Même si la distance nous sépare aujourd'hui, mon amour pour toi ne change pas et tu es toujours dans mes pensées.

A Morning Path. 12°C. Blackbirds singing.

"There is but one solution to the intricate riddle of life; to improve ourselves, and contribute to the happiness of others." ~ Mary Shelley Mortlake Terrace (1826) 🎨 J.M.W. Turner

Somewhere on Earth right now, rain is falling on an empty road, waves are breaking on a beach with nobody watching, and the sun is rising over a mountain with nobody there to photograph it. The world keeps being beautiful even when nobody is looking.

Forest mood 🌲

“It was now the hour when the fragrance of tea and the warm, heartening scent of buttered toast begin to float like a benediction over the English home...” P.G. Wodehouse, Full Moon

Juvenile Herring Gull! 😊 Taken last weekend at Apex Park in Somerset. 🐦

I haven’t met Buddy yet, but I’m besotted anyway. This pic 🥹 😍

Farms are holding back on reservoirs and other resilience work because it would push the value over the inheritance tax threshold. That’s not planning for the next generation – that’s being forced to choose between the farm surviving the drought or surviving the tax. Scrap the family farm tax in the Budget. In fact, scrap inheritance tax for all.

Absolutely! Fairer returns for farmers 💪🇬🇧

The fat in a blocked artery is three quarters unsaturated, and a cardiologist has known that since 1994. The pipe story goes like this: you eat butter, the butter floats about in the blood, the butter sticks to the wall like grease in a drain, one day the drain is shut. It is the tidiest piece of medicine ever drawn on a napkin, and every part of it is wrong. Dietary fat does not float about. It is packaged in the gut, shipped to your fat stores and muscle, and is gone from the blood within hours. Plaque does not sit in the pipe like sludge; it grows inside the wall, underneath the lining, where nothing you swallowed can reach it without an invitation. And the invitation is damage: a cholesterol particle gets through the lining, oxidises, and the immune system builds a scab over it. A plaque is a scab on the inside of a pipe, not a lump of dripping in the bend. In 1994 The Lancet did the obvious thing and cut the plaques open to see what the fat inside them actually was. 26% saturated. 74% unsaturated, and more than 40% of it polyunsaturated, the fat that oxidises, the fat that comes out of a seed, the fat the butter was replaced with. So the drain was never blocked with butter. It was scabbed over a wound, and the wound was full of the stuff the leaflets told two generations to cook with instead. The pipe was a metaphor. The seed oil was a diet.

“September came in with golden days and silver nights…” -J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

The Fellowship in Moria

Lidl has put peas in the beef and written High Protein on the front. The pea is hidden in a little black box, in a font you need a suspicious nature to read. It isn't a pea. It's the beige powder left after yellow split peas are milled and soaked in alkali. Vegan shakes are made from it. It tastes of a wet cupboard and it costs a fraction of mince. It's short of methionine. Beef isn't. So the 37g on the front is a bigger number doing a smaller job. The cow spent 2 years turning plants into beef. Lidl has put the plants back in. They took the fat out too. The flavour, the vitamins and the fullness left before the pea arrived. Food removed, crop added, and the word for that is High. Nobody in a gym has ever read past High. The reason isn't hidden. Lidl promised a quarter of its protein would be plant based by 2030. The meat-free aisle went grey. So the peas are going into the beef, where the customers are. In Holland the same mince is already 40% pea. Britain hasn't been told its number. Tesco printed Meat & Veg on the box in 2019. Dead in a year. Lidl moved the veg to the back. Buy the ugly 20% mince with one ingredient. The animal already ate the peas.

Another photo of the beautiful female Kestrel at the Huntspill seawall in Somerset at the weekend. 😍😊🐦

A single mature tree can lift a whole bathtub of water from the ground and pump it into the air every day… through pure physics and leaf magic. That’s one tree quietly running its own personal waterfall, cooling the planet, making rain, and giving us free AC.

A beautiful Kestrel flew so close yesterday that I struggled to get it all in the frame! 😁😍 Taken at the Huntspill seawall in Somerset. 😊🐦

The widespread use of computers and smart phones for administrative tasks is making life very hard for the elderly. My parents were scammed - spoofing, they’d never even heard of it until then - and the bank absolutely refused to reimburse them even though the Cour de Cassation has explicitly ruled that falling victim to a phone spoofing scam does not constitute grave negligence. I’ve had to deal with their case since the beginning as my parents were totally overwhelmed by it all, and now I have to escalate the case to the bank mediator. This process means dealing with PDF files, online portals, and so on. My parents wouldn't have a clue where to start. If I wasn’t there to handle it, they would have no chance of ever seeing their money again. It’s deeply worrying how the elderly are being left behind by modern banking, and it’s outrageous that they are treated so shoddily by banks. @CreditAgricole

If it’s British and on your plate, someone in a cab or a field made it happen in a brutal year. Buy British where you can, support our industry!🇬🇧

When we look at an oak, a sequoia, or a balsa tree in the Amazon rainforest, we're looking at solidified carbon and oxygen. Trees do not obtain structural mass from the soil; it comes out of thin air. Plants are built almost entirely from atmospheric gases—living, complex architectures of carbon, oxygen and sunlight. No wonder that as children, we hug them, play and climb in them, or wander through their woods, hearing them sighing in the wind. Around 90% to 95% of a tree's dry weight is carbon and oxygen, pulled directly from atmospheric carbon dioxide. Most people assume trees draw their body from the earth, yet the soil volume beneath a canopy remains unchanged as a sapling matures into a giant. Roots do not consume dirt to build branches; large trees leave no gaping holes in the ground. Instead, the root network is a mechanical anchor to hold the heavy tree structure upright, while absorbing water and a tiny fraction of soil minerals—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. These are their biological multivitamins, accounting for less than 5% of final dry mass. Through photosynthesis, sunlight breaks apart carbon dioxide and water molecules. The plant releases oxygen back into the atmosphere and chains the remaining carbon and oxygen into glucose molecules, forming complex structural polymers like cellulose and lignin. Across the globe, an estimated 3 trillion trees hold roughly 500 billion cubic meters of wood. Every forest on Earth is in reality solidified atmosphere—hundreds of billions of tons of air trapped, structured and given physical form by living plants. Mankind owes its survival to these friendly giants of the natural world.

A mother's strength is measured not only by the miles she travels, but by the lives she carries along the way