This year I found out that a few photographs on a blog can cost more than the blog will ever earn. I put them there in good faith. I thought a picture on the internet was a picture I could use, I h…

Photo by Nathana Rebouças on Unsplash Most people would consider being needed a good thing, and in many ways it is. To be genuinely useful to the people around you, to have something real to contri…

For a long time this blog has published something new every single day. From today it won’t, and I’d rather tell you why than let it quietly happen. When I started posting daily I paid …

Photo by Daniil Onischenko on Unsplash Seneca wrote some of his best work from his sickbed, which is either an impressive act of discipline or a testament to how much enforced stillness can clarify…

Every December, millions of us promise ourselves we’ll shop local and support British makers. Then life gets busy, the deadlines creep closer, and the easy option wins. A few clicks, a next d…

Photo by Sam Carter on Unsplash Cambrian Wool sources its fleece from farms across the Cambrian Mountains, the same range of hills that sits behind Gwynfryn, traced back to individual farms with a …

Photo by Jean-Baptiste D. on Unsplash There’s a pressure that runs through modern life that doesn’t always announce itself clearly but is difficult to miss once you notice it. The press…

Illustration generated using Midjourney AI. Rolf Skeldon does not use AI generated images without attribution. This week the Copernicus Ocean State Report landed, and it didn’t pull its punch…

Photo by Omid Ajorlo on Unsplash Nobody enjoys getting something wrong, and most of us have developed, over the years, a fairly sophisticated set of responses to failure that are designed primarily…

Photo by Bryan White on Unsplash There is a particular kind of woodland in Britain that looks, to most people walking through it, like an entirely ordinary conifer plantation. Rows of fast growing,…

Photo by illitch real on Unsplash There’s a version of integrity that tends to get celebrated in grand moments, the whistleblower who speaks up at personal cost, the man who holds his positio…

There’s a moment most evenings where I physically stop working. I close the laptop, I put the phone face down, I might even sit outside for a bit. And it does nothing at all, because the busi…

Illustration generated using Midjourney AI. Rolf Skeldon does not use AI generated images without attribution. Four barn owl chicks hatched this summer in a nest box at Arlington Court in Devon, wa…

Photo by Ronnie George on Unsplash Someone needs something from you. They need it urgently, or at least it feels urgent to them, and the urgency is real enough that it’s now sitting in your d…

Photo by Ally Griffin on Unsplash Somewhere in a veteran orchard in Harrow, west London, there is an apple tree that does not officially exist. Not in the sense that it isn’t real. It is real…

Illustration generated using Midjourney AI. Rolf Skeldon does not use AI generated images without attribution. North Wales Police have a new way of putting it. If your vehicle is seen tearing up a …

Illustration generated using Midjourney AI. Rolf Skeldon does not use AI generated images without attribution. In the seventeenth century, engineers drained the Fens of eastern England on a scale t…

Photo by Kylo on Unsplash Someone told you, at some point, that you were capable of more. A teacher, a parent, a person whose opinion you respected. They meant it as encouragement, and in the momen…

I want to read more. Properly read, I mean. Not skim, not half listen to an audiobook while I’m packing orders, but sit down with a book and actually take it in. The trouble is I can get to t…

Illustration generated using Midjourney AI. Rolf Skeldon does not use AI generated images without attribution. In June this year, three osprey chicks hatched at RSPB Campfield Marsh in Cumbria. Tha…

Photo by Pascal Debrunner on Unsplash The way forgiveness usually gets talked about, it sounds like something you do for the other person. A gift extended to someone who wronged you, an act of gene…

Photo by Oleksandr Sushko on Unsplash Britain has no coral reefs of its own. Its coastal waters are too cold, too far north, too far from the narrow band around the equator where reef building cora…

Photo by Ben Turnbull on Unsplash There’s a version of rest that most of us are familiar with, and it isn’t particularly restful. The evening spent moving between screens, the weekend t…

Illustration generated using Midjourney AI. Rolf Skeldon does not use AI generated images without attribution. Between 2019 and 2021, a team from Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust trapped thirty five …

Photo by Robbie Down on Unsplash Let’s be honest about something the Stoics are often misquoted on. They didn’t say anger was always wrong. They said it was almost always costly, which …

Photo by Nick Sokolov on Unsplash There are roughly 6,000 species of passerine birds in the world. Passerines are the perching birds, the ones most people mean when they think of birdsong, everythi…

No More Nobody run a slow fashion blog focused mostly on womenswear, and they’d put together a genuinely well researched Top 10 Slow Fashion Brands UK list. We got in touch to point out the o…

Photo by Jordan McQueen on Unsplash There’s a particular kind of freedom that doesn’t get talked about much, probably because it doesn’t look like freedom from the outside. It loo…

Illustration generated using Midjourney AI. Rolf Skeldon does not use AI generated images without attribution. Between the 29th of December and the 8th of January one recent winter, seventeen separ…

Illustration generated using Midjourney AI. Rolf Skeldon does not use AI generated images without attribution. It arrived on a Tuesday. A formal legal notice from a rights management company, infor…

Photo by Amin Zabardast on Unsplash You’ve met him. You might occasionally be him. The man who cannot let an argument rest, who keeps returning to the point after it’s been made, who ne…

Marcus Aurelius stripped back his personal life in ways that puzzled the people around him. He was the most powerful man in the world and he chose a simple bed, plain food, and clothes that drew no…

Grey marl is not a colour exactly. It is what happens when you spin together fibres of different natural shades and the result settles somewhere between white and charcoal, slightly heathered, slig…

Photo by Mayukh Karmakar on Unsplash There’s a confusion that runs through most conversations about being alone, which is that solitude and loneliness are the same experience at different int…

Photo by Natalia Trofimova on Unsplash Envy has a bad reputation, and most of it is deserved. It’s uncomfortable to feel, uncomfortable to admit to, and doesn’t reflect particularly wel…

Photo by simon on Unsplash Most of us are quite good at worrying. We do it consistently, often productively in its early stages, and with considerable dedication to things that haven’t happen…

There is a version of this post that talks about the turning of the seasons and the poetry of autumn. This is not that version. This is the practical version. As the mornings get cooler, fabric wei…

Photo by Marcus Urbenz on Unsplash A garment rarely dies where you’d expect. Not from the fabric wearing thin, not usually. It dies from a zipper that stops sliding, a button that works loose…

Photo by Lucas Santos on Unsplash Most disagreements don’t fail because the people involved have irreconcilable differences. They fail because at least one person stops being interested in th…

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash I don’t often follow celebrity news. I rarely listened to Dolly Parton’s music and, living in the UK, I never saw first hand the scale of what she…

Photo by Olga Nayda on Unsplash There are conversations most of us are not having. Not because the opportunity hasn’t arisen, but because something in us keeps finding reasons to defer them. …

Photo by Corey Young on Unsplash There’s a version of patience that most of us are familiar with, and it isn’t particularly pleasant. The gritted teeth version. The forced stillness of …

The number on a fabric specification sheet that most people ignore turns out to be one of the most useful pieces of information about any garment. GSM, grams per square metre, is simply how much a …

Most clothing is made to order. A brand decides what it wants, commissions fabric, has it woven, dyes it, cuts it, sews it, and sells it. The environmental cost of that process runs from the field …

Photo by Nicolas Lobos on Unsplash The word gratitude has been handled so much in recent years that it’s started to feel a little worn. Gratitude journals. Gratitude practices. The instructio…

Photo by Lucas Santos on Unsplash There’s a question that sits underneath a lot of daily life without often being asked directly. Not what do I want from this situation, or what can I get fro…

Photo by Hannah Wei on Unsplash Nobody writes about the man who simply kept going through an unremarkable difficult year. No dramatic turning point. No visible achievement. Just the quiet, daily de…

Photo by Bozhin Karaivanov on Unsplash Turning Old Cloth Into New Cloth, Properly This Time Less than one per cent of used clothing is currently recycled back into new garments. The rest, when it i…