I went into my garden this morning to sow some wildflower seeds that I have gathered over the summer, and found this forest of mushrooms fruiting. There were loads all over the place, and it made me feel quite happy. It prompted me to post some pictures of the cool mushrooms I have seen these last few weeks on my hikes. I am still obsessed with hiking. I am doing around 20km every weekend and don’t know how I lived my life without this practice. I finally know what I want to be when I grow up: a woman who walks in the woods. I have been walking alone, in the main. I realised that group walks are not for me the day that I was in the New Forest and the people ahead of me had squashed a large amount of stag beetles as they walked and talked. No one
I loved Sinéad O’Connor. Somehow, despite multiple moves, I still have her first album, The Lion and the Cobra, on vinyl. It was one of the first albums I bought when my taste matured beyond asinine pop music, and it remains one of my desert island discs. I won’t pretend that I followed her throughout her career, because I didn’t. But that first album of hers still has my heart. There was something about her, and that cover, which genuinely awed me when I was young. The juxtaposition between the fierceness she embodied, how delicate her voice was, the range she was able to cover, and the stories she told with her lyrics. I know every word and melody of every song on that album, and listening can easily transport me back to a self I’d rather not remember being. I did not like being a teenager at all, but that makes
Safety and security have become trigger words for me. They are gateways to instant mistrust and suspicion because they have come to symbolise a loss of my personal power and privacy. The state, and authority more generally, has no interest in keeping me, and other ordinary people, safe. They are simply interested in controlling us. For instance, nowadays banks very often use those words – safety and security – to freeze online payments people make. They claim they do it to protect you from fraud and keep you safe, but in reality, all they are doing is forcing you to give them more information about why you are transferring money to a person or organisation: they know the who, but with these ‘safety checks’, they are also collecting the why and the what of your relationship to the recipient. Similarly, this online safety bill should be more honestly entitled the loss
Ever since I (as an unvaxxed person) was transformed into a far-right racist by the mainstream media for deciding to stick with my pro-active health management instead of taking a novel, experimental vaccine with no long-term safety data, I have tended to view the vilification of individuals by the mass media and/or the social media mob with more than a little scepticism. Naturally then, I decided to watch the Tucker Carlson Andrew Tate interview for myself to see what the fuss was about. Firstly, Andrew Tate is clearly a con man. That could be, should be, and would have been, the end of it, if people weren’t dumb enough to fall for his clear and evident manipulations. Every single adversary currently up in arms is simply mirroring the men he scammed for money (by way of a woman’s face/body). You have all fallen for it. This also goes for all the