by Alex Hickman

Planting an orchard ii

The first of the trees are planted; they are Browns, a bitter sharp apple native to Devon. These trees should produce a prolific crop of red apples within 5 years. This batch of whips went missing in the post, and when it arrived there were seven, rather than the 15 we had ordered. But it’s […]

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by Alex Hickman

In search of consensus

Since we left the EU in January 2020 a worldwide pandemic and a European war propagated by a UN Security Council member has ended globalisation as we knew it (forever) and ushered in a new era of complex geopolitics driven by growing competition between China and ‘the West’ (a collective that now has fresh impetus), […]

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by Alex Hickman

British film

For unknown reasons the queue has stalled. It is past three in the morning on London’s South Bank and I am sitting in the British Film Institute’s café sipping hot coffee and watching a silent, exquisitely re-coloured film of the Queen’s visit to Pakistan in 1961: there she is laughing as she is asked to […]

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by Alex Hickman

For Felix (and his parents)

When I am away making myself, missing you, look  to the beech wood on the hill.   That bright door through which the deer slips marks my birth. My young years are the shooting green hawthorn, and the beeches – those steepling beeches so handsome and tall and sheltering are my middle and my age. […]

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by Alex Hickman

“Do you not see?” – the invisible magic of Nigel Smith

Nigel Smith, devoted family man, industrialist, sailor and hill walker, referendum wonk, devolutionist and electoral reformer was the most influential political campaigner you’ve never heard of. He died suddenly at home in Scotland two weeks ago aged 78, unburdened by establishment honours and with little public attention. The list of those who campaigned alongside Nigel […]

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