Yesterday, I finally got around to moving my ‘home office’ – laptop, monitor, speakers, keyboard, mouse, external hard-drive, an old desk and a chair – from the bedroom to the spare room. Helped by Veronica, my partner – who hadn’t realise she’d signed up to this when she travelled up from Bristol to join me for t...  Read this >>

I took a walk this morning along the upper reaches of the Aeron valley; an area of gently sloping pastures grazed by sheep and cattle, rolling land with sunken trackways and woods, scattered cottages and old chapels. It has been one of my favourite routes for years, but it starts with a challenge. The bridleway (unsigned from the road) follows a track tha...  Read this >>

Late August and the weather has changed; storms in from the sea blowing away the warm, sleepy air of mid-summer, freshness coming in with the rain. The strength of the gales, the intensity of the rain, the unpredictability of the heat-waves, unsettles me. In the heart of lockdown back in June I had sleepless nights listening to the wind around the house,...  Read this >>

My routine, like those of many others, was pretty much fixed from the 16th March until the week that people in Wales were finally allowed to travel more than three miles from their homes. I slotted into it easily – after the first couple of weeks I actually felt more rested and relaxed than I had for a long time – not because the amount of wor...  Read this >>

As the lockdown restrictions ease, current affairs programmes are full of people voicing opinions on whether they should ever have been put in place. Public figures such as Jonathan Sumption have eloquently put the case that such regulations, as well as being damaging, are an unjustified restriction on personal freedom that both infantilises and demonstra...  Read this >>

The other night I watched the launch of the NASA / Space X Dragon capsule on its Falcon 9 rocket, via a live feed provided by the BBC. The last few minutes of the countdown were gripping, even though there was little to see until the very end: hearing the various communications, seeing the white plumes of steam rippling out from the launch vehicle as it w...  Read this >>

Over the past few weeks, a big topic of debate has been the relationship between civil servants, politicians, and scientists. The repeated refrain from government on policy around Covid 19 has been that they have followed the scientific advice in coming to their decisions; this may be taken as a laudable strategy, as an attempt to avoid blame if things go...  Read this >>

Like everyone else, I’ve changed the way I buy my food since the lockdown began. I’ve always tried to buy local, from smaller shops and the farmers’ market. Still, I went to the supermarket a fair bit too, for quick shops when I was in a hurry or for brands I couldn’t get locally. A couple of things stopped me cutting out the supe...  Read this >>

Perhaps the most obvious impact of the lock-down is that we’re all forced to be at home. This seems, for many people, a difficult thing – to actually have to live in the place we ‘live’ in. Why has that become so strange and challenging? I think one reason is that, just as our lives have become a means to the end of collecting eno...  Read this >>