The day still unswum, after lunch we dive inand suspend ourselves in choppy water,our homage to Poseidon whose shifting outskirtsrent against the hard shore.In cleaves of marine glass the water rises, holds,and then shatters into armfuls of snow; rises, holds and vanishes into snow. All your days have lead us to this moored boat, this […]

This is a deeply moving, honest and sometimes upsetting account of a father’s sudden loss of his beloved daughter; in the days and weeks that follow the clinging on to memory, the glimpses of Iris, the bewilderment of grief. But ‘God is an Octopus’ is much more than a memoir of loss. Ben’s grief drives […]

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 […]

First comes a hedge …

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), […]