John Page was born in the West Riding, a proud Yorkshireman and was taught to play cricket left-handed “’cos it flummoxes t’ bowler, and buggers up t’ field”. He went to university in London and Leeds, and enjoyed (most of the time) attempting to teach young people that there’s a big wide world beyond the…
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Guest blog – Killing the Bird that Lays the Golden Egg by Gill Lewis
Killing the Bird that Lays the Golden Egg Gill Lewis is a multi-award-winning children’s author and former vet. She writes stories about animals and our human relationship with the wild world. Her books have won the US Green Earth Book Award, the German Prize for Environmental Youth Literature, and she has been awarded the Little…
Sunday book review – Nature’s Ghosts by Sophie Yeo
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This is a thoughtful and stimulating read. I enjoyed it very much. The book is about how the world used to be, ecologically. We travel back in time through the author’s narrative to a few decades ago, or a few centuries or many tens of millions of years. And we travel in space, around the…
Guest blog – Walshaw Turbine 44 by Nick MacKinnon
Nick MacKinnon is a freelance teacher of Maths, English and Medieval History, and lives above Haworth, in the last inhabited house before Top Withens = Wuthering Heights. In 1992 he founded the successful Campaign to Save Radio 4 Long Wave while in plaster following a rock-climbing accident on Skye. His poem ‘The metric system’ won…
Guest blog – Walshaw Turbine 40 by Nick MacKinnon and others
Nick MacKinnon is a freelance teacher of Maths, English and Medieval History, and lives above Haworth, in the last inhabited house before Top Withens = Wuthering Heights. In 1992 he founded the successful Campaign to Save Radio 4 Long Wave while in plaster following a rock-climbing accident on Skye. His poem ‘The metric system’ won…
Dear Mr Reed, 5 – who you should hear
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Dear Mr Reed, I’m sure you have heard lots of views and advice since you were appointed shadow secretary of state about a year ago. They can’t all be right! How do you decide who is talking nonsense? I remember a meeting with Ed Miliband when I was one of a group of NGO people…
Dear Mr Reed, 4 – your five priorities
Dear Mr Reed, welcome to your new job. It all gets real now. Yesterday you set out your five priorities for Defra; clean rivers zero waste economy food security nature recovery reducing flood risk These are good as headlines and demonstrate more strategic thought than we have seen from the Tories in 14 years. Everybody…
Rachel Reeves’s speech
Rachel Reeves made a speech yesterday – click here – it sounded pretty good but the devils (and the angels) are always in the detail not the rhetoric. Who could argue with this sentence? ‘Over the weekend I made clear to Treasury officials that the manifesto commitments that we were elected on will be kept…
General election comments
I’d like to thank the Scottish Labour Party, the Lib Dems and Reform for delivering a massive Labour majority on such a small share of the vote. Voters in Scotland switched from SNP to Labour, voters in the southwest and elsewhere switched from Con to LibDem, voters all over the place switched from Con to…
Dear Mr Reed, 3, marches and manifestos
Dear Steve Reed, in just a week’s time you may be in your second day in your new job as Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. I hope so. As a Labour member I’ve been delivering leaflets for Lee Barron in Raunds, a small, ex-boot-and-shoe town in Northants, and in the Corby…