If you had a beehive, your carefree summers would be heaped with responsibility for a hollow cedarwood cube full of 50,000 lives at any time.  They live fast and die young, too.   A winter worker lives around six months.  They huddle up like penguins and keep the hive temperature up so that when the spring comes and her time's up there's still a ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

'Now then, let’s talk about gloves.  Yes…  You can buy some lovely leather gloves these days and they do feel wonderful.  Problem is the bee stings get stuck in them and stay there so you’ll be left with a pair of gloves full of partially discharged stingers.  So I use marigolds, instead.  They’re wonderfully cheap, you see, and you can get them ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

High tide passed, and the steel-cold grey saltwater river was pouring back out towards the sea, swollen by snowmelt and rainfall. The old millstream weir joined it just past Tintern bridge, a whitewater that roared so loudly it drowned out the music playing through the headphones burrowing into my cold ears. High-banked forests on either side of ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

With a damp, woody thunk the edge of my axe bit hard into the spongy rotten flesh of the old tree trunk. I was breaking it up, trying to mine sound wood out from decayed, later to be stacked in the woodshed as fuel. A spray of chips flew up and bounced off my shoulders and the plastic chemistry-lesson goggles protecting my eyes. Woodlice lay ( Read more... )

We parked beside a grey stone wall, limen of the grassed-over moat that girdles St Briavels Castle. The back wall of the castle looked shaggy, pixellated, inviting and scalable, unlike the tight imposing front facade with its two rounded towers and high battlements. These days the castle is a Youth Hostel, but it could still be held secure by no ( Read more... )

This time last year i was in Qingdao on the east coast of China. I had to work both Eve and Day, and i ended up with the feeling that i had missed Christmas. I mean, it's not like we didn't try our best. We had a couple of gatherings, and my friend Dan really went above and beyond in creating his pirate costume for the dinner at Amy's Bakery. ( Read more... )

I don't go to the cinema very often. Never more than five times in a year, i don't think. Certainly never into double figures. I get depressed by mediocre films and i don't know any regular cinephiles to drag me along with the dubious promise of a darkened room and those uncomfortable folding seats that seem to be made out of opulent moleskins ( Read more... )