themselves from school, socialising and the workplace, so they are also dropping out of our expeditions before they can experience the full benefit of life in the wilderness.
We cannot help young people who aren’t with us. So British Exploring Society is evolving once again to meet young people where they are today.
In addition to our famous multi-week expeditions, we are now introducing two new UK-based programmes that offer young people a chance to find their feet and hit their stride without compromising our unique person-centred approach, based around Adventure, Knowledge and Personal Development.
Adventure Weekends (for ages 14+) provide an adventurous entry point, with two nights under canvas at a residential outdoor centre.
Adventure Weeks (for ages 16+) offer a wilder challenge, with five or seven days of immersive adventure in England and Scotland’s most dramatic and remote environments.
These UK Adventures will allow young people to build confidence gradually, at a pace they choose.
Our ambition is that our Young Adventurers of 2025 will become our Young Explorers of 2026 — ready to explore the wildernesses of places like Arctic Iceland, mountainous Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, and the deserts of Oman.
Books for Reflection
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt – exploring how social media and screentime has impacted young people’s mental health.
All British Exploring Society programmes are free-to-access for young people resident in the UK and aged 14-25.
One thing you can do today is share our Expeditions page and help your favourite young people apply to join our Adventure Weekend or Adventure Weeks. They have nothing to lose and a whole world of adventure to gain.
Our expeditions and adventures are led by an incredible community of professional volunteer leaders, including social workers, scientists, bushcraft instructors, school teachers, psychotherapists, engineers and mountain guides. If you are interested in leading with us and helping young people unlock their self-belief, please get in touch.
Grab your Sunday lunch with friends and family and get to know some key facts about heart disease and men’s cardiovascular health — free blood pressure testing throughout the day!
What’s killing 12 men a day in the UK? Join us for a powerful documentary about male mental health and suicide prevention.
Is there such a thing as the male menopause? A thought-provoking evening exploring how declining testosterone levels in middle-aged men can impact everything from libido and mental health to relationships and physical wellbeing.
Join the brothers at Westow House, SE19 1TX. 19 February to 7 March.
A funny thing happens when a Snickers bar goes from whole to eaten — the wrapper transmorgifies from useful to toxic. Suddenly, this thing that was keeping germs and dirt off your chocolate sugar log is now “useless” and with this comes the heaviest burden a modern person unencumbered by genocide or famine can hold: garbage responsibility.
Leaders aren’t just generals, presidents and CEOs. You’re probably a leader too! Someone in your home, school or workplace might look to you for guidance – and that’s leading. So how do you inspire the people around you and make yourself the best leader you can be?
Thank You
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Tomorrow, at dawn, I drive west to Dartmoor. The weather forecast for my long-awaited, much-postponed three day Hill and Moorland Leader assessment is suboptimal.
Heavy rain and a moderate breeze. Heavy rain and a fresh breeze. Strong winds and heavy rain.
Ravens collaborate with wolves to take down prey. They sometimes babysit the wolf cubs. One theory behind why wolves hunt in packs is so that the ravens don’t eat more than their share of the kill.
The ravens, in other words, are in charge.
Despite the fact that there are 139 different species of corvid, for all intents and purposes, they look and sound EXACTLY THE SAME.
Unless, that is, you make your own quick and dirty cheat sheet like mine:
Ravens are chunky — as big as red kites, although with a shorter wingspan — with a diamond-shaped tail and a range of Barry White pitched calls.
Crows are solitary (except when they’re not), noisy — repetitive caa-caa — with a fan-shaped tail and moustaches on their beaks.
Rooks are sociable, dishevelled, with a purple sheen and fluffy trousers. Softer voices.
Jackdaws are small with beady little eyes, a grey hood and a black cap. They call their name — ‘chack-tyaw’.
Magpies are black and white with a purply-blue sheen in sunlight. Their call is a death rattle. …Eleven for health, Twelve for wealth, Thirteen — beware! — it’s the devil himself.
Choughs have red legs and beaks. Only found in the far west.
Jays dress to impress, the dandies of the corvid parade. Still smart as anything — and aggressive too.
‘Tell me about corvids’ is the sort of question I’ll be asked over the next three days as I undertake my Hill and Moorland Leader assessment on Dartmoor.
Other questions include: ‘What do you do if a rucksack strap breaks mid-walk?’, ‘Can you use the aspect of slope and a bearing to aim off the attack point to the trig?’ and ‘Sorry to interrupt your fascinating disquisition on crows, but why are you leading us over that precipice?’
Wish me luck.
Three Tiny Big Things
1. Why we can’t stand feeling bored
Nearly half of participants sitting alone in a room for 15 minutes, with no stimulation other than a button that would administer a mild electric shock, pressed the button.
Huge thanks to all the paying subscribers who helped make this story possible. You know who you are. Thank you. 💚
If you enjoyed this one, then go ahead and tell me. It’s the only way I’ll know. You can tap the heart button, write a comment, share the newsletter with friends, or simply reply to this email.
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Before I get into it, I just want to say that the Seven Archetypes is not a hierarchy. They all have their place.
You might find yourself drawn to one or other Archetype, perhaps modulating between them all at different stages of your life, depending on what you’re searching for in that moment.
Perhaps the perfect adventure contains elements of them all, I don’t know.
I hope that the Seven Archetypes help you figure out what you need from an adventure, or help you have a cooperative conversation with someone else to make sure you both get what you need.
Holidaymaker 🏖
Success is… escape from the daily grind.
Favourite mode of travel… limo.
The journey is… an opportunity to hit the duty free.
My motivation is… pure pleasure.
My light side is… joy.
My dark side is… oblivion.
Tourist 📷
Success is… enjoying a well-planned itinerary of sights and experiences.
I think I’m currently feeling about 60 percent Traveller, 40 percent Wanderer.
I’d love to hear which Archetype appeals to you most right now. Has your default Archetype changed over time? Does it vary from adventure to adventure? Do you too love a pie chart?
There is so much good stuff in Anne Helen Petersen’s round-up of critical writing on smartphone usage. The headline is from a piece by Kate Lindsay and I can’t resist another quote, this time from Sam Kriss:
A phone is a device for muting the anxieties proper to being alive.
Wikenigma is ‘dedicated to documenting fundamental gaps in human knowledge’. That link will take you to a random example of something NOBODY understands.
A 2020 study from Stanford University has found that human body temperature — previously standardised at 37°C — has been steadily declining over the last 200 years or so. Using historical records, the research team found that the current average body temperature is probably now around half a degree lower.
AND NOBODY KNOWS WHY.
3. What the heck is this?
The end of cars, that’s what. Or the beginning of cars? I don’t know.
If you like this sort of thing, then make sure you drop by and say hello to your reviewer extraordinaire, .
Thank You
Huge thanks to all the paying subscribers who helped make this story possible. You know who you are. Thank you. 💚
If you enjoyed this one, then go ahead and tell me. It’s the only way I’ll know. You can tap the heart button, write a comment, share the newsletter with friends, or simply reply to this email.
If you’re not into the whole Substack subscription thing, then you can also make a one-off, choose-your-own-contribution via PayPal. That’d make my day.
In this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.
Sometimes I am awed by wild in the city.
Stop Judging You: A New Forest Story
On New Year’s Eve Eve, I walked clean across the New Forest, from Sway in the south to Ashurst in the east.
It was my first long hike in months, testing an ankle that had been swollen and sore, inflamed from August to December. God bless the osteopath!
You’d think that, being my first long hike in months, I would take it easy. For some explicable reason, I didn’t.
18km in five hours.
This story is about the all-too-explicable reason I turned this adventure into a forced march — and what I did next, twenty-four hours later.
A Bad Idea
After what felt like a bald few months of hopping and hobbling, I was determined to Do Something over the Christmas holiday.
This is called goal-setting and — spoiler alert — it is only ambiguously a good thing.
Nevertheless, my goal was to do what I call a Defined Adventure. I wanted to plan to hike from A to B and then I wanted to do the hike from A to B.
Plan: A to B.
Or at least I thought that was what I wanted.
As I said: goal-setting is only ambiguously a good thing.
Goal-setting is part of the doing mindset, a productive space where humans fix problems and stress out. Not necessarily what I needed at a reflective time of year such as New Year’s Eve Eve.
So sometimes goals are bad ideas to have, especially when, compounding the calamity, we stick to the damn things.
So What Went Wrong?
On the surface: nothing. I hiked for 18km without incident, without getting lost, without ankle pain, without even a proper lunch.
And that, pretty much, sums up what went wrong.
I called this hike a Defined Adventure — but what kind of an adventure is it when you don’t even have lunch?
Etymologically buried at the heart of the word ‘adventure’ is the idea of chancing your luck and taking a risk.
There was no risk on my Trans-Forest Trail, only — for that explicable reason — a deep anxiety of leaving A behind and whithering my ass to B.
And so we reach our explicable reason. Or perhaps I should say reasons plural.
Doing When I Need Being 🤔
Picture the scene. It’s New Year’s Eve Eve and you’re on your first hike in months, somewhere you love — like the New Forest.
It’s one of those tail-end days where the ground is soft, the air is sharp and the herons are doing good business.
It looks a bit like this:
A tree stand in a Scots Pine on Ober Heath
I climbed to the top of the tree stand you can see in the picture, a slippery climb into the Scots Pine, for an owl’s eye across the land.
These tree stands are used by gamekeepers for good shot at deer. There’s a sign telling me not to climb, but it’s New Year’s Eve Eve so I don’t care.
It’s still enough that I can hear the rustle of waterproof trousers a kilometer away.
I take stock. I look out over Fletchers Thorns to the dark silhouettes of Queen Bower.
I check my watch.
I check my phone.
I check my fucking Oura ring.
Even though I’m only halfway through my first hike in months, I can feel there’s something not right here.
I’m doing when I need being.
How the hell has it come to pass that I am measuring this hike on three different devices?
I’m doing when I need being.
My watch says I’ve done 8km. My phone says I’ve done 8km. My fucking Oura ring says I’ve done 8km — and is giving me top marks for activity today. Congratulations, you have met your activity goal!
I’m getting praise from a band of metal round my finger. I don’t feel good.
I’m doing when I need being.
All these devices — they only measure doing.
My fucking Oura ring grades me on 54 metrics, from Average Resting Heart Rate to Temperature Trend Deviation. But it doesn’t matter how many sensors they add, there’s no device on Earth that measures being.
It’s New Year’s Eve Eve. I’m doing when I need being.
And it’s giving me a headache.
Muscle-Through Adventures
An adventure isn’t an adventure if you know the outcome in advance. Today, in the Forest, I knew the outcome in advance.
I had 18km of Forest to wade through; my job was to follow my phone and beat out the steps, each one logged in triplicate on my doing devices — three!
It meant I could ‘muscle through’ the so-called adventure: suck up the foot-pounding, suck up the headaches, keep my eyes on the horizon and shift it.
Today’s hike was more like the successful completion of a half marathon, only without the cheering supporters, samba band and tinpot medal.
I could’ve had a bigger adventure in Asda.
Not an Asda in sight. But, if you peer closely, you might see a heron.
A Fallacy
One of the classic markers of being is losing track of time and, on a very simple level, it’s hard to lose track of time when I’m wearing a watch. Especially one — three! — that are specifically and perniciously measuring my every step.
With these devices it’s like I’m constantly looking over my own shoulder. Constantly monitoring myself. Not trusting myself to be alive. Judging my sleep, judging my steps. Judging my beingness through my doingness. A fallacy.
When I hike to the drumbeat of doing devices — three! — I can’t help but shift into doing mode.
And doing is trying, in both senses of the word.
Stop trying.
Stop trying so hard.
Stop trying to relax.
Stop trying!
Apologies To The Forest
Okay, so I got New Year’s Eve Eve wrong in a few ways.
I thought I wanted Defined Adventure; I didn’t. Nothing wrong with Defined Adventures. Nothing wrong with doing mode. But I needed being, not doing.
18km is too far for me to do much more than muscle through. (Especially after I realised I could get home before dark to see friends. Tick off those miles!)
Measuring a hike on three devices is a bit much. (In my defence, before you think I’m a complete monster, I was testing one of the devices. Even so: measuring a pleasure hike on even one device might be a bit much.)
I didn’t bring lunch. What WAS I thinking?!
But perhaps worst of all is that I hired the Forest to collude in my doing, sold out nature for productivity and bribed ecology to dress the scene of my accomplishments.
And that kinda goes against everything I learned in 2024 .
So, the next day, New Year’s Eve, I went back to the Forest to apologise.
The Wind Gave Me A Playful Shove
I didn’t really have time to be going into the Forest. It was New Year’s Eve and I’d spent most of the day writing to you.
There were a few other cars still parked in the darkness at Cadnam’s Pool. A family picked their way along the sandy shore, dogs weaving between skinny legs in welly boots.
I switched off my headlights and let my eyes grow into the early starlight. I enjoyed the power of the wind, pushing and shoving at the car bonnet, riffling waves over the water.
I watched the family round up their dogs and clank their wellies free of mud. I waited for their taillights to disappear down the track. I got out of my car. The wind gave me a playful shove.
I turned away from the pool and walked into Anses Wood, scuffing up leaves and storm-shaken debris with my boots, stumbling in the gloom.
Hoooo — a tawny owl called around me in stereo — huhuhuhooo. It felt like an ambivalent welcome: ‘So you’re back,’ the owl observed. Their unseen glare was suspicious: ‘Are you ready to be here now?’
My heart leapt up like the family dog and I grabbed a branch from the Forest floor, feeling the scratch-caress of its rough-smooth bark.
Enjoying its reassuring heft in my hand, I hurled the dead branch into the air and caught it, neatly.
Pleased with my body’s no-brain instinctive deftness, I threw the branch over and over, spinning cartwheels in the night, and catching over and over like a sylvan circus performer.
Then I began to run, I don’t know where. I ran out of the woods and onto a smooth grassy trail, lit by the moon. The grass knew me and I fell down to meet it, rolling in my waterproofs, rolling like a log, like a scratching dog, embodying the animal play-feel of the ground all over.
Playtime over, I marched down Freeworms Hill, heading towards Queen North Wood, feet sinking into boggy ground. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew this was where I must go.
I came to a fallen birch, a mighty tree laid low, and knew I must rest here.
The silvery light of the silvery moon met the silvery bark of the silvery birch.
I clambered onto the fallen birch from the rootstock end and then, monkey-style, tail up, all-foured along the mossy trunk to where a branch curled into the sky.
Here I rested, my back against the vertical branch, my legs stretched out along the trunk, my body sinking into the inch-thick moss. My head angled to the stars and I closed my eyes as a light rain began to fall.
Afterword: Farewell Oura
I lived for five and a half months with my fucking Oura ring.
In short, my conclusions chime with my experience of the Zoe Personalised Nutrition programme: an interesting short-term experiment, if you can afford it. I emphasise the word short-term. No technology will ever surpass our own sense of interoception.
That’s not to say that the £300 I dunked on the Oura told me nothing. I came back with two firm conclusions:
I sleep well. Even when I sleep badly, it doesn’t mean I have a bad day and I easily make up the rest I need. I’m lucky.
I feel good when I get outside and move at least three times a day.
The next day, the first of the new year, I removed my Oura ring and went for a run. An unmeasured, ungraded, unsanctioned run. For the sheer hell of it.
I haven’t missed the ring.
~
Apologies for the long break between newsletters: I needed this story to be the next one I published and, as you have seen, it morphed into a long one.
For those of you eager for a more regular publication schedule — bless your woolly socks — rest assured that I have a couple drafted and ready to launch, firework style, into your inboxes soon.
While there is no OECD-wide average against which to compare Finland’s homeless rate of 0.08%, other countries with similarly broad definitions of homelessness provide points of reference, such as neighbouring Sweden (0.33%) or the Netherlands (0.23%).
Huge thanks to all the paying subscribers who helped make this story possible. You know who you are. Thank you. 💚
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Thanks to for sharing this training in his excellent newsletter.
2. 2025: Your Journey in Nature
Go out into nature — whatever that means for you. It could be your back garden. It could be a local park, riverside or beach. It could be the woods. It could be the wasteland round the back of the multi-storey. It doesn’t matter. It’s yours.
Ideally, this natural place will be somewhere you can go back to throughout the year, but please don’t let that stop you doing it wherever you are now.
Identify two landmarks in your natural place. Ideally, they should be about twelve paces apart from each other.
Trees are good landmarks for this exercise because they are beautiful and these landmarks may well take on a special significance for you over the course of the year.
But your landmarks could be almost anything — the only definite requirements are that they are fixed in place and that you can move comfortably between the two.
The first landmark represents you today, at the beginning of 2025. The second landmark represents you in twelve months’ time, at the beginning of 2026.
I invite you to look closely at your first landmark.
Where are you now? How do you feel about your life today? What is going well? What would you love to see going better? This landmark is you, today.
Now look closely at your second landmark.
I invite you to pour all of your hopes, aspiration, dreams and ambitions into this second landmark. This second landmark is you, in twelve months’ time.
Please don’t feel obliged to write down or record the hopes and dreams that you have projected into your second landmark. This is not corporate goal-setting. Trust that what is important will stick, and allow yourself to adapt and evolve in a very natural way as the seasons rise and fall.
Every month, I invite you to return to this natural place. Welcome yourself back. Re-introduce yourself to your surroundings.
How has the space changed in the last month?
In particular, acknowledge your two landmarks, old friends: your past self and your future self, with you somewhere in between. How are they doing?
Every month, start at your first landmark and walk the number of paces that represents how far along in the year you’ve gone. Maybe bring a votive offering of tea and pour it on the ground or scatter some sage leaves along the path as you walk.
If the two landmarks are twelve paces apart, then at the end of January take one pace towards your second landmark. In June, you would take six paces from the first landmark towards the second, representing each of the six months that have elapsed since you first came to your nature place.
As you move slowly forward each month, think about how you are moving slowly forward towards your future self. Keep that in mind.
How are you doing today? What’s changed in you over the past month?
As you travel over ground that represents times past, remember the person you’ve been at those times. When you’ve counted out the requisite number of paces, look back at how far you’ve come.
How have you evolved and grown since the beginning of the year?
Honour all the things you’ve learned so far and all the experiences and relationships that are contributing to your becomingness.
Now look ahead to your second landmark.
In what ways are you slowly becoming that future person? Do you remember any of the hopes and dreams that you poured into your landmark? Do you want to change or add to any of those ideas?
Remember that nature is always changing, always in compromise and combination with the zillions of other organisms that make up its environment. Sometimes this means change in totally unexpected ways. That’s okay. No one here is judging you.
When you’ve thought a little bit about your future self, come back to now.
How does your year’s journey feel to you so far?
How does it feel to be alive?
Don’t be hard on yourself. Whatever happens this year, give yourself credit for moving forward.
3. Join a Men’s Circle
In 2025, men need to rediscover the art of gathering in circle. It doesn’t have to be around a campfire (although that does seem to help). It does have to be all men, in a circle of brothers, showing who they are — who they really are.
Message me if you would like to join an online circle run by an experienced and trusted brother. I’ll send you the link.
If you’re not a man: encourage your menfolk to find their own circle.
Thank You
Huge thanks to all the paying subscribers who helped make this story possible. You know who you are. Thank you. 💚
If you enjoyed this one, then go ahead and tell me. It’s the only way I’ll know. You can tap the heart button, write a comment, share the newsletter with friends, or simply reply to this email.
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‘For the first time, the elimination of a cancer is within our reach.’ 😮
and…
The pace of [solar energy] deployment has become almost unfathomable — in 2010, it took a month to install a gigawatt, by 2016, a week, and in 2024, just 12 hours. […] The International Energy Agency said that the pace of deployment is now ahead of the trajectory required for net zero by 2050. 😎
and…
The Mersey River, dubbed the ‘greatest river recovery in Europe,’ continued to thrive with 45 different kinds of fish recorded, triple the amount from 2002. 🧜♀️
Oh shucks. I can’t resist adding a fourth:
Australia became the first country this year to ban social media for children under the age of 16, and next year France will become the first country to ban phones at school for children under the age of 15 nationwide. 📵
If your eyeballs can’t handle so much progress all at once, then you can passively absorb the good good through your two earholes on The Good News You Missed In 2024 podcast.
2. Osteopaths are great.
I spent about two months of 2024 convinced that I had arthritis. I couldn’t walk on my left ankle, which was a bit of a shame for a qualified walk leader.
Despite its origins in pseudoscience, one osteopathy appointment at the Rebalance Clinic changed everything.
After asking about a million diagnostic questions, James got stuck in (literally) with needles, ultrasound, lasers, massage gun, fists and elbows. It sounds violent, but I spent the whole hour in fits of giggles.
Most importantly, I was back walking within days and the inflammation had all but disappeared by the time of my follow-up appointment two weeks later.
Not a cure for impotency.
Bonus: if you have a proper injury, then ice packs are worth the investment. A simple velcro strap made all the difference to me. Frozen peas are for amateurs.
3. I’m addicted to courses (and external validation).
There is no doubt that learning energises me, but I’m concerned about my need for external validation. I am vulnerable to mistake grades, approval and qualifications for learning or accomplishment.
For example: my brain is secretly hoping that next year’s Foundational Ethnobotany course will be as simple as a data download on my phone.
Like in the Matrix, I’ll upgrade my operating system with a new app that will be able to identify and prepare foraged food and medicines. I only need to pay for the training and get plugged in.
My rational self knows that won’t happen. Brains learn things through sustained focus and repetition. I could learn ethnobotany the way most people do: practice.
Still: I’m REALLY excited to learn from one of the UK’s most knowledgable foragers next year!
I love reading books. I love the ‘forced meditation’. I love the sustained connection with another human mind. I love the softness of the page, respite from the harsh eyepound of my screens. I love new angles on things I’d never noticed. I love the places I’ve never been and the characters I’ve never met.
I love the beginning and — days, weeks or months later — I love The End.
So here’s the first of seven books on this list, the winnner of my Paradigm Shift Book of the Year —
Humankind by Rutger Bregman (2020)
tl;dr: Humans are good people: the case for the defence.
5. ChatGPT diagnosed my rye bread failures.
This year, I had really inconsistent results with my sourdough rye until I worked with ChatGPT to diagnose, fix and understand the recipe.
A lot is said about A.I., but it has proved an effective replacement for a master-apprentice relationship in this one, admittedly quite niche, case.
For those interested, the solutions were:
Buy a bread thermometer probe and bake the loaf until the centre hits 100C.
Carve slashes into the surface of the loaf before baking.
6. Note to self: dancing to live music is great.
I can count the number of gigs I went to in 2024 on the fingers of one hand that has been involved in a nasty carpentry accident.
Next year, I would like to barely count them on the fingers of both, ideally fully digitised, hands.
7. My ‘Fix Your Brain’ Book of The Year
Unwinding Anxiety by Judson Brewer (2020)
tl;dr: Anxiety is a habit; break the loop with mindfulness.
Key ingredients: lashings of olive oil and oregano and a whole slab of Greek feta.
9. I sleep much bettter than I thought I did.
In July, I bought an Oura ring — a screenless wearable device that gives me a stupid amount of biometric data on my physical activity and sleep.
Thrillingly for someone addicted to grades, the Oura scores my sleep out of 100 every night. And I can print out a GRAPH, look —
As you can see, my average is 88, which Oura classifies as ‘Optimal’. I’m SO PROUD.
When people ask me whether the Oura was worth buying, this is the first thing I say: ‘It’s showed me that I sleep much better than I thought I did.’
As you can see, despite having a couple of bad nights every month or so, my sleep is rock solid.
A lot of people think they’re bad sleepers when in fact they sleep really well. I am not in that group any more. I sleep darned well, all things considered.
The Oura was worth the money on that score alone. But does that mean I’ll keep wearing it into 2025? Maybe not.
Sometimes collecting biometric data leads to good outcomes: having a benchmark of my physical activity means that I can work to increase it and then see the results on a pretty graph. Yay me!
(I’m aware now that I’ve been sitting here in this chair writing for a couple of hours — the Oura won’t be happy. I should move.)
Do I sleep better for wearing an Oura ring? No — but I have learned that I sleep well.
Do I walk more? Perhaps. It certainly encourages me to move, to make the Oura’s activity goals and boost my activity grade.
But there are better questions:
Do I enjoy my walks more for having the Oura and its activity grades? No.
Has the Oura made me joyless?
How long will it take my brain to recover once I stop wearing it?
10. Mortality is a good thing?
How would you like to feel, in your mind, in your body, at the moment of death?
As advised by Geshe Tenzin Namdak, I’ve been using the dark minutes before sleep as a rehearsal.
Sleep as death; dream state as transcendence; waking as rebirth. I’ve found it puts any pettyfogging worries to rest and quiets the mind. Sleep comes more easily to those who surrender.
Having said that, aging is a bitch, isn’t it? What if I never cycle across a continent again? What if I never live beside the sea again? What if I never write that novel?
I get the whole Buddhist death thing, but I’m still not sure what I’d say if you offered me eternal youth.
Just like everyone, I am of the nature to age. I have not gone beyond ageing.
On a day with a gentle wind, go to the woods. If you don’t have any convenient woods near you, find a tree in a quiet corner of a garden or public park.
Lie down on the ground (don’t worry, it’s only for a couple of minutes). If you can’t lie down, then please sit down or lean up against a tree.
Look up at the tree tops. Notice what you notice. Notice how the wind sways the treetops. Listen to the wind as it moves through the branches and leaves.
Take a deep breath in. As you slowly exhale, mimic with your breath the sound of the wind. Do this for a few rounds of breath: inhale, slow exhale like the wind.
Ponder for a moment: the wind that blows through the treetops is the same air that you are breathing. You are part of nature.
13. My ‘Fix Your Relationships’ Book of the Year
High Conflict by Amanda Ripley (2021)
tl;dr: High conflict hijacks our brains; how to escape the trap.
But it does add a disruptive layer of mindfulness. Highly recommended. Read more here — or just go right ahead and Delete The Internet. (👈 Second most popular newsletter from 2024.)
Nothing bad will happen.
15. My ‘Jeez This’ll Really Stay With You’ Novel of the Year
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (2022)
tl;dr: Chemical romance epic; Dickens for the OxyContin generation.
16. Hot tubs are amazing.
Completely against the run of play, 2024 was the year of the hot tub. They are amazing. New life goal: an outdoor bath tub.
Stay connected to yourself, other people, your surroundings, or whatever you’re doing
Stay curious: ignorance is a helpful signpost
Say something out loud to someone (then listen)
Take your ‘little voice’ by the hand and explore together
Take the first step, then take it piece by piece
18. My ‘Atmospheric’ Novel of the Year
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (2001)
tl;dr: Tender and taut.
19. Crypto is going crazy and I’ve made some money.
And I can’t decide whether it’s good that at least some normal people are profiting from the kakistocracy, or if I’m part of the problem. Please don’t tell me.
20. Adventure isn’t adventure if you already know the outcome.
This is an echo of previous entries:
Smartphone mapping makes it too easy to know the outcome of an adventure.
The Oura ring urges me to race through a hike, to not get lost, to get through my steps as efficiently as possible.
But that’s not adventure. Once this newsletter is done, I’m going to spend the last of the daylight lying in a treetop. That’s adventure.
The commute is a grind — or it would be if I didn’t cycle.
One of my promises to myself when I started was that I would never use the underground for work. I’ve kept that promise.
Since August, I reckon I’ve cycled about 810km to and from work, saving over £260 in the process.
That’s the same distance as riding from London to Edinburgh — and enough dosh to pay myself back for buying that Oura ring 😂
22. My ‘Glorious Nature’ Book of the Year
Goshawk Summer by James Aldred (2021)
tl;dr: A cameraman sits in a tree during a pandemic.
As good with words as he is with film, James Aldred artfully captures the vulnerability of goshawks chicks as they hatch and fledge — but it’s the territorial vigilance of their fearsome mother that comes through most powerfully.
As a reader, I feel like I’m being watched: one false move and she would show no mercy tearing me to shreds, talons ripping viciously through the pages.
Over the course of about six hours, I seem to have jumped the scales from a lean 66kg to a vaguely bloated 71kg. And I’ve stayed there all year. Weird.
I have no explanation except my body suddenly realising that it’s middle aged, or perhaps the couple of months I spent weightlifting.
Who knows? Who, really, cares?
24. My ‘Understanding Israel’ Book of the Year
A Day In The Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall (2024)
tl;dr: The humanity and tragedy of daily life in an open prison.
It’s been one hell of a year. There are so many stories we could tell. This list has hinted at one human’s story of the year, but it doesn’t tell the quadzillionth of it.
Whereever you look, humanity and tragedy abound. Through one angle you see this; tilt the mirror and you see the other.
Perhaps we’re all playing our part in the Poincaré Recurrence Theorem. Perhaps it’s time to go back to the 86 Stories of Progress from 2024. 😜
Right — we’re done here. I’m off to the Forest treetops. Have a wonderful evening and I wish you wild blessings for the year ahead.
FINALLY: Thank You 💚
Huge thanks to all the paying subscribers who helped make this year possible. You know who you are. Thank you. 💚
If you enjoyed this story, then go ahead and tell me. It’s the only way I’ll know. You can tap the heart button, write a comment, share the newsletter with friends, or simply reply to this email.
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And a warm welcome from the inside of a named weather system that I didn’t know was coming when I left my house yesterday afternoon.
Despite absorbing an entire storm cloud’s worth of rain with my inappropriate evening wear, I only got physically spun round once on my cycle home.
But cycling home from where, I hear you ask?
Only from the best night of adventure storytelling on the whole PLANET.
The P.A.S.T adventure series spotlights the amateur. The person who already won by getting to the starting line. The person who got out of the rut and went on an adventure. The person who had 9 hours without the kids so went to the forest for a camp out before being back for the school run in the morning.
We’re not doing anything the best, or for the first time. We’re not the fastest and we’re not being sponsored. There’s no medal at the end. We’re powered by optimism a curious spirit and we’re just f*****g doing it.
In this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.
Sometimes I get a bit damp, but it’s always worth it.
🐈 Phone
In my continuing pursuit of digital nirvana, I bought a CAT phone. The 🐈 phone is a fully featured Android smartphone squashed into an almost unusable little flip box.
Technically, it can do all of the things that modern social gravity demands — I can even scan my girlfriend’s Nectar card on the tiny 2.8” screen — but bloody hell I don’t want to have to use the damn thing unless I really have to.
And that is exactly why I bought it: to make the designed for addiction smartphone as unappealing as possible, and so shift my brain away from shiny distraction and toward earthy connection.
Yes, that is a touch screen. No, my fingers are not that small. Yes, it is a massive pain in the bum to type messages.
Reader: the 🐈 is an absolute joy. But has it made any impression on my screen time?
More importantly, why should anyone care anyway?
In short: society is a bit fucked and anything we can do to get off our screens and into the sunshine (if applicable) can only be a good thing.
And, for that, I desperately need your help.
But more on that later.
A Whole Lot of Nothing?
I’ve only been using the 🐈 as my main phone for the past 11 days and, as you’ll see, my definition of ‘main phone’ is debatable, but without any more ratting about, a graph:
Time spent on various devices per day. The blue is my average smartphone use in the six weeks prior to getting the 🐈 The green is my total average phone use in the last 11 days (i.e. both smartphone and 🐈)
As you can see, the data is mixed.
(FYI 1: The total time on this chart excludes use of Google Maps, which I only use as a GPS for driving and thus distorts phone usage significantly.)
(FYI 2: My recent smartphone use is broadly in line with historical data collected since 2021, which varies between 1.5 and 2 hours per day. However, this includes use of Google Maps.)
On the one hand, time spent on my ‘main’ 🐈 phone has crashed through the floor, to barely 20 minutes per day. Not only that, but time spent on my smartphone has also dropped significantly.
However, the total time spent on both devices combined is pretty much the same as before. As the kids say: LOL.
But wait — there’s devil in the detail and goblins in the graph.
Three Whole Days?!
The decrease from 23 minutes per day on Whatsapp to 19 minutes per day is statistically significant. As is the reduction from 15 minutes per day on my Firefox Focus browser to only 8 minutes per day across both devices.
That 12 minute difference might not sound like much, but it’s something — nearly an hour and a half per week. Sustained over a year, that’s three whole days of non-stop, no-sleep phone use that I’m getting back.
But is there any evidence at all that I can sustain (or even increase) this time saving over the course of a year? That’s the question and we can find clues in the data.
Unlocking Behaviour Change?
When it comes to how often I unlock and then how I use my phones, the data is even more topsy-turvy.
On the one hand, since getting the 🐈, I’ve unlocked my smartphone more than I usually would. Huh?!
But, significantly, I’ve opened my most time-sucky distractor apps, Whatsapp and Firefox, less often. From 46 launches per day to only 33. Big wow and, again, as the kids say: LOL.
Nevertheless, the reductions are significant and allow me to hypothesise what’s going on and where I might end up with this experiment.
What’s Going On?
Despite all the murkiness, I think the data is promising. How dare I draw that conclusion? Well, I hypothesise two future directions:
1. I’m still in transition and my future phone use will trend 📉
This transitional phase may partly explain why I unlocked my smartphone more often in the past 11 days: I was figuring out which apps I need on which device.
My intention is to steadily reduce the number of apps that I use on my smartphone and increase the number that I only use on the 🐈 and on my computer.
As my confidence in and reliance on the 🐈 grows, I anticipate using my smartphone less and less. We’ll see.
2. Some apps I’ll use MORE on the 🐈 — and that’s a GOOD thing
The most used app on my 🐈 over the past 11 days is, believe it or not, the Phone app. You know, the one that makes phone calls to other humans?
In the two weeks before this experiment began, the Phone app was my fourteenth most used app.
If using the 🐈 means I make more phone calls and connect more deeply and more frequently with other humans, then that’s a GOOD thing in my book. If that’s part of my future direction of travel, then I’m in.
Data is all well and good, but you could say pretty narcissistic, so…
The bad news is that, science being science, it’s almost impossible to boil down to a palatably simple message. To summarise the evidence in a reasonably scientific manner on only one research question, you need a 397-page collaborative Google Doc.
Who the heck is reading that?
This is how Big Tech can get away with the kind of disingenuous fudging so familiar from Big Oil’s response to climate change or Big Tobacco’s response to cancer research.
Because the message from Big Tech is simple. To paraphrase:
Gosh, well. All we can say is that the evidence isn’t clear one way or another. Maybe bad things can happen, but that’s down to how you use your smartphone. It’s not really our fault. We’re doing what we can. In the meantime, isn’t this new feature cool?! 🙃
Reading a blog post or listening to a podcast will probably not convince you to ditch your phone when there is so much social gravity going the other way. I already know this newsletter story won’t work.
Which is why I can only rely on…
2. Vibes
I’d really like everyone to notice how they feel, body and mind, when they do different things.
How does it feel when you scroll the internet on your phone?
How does it feel when you go for a walk on the beach?
How does it feel when you text a friend for half an hour?
How does it feel when you see a friend in person for half an hour?
How does it feel when you talk to a stranger on the bus?
Humans are really bad at ‘affective forecasting’, estimating how we will feel about doing different activities in the future. But, if we take a second to notice, we are accurate at judging how we do feel during (or just after) the activity.
This backfires horribly. We think we will feel good about scrolling the internet — It’ll be relaxing! It’ll be educational! It’ll be entertaining!
We think we willnot feel good about talking to a stranger on the bus — It’ll be scary! They’ll think I’m crazy! It’ll annoy them!
And we’re usually wrong on all counts. But we’ll never know, we’ll never change, unless we notice. Unless we actually pick up on our vibe.
I Need You Right Now
There’s not much point in me getting my 🐈 if no one else is going the same way.
Yes, I’ll reclaim parts of my brain that I didn’t have before and, yes, I’ll have a bit more time to connect with the real world.
But that could actually be quite a lonely place if everyone else is sucked in their phones.
⚠Confession⚠
I’m actually pretty boring compared to the whole of the internet and your entire Whatsapp contacts list. I don’t blame you for scrolling Instagram instead of striking up a conversation with a random bald man.
It’s intimidating. How can I compete? So maybe I stay closed off and shut down too.
That’s why this email is a very personal ask. I need you to take action as much as you might need me to. We both need each other to put down our phones and open up.
Thank you for reading. 💚
We need each other. More than ever. As new technologies crush and replace everything that’s real and intimate, we should protect our relationships as much as possible.
We estimate the returns to IRS audits of taxpayers across the income distribution. We find an additional 1 spent auditing taxpayers above the 90th income percentile yields more than 12 in revenue.
This isn’t eat the rich; this isn’t even tax the rich. A simple audit will do.
Thanks DRL (👋) for sharing.
2. Keep an Idiot Diary
Every organisation should have an ‘Our Mistakes’ page on their website. Credit to Give Well for actually doing it.
Carnegie’s “D.F.T” folder contained records of the times he stuck his foot in his mouth, committed a faux pas, made someone feel awkward, gave into laziness, arrived somewhere late, bungled a conversation, procrastinated, lost his temper or patience, and so on.
One of its entries said: “Wasted ten minutes in an unnecessary harangue with the phone company about their shortcomings.”
And credit to Dan Schreiber, comedian and host of podcast No Such Thing As A Fish, who keeps what he calls — poetically — his ‘Idiot Diary’.
Aside: It took me over half an hour to research and reference this tiny big thing. I’m not sure whether that should be the first entry in my idiot diary.
3. Bumblebee population increases 116 times over in ‘remarkable’ Scotland rewilding project
Huge thanks to all the paying subscribers who helped make this story possible. You know who you are. Thank you. 💚
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Frankly, I’d be amazed if you do, but, last weekend, standing on the storm-whipped asphalt of Warwick Services, my membership of TSSoLH paid off, big time:
Urged on by discerning shed-punk technologist , I’ve been lusting after a Tilley hat for half a decade, yet always shied away from the premium price tag (£60 in the current sales).
But here I am at Warwick Services in a rainstorm, an abandoned Tilley hat fallen at my feet.
Stooped drivers scurry across the service station forecourt and rain rattles the tinny roof of my car. I scan the horizon for anyone who looks like they might have recently lost a hat.
Pretty much all of us, then. Forty mile an hour winds will do that to headgear.
The Tilley was squashed down with storm water and smelt of boiled mushrooms. It was so hydrated that I figured the owner had been and gone and lost the hat an hour ago or more.
They were probably six junctions away by now, their takeaway coffee long since finished or gone cold. So I chucked my new acquisition on the backseat and drove off as fast as I could.
Not only that, but it’s guaranteed for life and boasts a SECRET POCKET.
Knowing how beloved these hats are to their owners, I guiltily asked Documentally whether the law of finders keepers even applies to Tilley hats.
Documentally wrote back immediately: ‘When my Land Rover was stolen with my Tilley inside, I only wanted the hat back.’
So consider this newsletter an appeal for any information that may lead to the safe reunion of a June 2018 edition Tilley T3 with its erstwhile owner (noggin size 7 1/2), who passed through Warwick Services on the penultimate Saturday of October 2024.
Your reward will be your conscience. Until such time as justice is served, I promise to wear with care and maybe write a few more stories in this prodigal hat’s history.
In this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.
Sometimes I find dirty old hats.
Bump into ideas that’ll change your life
The view from, er, the M6 Services at Killington
Last week, I spent two days in conclave with the most adventurous minds in the country, at the annual conference they most suitably call Adventure Mind.
We gathered at Bendrigg Trust on the edge of Lakeland to share everything we could about ‘Accessible Adventures’ — the importance of adventure in supporting the mental health of those who face the most significant barriers to accessing challenges in the outdoors.
I can’t overstate the importance of conferences like Adventure Mind: the opportunity to be in the same room as a hundred other professionals for two whole days, massively increasing the chances of bumping into an idea or a human that will change your life.
Last year at Adventure Mind I met the Head of Programmes for British Exploring Society and chatted to a few people who were raving about the EQE Outdoors course in Wilderness Therapeutic Approaches.
Fast forward to this year and I’m at Adventure Mind representing British Exploring Society, having completed my second week of training as a wilderness therapeutic practitioner…
If you get the chance, go.
I won’t bore you with a full list of all the wonderful humans I met this year, but here’s a selection of titbits that’ll hopefully be interesting to most:
1. Opening up the National Trust
The National Trust are Britain’s third largest landowner.
I was heartened to hear that, in January, the National Trust are publishing a new strategy: End Unequal Access.
As part of this new strategy, there will in future be greater openness to working with other organisations to provide activities and access to adventure in the outdoors.
Get in touch with your local National Trust and let’s get collaborating.
Examining multi-day adventures, Mutz & Müller (2016) focused on adolescent wellbeing and mental health. In one example, 12 x 14-year olds participated in a 9-day hike across the alps. Four days after completing the hike, child-reported worry and their sense of demands on them had decreased. There was also a large increase in mindfulness as well as wellbeing (underpinned by both happiness and life satisfaction).
3. Free adventure kit for people with low income
Kitsquad are ‘the only UK-based scheme that provides donated adventure gear to low-income individuals’. Respect.
CAT Phone 🐈
In my continuing pursuit of digital nirvana, I bought a CAT phone. It’s an absolute joy. But has it made any impression on my screen time? Full review to come…
Three Tiny Big Things
1. Broken zip? 13-second fix
After spending a couple of days exchanging dead-end emails with a premium outdoor brand known for its sustainability, I watched the first 13 seconds of this video and fixed the broken zip on my down jacket myself.
2. Do you ever get the feeling you’re being watched?
Bristling with spikes to deter pigeons, seven cameras surveil platforms 9-12 at Victoria Station.
Huge thanks to all the paying subscribers who helped make this story possible. You know who you are. Thank you. 💚
If you enjoyed this one, then go ahead and tell me. It’s the only way I’ll know. You can tap the heart button, write a comment, share the newsletter with friends, or simply reply to this email.
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I know that we’ve only had the concept of the ‘weekend’ for less than two centuries and I know that Han Dynasty China had one day off every five days for ‘washing one’s hair’ and I know that Romans only had one day off every nine days and I know that the French Revolutionary Calendar only allowed one day off every ten days, so I know that two-day weekends are great, but I can’t help wondering whether three-day weekends would be even better. (And could cut carbon emissions by 30 percent.)
In this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.
Sometimes I love weekends too much.
Do It While You Can
How would you like to feel, in your mind, in your body, at the moment of death?
This week, as advised by Geshe Tenzin Namdak, I’ve been using the dark minutes before sleep as a rehearsal.
Sleep as death; dream state as transcendence; waking as rebirth. I’ve found it puts any pettyfogging worries to rest and quiets the mind. Sleep comes more easily to those who surrender.
It’s also brought me closer to memories of my nan: the only person whose deathbed I’ve sat beside. Memories of life and how to live.
This week’s story is an extract from Life to the Lees, a book I wrote about cycling around Britain in the weeks following my nan’s death. Enjoy.
~
It’s St George’s Day.
Tomorrow is nan’s ninety-sixth birthday, so I buy her a present: a small potted plant with little yellow flowers. She likes plants and their flowers; her Epping rose bushes came a close second in her affections to her children and her grandchildren.
The nursing home is the kind of red brick country house that wouldn’t look out of place on the set of an ITV murder mystery, with a long gravel drive that crunches under your wheels.
I ring the doorbell, which is opened by a nurse in a blue smock. I sign the visitor’s book and breathe in the smell of carpets and disinfectant, optimistically masked by a bouquet of synthetic sprayed aromas. I walk straight down the hallway, through the sitting room, past the fish tank and the kitchen, to nan’s room. The door’s wide open.
‘Hello nan!’
She looks up, eyes searching for something she might recognise. ‘Who’s this?’ Her lips chew over each other, suspiciously.
I take a couple of steps into the room. ‘It’s David, your grandson.’
Then her eyes catch up and her face lights up. She takes my hand in hers, as I sit down on the stool by her side. Her palms are soft, with waves of wrinkles rolling over the gentle knuckles. So soft, worn down, eroded by the years, by countless caresses and gentle gestures.
‘I brought you a present,’ I say and give her the plant. She takes it onto her woollen skirt and inspects it closely. She’s been wearing those skirts for as long as I’ve known her and that’s almost thirty years. She probably made them herself.
‘That’s lovely. Thank you.’ She looks confused still, as if wondering why anyone would be bringing her a present, but is too polite to ask.
‘It’s your birthday tomorrow, isn’t it?’ I say.
She looks up at me, mildly shocked. ‘Is it?’
‘Yep. Today’s St George’s Day.’
‘Is it now.’ Her eyes wander off into the middle distance. Surely she remembers who St George is?
‘Yep. I couldn’t find a dragon, though.’
The eyes snap back and she smiles. ‘Well, I never did,’ she says. ‘Doesn’t time fly?’ She struggles forward to tickle the ears of an enormous soft toy sheepdog that lies at her feet. ‘Good boy! Who’s a good boy?’
‘Memory’s a strange thing, isn’t it?’
She leans back up from the dog. ‘I have so many that it’s hard to know what is real and what is memory sometimes.’
‘What’s the earliest thing you remember?’ Whenever I go to see nan, I always want to hear something new from the vaults of her memory, from the silo of almost a hundred years.
When you’re young, you believe that every day will bring new life and new memories, but I don’t think nan’s made a single new memory for months, if not years. She’s full up.
‘Gosh. The first thing I remember is my father… I think it was my father, he was… He was…’ She frowns. ‘I can’t remember now. Maybe he was getting ready for the next day?’ She turns to me, as if I’ve got the answers. ‘I think it was a Sunday and he was getting ready for work on Monday.’ She smiles, momentarily defeated. ‘He was doing something, anyway.’
‘Anything else you remember?’
She’s looking straight ahead now. She points a weak finger at a print on the wall opposite. ‘You see that picture?’
It’s a scene of a road curling through a wood. It used to hang on the wall of her living room in Epping and sparks strange familiar memories of childhood in me; the strange memories that accompany otherwise meaningless objects.
‘I remember the day I bought that.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘We’d been to that exact spot, to have a picnic. I must have been in my early twenties, I should have thought. It was before the war, anyway. With my girlfriends, we cycled there together.’
‘Nice.’
‘It was a lovely day. A very happy day. We had a lot of fun in those days.’ She checks with me; I smile. ‘Then, on our way home, in the town, I saw that picture in the window of a shop and I had to buy it.’
‘Of course!’
‘It’s been with me ever since.’
She’s told me this story five or six times in the last few weeks. It’s totally improbable, of course, totally fabricated from the torn shreds of her memory, but it’s a beautiful fabric. One of the blue-smock nurses bustles into the room.
‘Morning Win,’ she says, in her loud-and-clear voice for elderly people. ‘Have you drunk your tea?’ She doesn’t wait for an answer and peers into the cup. It’s full. And cold. ‘Oh Win.’ The nurse smiles at me. ‘She’s always asking for tea and then you forget about it, don’t you, Win?’
Nan’s eyebrows wrinkle together. ‘What’s that?’
‘You’ve forgotten your tea, haven’t you, Win?’
‘Have I?’ She reaches a hand for the cup, but the nurse whisks it away onto her tray.
‘I’ll get you a fresh cup, shall I?’ The nurse smiles vigorously again. ‘I’ll leave you in peace with your grandson now, Win.’ And she whirls out of the room.
Nan leans over to me. ‘I don’t know what that was about,’ she says, conspiratorially.
I’m not expecting what happens next. I thought I was just making small talk, but nan has other ideas.
She squeezes my hands between hers and makes sure that her eyes are looking directly into mine and then she says, ‘Do it while you can. You’re still young; do it while you can.’
I walk out of the nursing home into the dazing sunshine. My eyes hear the words again: Do it while you can.
Nan sits alone in her armchair all day, getting tea, forgetting tea, unable to remember her own birthday. But still she says: Do it while you can. Make the memories, she says, even if in time they are lost.
It’s a potent message of optimism and it’s the last time I speak to the human being she was.
~
p.s.: ‘Life to the lees’ is a quotation from Ulysses by Alfred Tennyson:
… I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone, on shore…
p.p.s.: If you’d like to read more about my nan (and/or cycling around Britain), you can buy Life to the Lees for less than a tenner.
Following my missive on death meditations, thanks to Dan at for sharing this sung prayer. Beautiful.
2. Have You Heard Of COF-999?
A typical large tree can suck as much as 40 kilograms of carbon dioxide out of the air over the course of a year. Now scientists at UC Berkeley say they can do the same job with less than half a pound of a fluffy yellow powder.
Incidentally, the study’s senior author, Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, is a man called Omar Yaghi, who arrived in the US aged 15 with little English, the son of Palestinian refugees.
As the good people at Fix The News like to say, ‘The real immigration crisis? Not enough immigrants.’
Huge thanks to all the paying subscribers who helped make this story possible. You know who you are. Thank you. 💚
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Footage was shot by Young Explorers on location in Georgia, Iceland and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. The voice over narration is made up of (unscripted) voice notes left by Young Explorers after they got home.
In this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.
Autumn is a time of dying. Or so it seems. Halloween and all that.
A vivacious tree, losing verdancy with the breakdown of chlorophyll, preparing for the suspension of life, hibernation, winter.
But the reds, oranges and yellows of autumn are not dying colours; they’re not the last sparks of a fire that burns green; these carotenoids are the true colours, heart colours, which lie beneath the summer camouflage of chlorophyll.
In autumn, the Golden Ash removes its mask and returns to the blazing yellow of its youngest shoots, its youth.
Similarly, the inexorable change of season might help us remove our masks.
In our summer days, we might feel compelled to don masks, make ourselves most productive, converting energy into energy, put down roots, hold tight, compete.
But seasons turn and, as they do, perhaps we realise that we can’t take our worldly masks where we are going, nor our signs and symbols of success.
For those who follow the Golden Ash, this is a time to return to the blazing glory of our youth; return to who we were, in our budding potential.
As Wind Swirls Through Fallen Leaves, think not of tragedy, but of unmasking and rebirth.
During the course of the day, I learned three meditations on death. Each meditation had three phases, only varying in the third:
Sit with your spine straight, your head slightly lowered and with your eyes closed softly. Pay attention to your breath for a minute or so.
Practice concentration by counting breaths. Count ‘one’ on your first in-breath, ‘two’ on your first out-breath, ‘three’ on your second in-breath, ‘four’ on your second out-breath, and so on up to ‘ten’. When you reach ‘ten’, return to ‘one’ and repeat for a few minutes.
Practice analytical meditation for five to ten minutes:
In the first meditation, analyse the proposition that your death is certain and inevitable. Death is a condition of birth. The purpose of this first meditation is to accept that you shall die, and to give you motivation to use this life well.
In the second meditation, analyse the proposition that your time of death is uncertain. The purpose of this second meditation is to accept that you (and any being) may die at any moment, and to give you the strength to start now.
In the third meditation, analyse the proposition that no possessions, no prestige and no persons have any relevance to you at the moment of death. The only thing that is truly beneficial at the time of death is your state of mind. The purpose of this third meditation is to loosen your bonds of attachment to corporeal things, and to inspire you to cultivate your state of mind.
Death is coming. At any moment.
Unmask.
__
*I guess ‘thoughtshop’ is the thinking counterpart to ‘workshop’.
Three Tiny Big Things
1. 40th Percentile Narcissist 👋
I cordially invite you to take the Short Dark Triad (SD-3), which measures the three ‘socially aversive’ traits of machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy.
Machiavellianism is the personality trait of being unprincipled and manipulative, cynical and an acceptance of ‘by whatever means necessary’.
Narcissism is the personality trait of vanity, self-superiority, entitlement, dominance, and a craving admiration and submission.
Psychopathy is the personality trait of being low-empathy and high impulsivity. It is a persistent pattern of deviant behavior and a disregard for others.
As doubtful as I am about the test’s validity in a self-administered online quiz format, I’m totally onboard with the results — I am definitely more narcissist than Machiavellian or psychopath!
2. 7% of All Humans Ever Are Still Alive Today 🙋♂️
If you want to go really deep on what happens on a British Exploring Society expedition, then here is a video made by one of the Young Explorers on the Pinnacle Wild Leadership programme in Svaneti, Georgia.
Thank You
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In this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.
Sometimes I get stuff for free.
Everything Is Free*
Or: Money Is Only One Way Of Doing Things
Capitalism creates abundance.
On shelves, forecourts and websites around the world there is an overwhelming excess of all kinds of goods — whether you’re after bananas, baskets, bricks or Beanie Babies, we could (if you’re that way inclined) bury you mile-deep in product.
All of these products are created for sale and you can buy them with money.
But, because of the abundant — nay, excessive production, you can also acquire anything and everything for free. 🤑
There are two ways of getting everything you want for zero money:
After the original buyer has finished with the thing (ask nicely, don’t snatch!)
Before the thing ever gets sold. (And a certain amount of everything, except rare art and limited edition vinyl, never gets sold. It’s just out there, waiting for you.)
If you think about it, money is one way of solving two problems:
Labour.
Distribution.
1. Labour
It was pointed out to me the other day that I could easily and significantly more cheaply make my own Mexican lentil lunches at home and bring them into work with me.
But instead I pay money to a company called Merchant for them to make my lunch in a factory for me and shovel it into a microwaveable packet. I pay money for Merchant to do the labour.
I think we’re all used to this idea — after all, that’s why most of us dedicate so many hours a day to somebody else’s work goals.
It’s simple: that somebody else pays us money. And then we use that money to pay somebody else to solve our labour issues.
But I find fewer people see that we often use money to solve a distribution problem.
2. Distribution
I know that, somewhere, someone is getting all the Merchant microwaveable lunches they could ever imagine FOR FREE — while muggins over here is paying £1.50 for the privilege. (Never ever pay full price for Merchants; just wait.)
Admittedly, that someone is probably an employee of Merchants. But the principle remains: more Merchants are produced than are sold and eaten. The remainder is either destroyed (😱) or given away for free.
I’m currently midway through building a shoe rack for the hallway. We couldn’t find anything to matched up to our specifications, so I thought — ‘I’ll make one!’
I bought a lovely slab of oak from a sawmill and was on the cusp of a day trip to B&Q for the legs and other shelves when I found myself in Fulham, by the river.
Washed up on the shoreline was lorry-sized pile of flotsam and jetsam — hundreds of pieces of timber that would be perfect for legs and other shelves and much more besides — if I could only squeeze them all into my hatchback Corolla.
Some of the lovely wood I’m looking forward to butchering
I crossed B&Q off my to do list. I had found one of the many places on this great green Earth where timber is free: in this case, the waste of an overproductive economic system.
Money is only one way of doing things.
And it’s not even our most common way of doing things.
Money Is A Wedge (or can be)
For Mark Boyle, who lived without money for four years, money is a wedge that separates us from the consequences of our actions.
On his four years living without money, Mark said:
I experienced how connected and interdependent I was on the people and natural world around me. More than anything else, I discovered that my security no longer lay in my bank account, but in the strength of my relationships with the people, plants and animals around me.
There’s one area where we all live without asking for or expecting the bill: with those we love.
Indeed, we’d be utterly outraged if anyone tried to give us cash in exchange for the dozens of acts of loving kindness that we perform for our friends and family every day.
But any parental attempt to recoup the bill from their children would be monstrous.
The fact is that most of life is made up of spider’s web networks of cashless exchange, favours and gifts.
Yes, I spend money pretty much every day, but I am reliant on friends, family and neighbours for almost every single moment — certainly all the most precious.
Debt ≠ Obligation
In his critically acclaimed book,Debt: The First 5,000 Years, anthropologist David Graeber explains the difference between a debt and an obligation.
Obligation is what I feel towards another human being after they:
invite me to dinner
lend me a cup of sugar
look after my (hypothetical) dog for the weekend.
Debt is what I feel towards:
the bank for my loan-funded education
work after getting my payslip (but before doing the work)
Shylock after losing his money in an ill-fated mercantile venture.
In short: obligations bond human beings; debts divide us.
As Graeber writes:
The difference between a debt and an obligation is that a debt can be precisely quantified. This requires money.
It follows that, if we remove money from a transaction, it becomes not a debt to be paid, but rather an obligation:
an unspecific generosity,
of similar but crucially not identical value,
to be performed not immediately, but at some appropriate moment in the future, according to the unique needs of the recipient and resources of the obliged.
In this way, exchange by exchange, we could move from a waste economy of division to a gift economy of connection.
We could move to a society where we treat each other more like family by exchanging gifts, sharing food and doing favours for the love, not the lucre.
Gifts In An Open Ecosystem
Or perhaps we can think wider, deeper — the way we exchange gifts within an open ecosystem.
There is no price paid by the birds for the berries. Instead there are mutualisms: through sharing, both grow stronger.
My rosehip syrup stands brewing on the living room table, vitamin medicine for the winter. Free. (Except, admittedly, the sugar.)
Yes, I could have gone to Boots and bought Beechams — but then I wouldn’t have learned anything about the finding, gathering, preparing and processing of rosehips.
My hour of foraging in Crystal Palace Park brings me closer to where I live, in a way that seems unlikely had I picked up a cold and flu remedy from the supermarket shelves.
Money really is only one way of doing things.
(And not a very satisfactory one, all in all.)
—
I’ve written about this sort of thing before and this article steals huge swathes develops the ideas of two articles in particular: Money Is Not Generosity and We All Live Moneyless.
Each revolution designed to make travel more accessible and convenient seems, in time, to exact lamentable collateral costs.
[…]
Travel is an expression of democratic freedom and the economic lifeblood for millions; tourism is an instrument of capitalist expropriation, an engine of inequality.
[…]
For somewhere to matter, it had to be beheld, Yeoman insisted. “If you want people to genuinely care about a place, they need to make the physical effort to go there,” he said. Would anyone bother to repaint the Eiffel Tower, or would it be left to rust?
2. ‘Mother Earth is not asking us to save her. She is demanding that we respect her.’
A stark warning from Nemonte Nenquimo, the co-founder of Amazon Frontlines. Pairs optimistically with Jane Goodall:
We have this expression ‘think globally, act locally’, but it’s the wrong way around.
If you think locally, you see that you can make a difference and you want to do more.
And then you realise that around the globe there are other people acting, who are doing their little bit — and millions of little bits add up to big change.
In working with students at Colorado Outward Bound on land sections of outward bound courses, I noticed that hikers with smaller frames were often able to carry as much weight as hikers with larger frames who were otherwise of similar fitness.
The heavier you are, the less you can carry because strength does not increase in line with weight and heavier people have to carry, er, themselves too. Image
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Whatever the mundane backdrop to these thoughts — bath, bed or bicycle — they are always profound:
If your shirt isn’t tucked into your trousers, then are your trousers tucked into your shirt?
An hourglass has more moving parts than the International Space Station.1
A vampire walrus would look a lot like a normal walrus.
(I didn’t say they were significant.)
Anyway. Back to my bike thought, which actually started as:
I want to be cool.
Immediately a second voice (still in my head) piped up:
It’s not okay to want to be cool. That implies extrinsic motivation — desperately striving to seem ‘cool’ in the eyes of others.
Instead of shutting up and concentrating on the road ahead, the first voice (unusually for me) fought back:
What’s wrong with wanting to be cool in the eyes of others — if it’s what I also think is cool? There’s nothing wrong with enjoying social approval, so long as it’s in good faith.
The second voice was so surprised that it fell silent. So the first voice carried on:
It’s okay to want to be cool, if you know what cool is — for you.
And that highly profound cycle thought led directly to this morning: wandering around Crystal Palace Park with a custom map I’d made, showing the location and species of every single one of the park’s 2,798 mature trees.
Mapmaking credits: Tom Chance, Bromley Borough Council and ChatGPT
Because my definition of ‘cool’ includes both:
Using spreadsheet data to make useful maps;
AND
Going out on a wet Sunday to forage for wild edibles and fatwood.
On my wanderings, I found no fewer than four dog roses, dotted around the margins of the park, and each weighed down with rosehips.
I collected no more than a handful from each tree, stuffed my pockets, and brought them home to process into raw rosehip syrup.
After pricking them with a fork, I stuffed the rosehips into an air-tight jar filled with sugar.
Over the course of the next few weeks (or months), sunlight and sugar will draw the liquid from the rosehips and (hopefully) give me a gloopy syrup.
BUT WHY, DAVE? WHY?
Because raw rosehips are ridiculously high in vitamin C: more than five times the puny orange, but also multiples more than lemons, limes, grapefruit, guava, potatoes, papaya, kiwi and kale.
In fact, rosehips contain more vitamin C than any other fruit or vegetable except acerola cherries and kakadu plums — and (let’s be honest) what the fuck are those?
Rosehips are nature’s own remedy for winter colds. They grow all around us: in our parks, in our gardens, in our hedgerows, ripe for the picking, completely free of charge.
So, yeah, I think that’s pretty cool.
Brewing nature’s cold remedy 🤞
Three Tiny Big Things
1. ‘Tax the rich’ doesn’t mean what you think
By 2023, the richest 50 families in the UK held more wealth than half of the UK population.
A 2021 study … found each one-point increase in the Gini income inequality measure increased support for far-right parties by one percentage point, with people more likely to support the far right if they have “economic insecurities, distrust elites, are socially disintegrated, and hold national identities.”
Wealth inequality 👉 Rise of far right 👉 More inequality
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There are approximately 3.7 million grains of sand in a bog standard hourglass. Beat that, ISS! (I originally used the Large Hadron Collider as my comparison, until ChatGPT gently pointed out that the LHC involves the movement of trillions of protons.)
As this was an assessment under pressure, I was given a strict time limit: twenty minutes.
It took me less than five.
Kinda.
I actually got that fire going during my second shot at assessment that afternoon.
I spent the whole of my first twenty minutes going around in circles: a spark to catch tinder, tinder to catch kindling, kindling to catch — nada.
One moment I had flames licking a foot high and was all ready to celebrate; seconds later there was nothing but cold ash on my stump hearth.
Try as a I might, five times round, I could never make the next step. My fuel simply wouldn’t light. My fire wouldn’t burn bright.
Twenty minutes up.
Despite an arm around the shoulder — ‘It happens. All of us struggle sometimes’ — I felt downcast by my failure. Especially when everyone else’s fires seemed to ignite in effortless and spontaneous combustion.
I trudged back to my friends (A Tribe Called West) and they brightened me up: ‘Have another go, we can film you.’
So another go I had.
The lesson from round one was simple: preparation.
Second time around, I used a fist-sized ball of resinous fatwood as tinder. I prepared a whole bowlful of hazel shavings and a thick bundle of cinder-dry bracken stems for kindling. Lolly-pop splinters of hazel were my starter fuel.
Second time around, with the right preparation, my spark caught, fire flames high, a steady burn I could leave untended. All in less than five minutes.
As you might have noticed, this is more than a fire. This is a metaphor.
Free Money Day is a social experiment that is meant to explore people’s attachment to money and remind people that it must freely circulate in a successful economy.
I can’t believe you actually get white hot firework sparks off the innards of a dead branch.
2. One Thing I Knew, One Thing I Didn’t: Both Blow My Mind
Horse’s Hoof fungus, often found on Birch, takes an ember real nice.
Tbf, I only learned this on Thursday. Still: proud.
Fire pistons are an ancient Malay device that suddenly compress air to generate temperatures of 260 degrees and they are freaking awesome.
See them both in action here:
3. And This Is Just Silly
A man making fire from a few reedy twigs of Dogbane and a couple of flat rocks. In the comments, he says that Stinging Nettle works even better.
Shocking audio — mute if you’re sensitive.
Thank You
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In this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.
Sometimes I feed the birds.
The Fall of the House Sparrow
Last Saturday, we bought a bird feeder.
I am now obsessed.
They’ve got through about three whole feeders’ worth in five days, with the rate of dispatch accelerating as more of the neighbourhood catches wind of the new buffet in town.
So far, I’ve seen one Pigeon, one Robin and possibly a Blackcap — but I don’t really know what I’m talking about, since the bulk of my bird ID skills come directly from the images printed on Christmas cards.
The first to arrive at our hanging feast were House Sparrows, who had a short commute from their favourite Rowan (?) tree.
Apparently, Crystal Palace was once famous for its sparrows. There’s even a pub named after their most charismatic predator: The Sparrowhawk.
(Side note: New entries to the Red List in 2021 included Greenfinch, Swift and House Martin, but there was better news for rising populations of White-tailed Eagle, Song Thrush and Kingfisher.)
Nobody fully understands why Sparrow numbers have fallen so sharply — but it’s probably something to do with humans. (When is it not?)
House Sparrows have always had a close relationship to humans — indeed, bar isolated cases, they simply won’t breed away from us. They earn their bread and butter by pecking at the fringes of our carelessness, ill-hygeine and miscellaneous littering.
For example, Sparrow numbers took a tumble in the early twentieth century with the disappearance of horse-drawn carts and the general cleaning up of our streets. Nothing screams biodiversity like a big horse poo in the middle of the road.
But the reasons behind the vertiginous House Sparrow decline since the 1970s are more fiddly to pin down.
Perhaps it’s the intensification of agriculture and ‘tidying up’ of farms. Perhaps it’s breeding performance (come on, guys!) Perhaps it’s improved sanitation and rubbish collection. Perhaps it’s the electromagnetic pollution of our mobile phone networks (finally — a 5G conspiracy supported by actual science).
I suspect Our Clever Little House Sparrows (as they’re now known) have figured out a way of dumping a whole batch of seed from the feeder onto the neighbour’s roof below.
Often, there is more seed outside the feeder than inside.
That way, rather than sharing the feeder, two at a time, the whole flock (and one pigeon) can have breakfast together. And swap parasites.
Feeding birds are more likely to survive winter, they’re more likely to be healthy and they’re more likely to have loads of chicks when spring comes around.
But still: parasites.
The solution, as we all know by rote, is STOP THE SPREAD. Unfortunately, Sparrows have a reading age of nil, so I don’t hold out much hope for my new HANDS, FACE, SPACE posters, but I can start following the Garden Wildlife Health trichomonosis prevention guidelines.
In short:
Clean feeders regularly
Don’t let food, food waste or bird droppings accumulate (i.e. below the feeder)
Only fill feeders with enough food for 24-48 hours (and chuck stale leftovers away before refilling)
Don’t use table or ground feeders
Offer different food types so birds with different diets don’t feed together
Moderate food provision if you’re getting high density of congregation, especially of finches
Three Tiny Big Things
1. Scott Galloway: How the US is Destroying Young People’s Future
This video is what the word ‘coruscating’ was invented for:
Animated and brilliantly clever or witty
Marked by harshly abusive criticism
Having brief brilliant points or flashes of light
If anyone knows of any such polemic regarding the UK equivalent, I’d be interested.
2. Create a Sparrow Street
The RSPB wants you to give House Sparrows somewhere to raise their chicks.
3. What Our Obsession with Washing-up Bowls Says About the UK
Many facets of British life raise eyebrows abroad … but few provoke the same panic and despair as the discovery that the nation washes its dishes in a plastic tub.
😂😘
Thank You
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In this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.
Today’s story has a soundtrack. When you’re ready, hit play and scroll:
Sometimes I get stung.
A Flaming Match Head
Globally, there are over 20,000 different species of bee and more than 250 of those are found in the UK.
But, after half an hour of clumsy research, I think this a European Honey Bee, Apis mellifera, the domesticated species that produces Pooh Bear’s favourite comestible:
European (?) Honey (?) Bee (Deceased)
And, yesterday, apropos of nothing, this particular specimen, a worker bee, landed on the fleshy nubbin twixt my thumb and forefinger, and lanced me with its venomous stinger.
The worker fell to the ground, her barbed needle lodged in my skin, injecting apitoxins from its venom sac into my blood until I plucked it out.
Distracting myself from the caustic burn, we watched as the honey bee crawled away.
Tragically, we saw her slip in a tiny puddle, fall onto her back and struggle to right herself.
She finally managed to flip herself over and crawl a short distance to the lip of mortar between paving slabs.
She crawled no more.
It’s a myth that bees always die once they’ve spent their sting.
Bees sting to protect their hive. Their most common enemies are other insects, small critters with thin skins, against whom bees can use their stinger without fear of death.
As I witnessed first hand, the stinger pierces the skin of the victim, where it’s held fast by barbs, before detaching from the bee’s abdomen when it makes its escape.
But if the victim’s skin is excessively thick — such as in humans or other large mammals — the stinger is barbed too tightly in the thick skin.
Instead of detaching, the stinger is torn away, causing fatal damage to the bee’s belly, killing her in minutes.
It was a sorry sight, even if she started the fight.
There is another misconception (I won’t say myth) surrounding bees: their decline.
Of course, this graph condenses all nuance: yes, wild bees are found across more of the UK than in 1980 — but there are 158 species in the survey and 26 percent of them have become less widespread, with 7 percent showing a strong decline.
If we open up our graph to include hoverflies, another important pollinator, we see very different results:
Looking at the positive: yesterday’s close encounter with a grumpy pollinator at least brought me into nature.
For most humans today, myself included, nature is an environment that I choose to enter on my own terms, when I’m ready for a short break from my timetabled, double-glazed workerdome.
There is little day-to-day awareness that I am a living part of an ecosystem, existing in relationship with other organisms. The plants that oxygenate the air I breathe; the fungi that vitalise the ground I walk on; the bees that pollinate the crops I eat.
Nature rarely troubles us. Nature rarely enters the adult human bubble on her terms. And when she does, it’s an inconvenience: rain at a picnic, leaves on the line, a bee sting.
I’d like to change that. I’d like to get to know her better.
Start With Ten
I firmly believe that, if you know ten of anything, then you’re comparably well-versed. Not an expert, but certainly more than a layman.
A busker who knows ten songs is no jukebox, but they can keep a crowd entertained for an hour.
If you can rustle up ten recipes by heart, then you’re not going to win Masterchef, but you will keep your family happily fed.
A person with ten good friends is hardly a social butterlfy, but they’ll never be short of confidantes or Saturday plans.
So let’s go through our ecosystem and chart the extent of my ignorance:
Can you identify and describe the habits and habitats of ten species of insect or other invertebrate? Despite today’s little foray into the world of bees and wasps, no, I can’t ❌ As far as I’m concerned, there are only three species of spider: money spiders, bath spiders and scary spiders.
Can you identify ten species of plant and describe their medicinal, nutritional, practical or cultural uses? Yes, I think I can! ✔ I’d be struggling if we separated trees from other plants, however.
How about ten species of fungi, moss, mould or lichen? Maybe two or three? ❌
Can you identify and describe the habits and habitats of ten species of mammal? If you include farmyard animals, I guess ✔ But if you mean our wild species, then probably not ❌
How about birds and their song? I’ve got pigeons down, and maybe a handful of others, so no ❌
Or fresh and saltwater fish and amphibians? Nope ❌ But I did learn today that Old English had a cute habit of giving animals nicknames that end in -g: dog, pig, hog, mog, stag, slug, earwig and, of course, frog.
Can you identify ten rocks and minerals? Chalk, sandstone, erm, gravel… ❌
Can you identify and describe ten weather systems, clouds or tides? Does ‘drizzle’ count? ❌
Or ten constellations, and describe their astronomical and cultural significance? Orion, the Bears, Cassiopeia ❌
Applications are now open for all kinds of leadership roles for people with all kinds of different skills and backgrounds:
Social Leader 🧸
Knowledge Leader 🔬
Adventure Leader 🥾 (This is the only one that requires Mountain Leader training)
Basecamp Manager 👩🍳
Medical Leader 🩺
Thank You
Huge thanks to all the paying subscribers who helped make this story possible. You know who you are. Thank you. 💚
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