Guest blog – Halloween: A Time to Celebrate Spiders by Debbie Rolls

Debbie is a freelance writer and lecturer in Teacher Education. She has contributed creative fiction and non-fiction to anthologies, has written for BBC Countryfile and is a regular contributor to Leeds Living website (https://leedsliving.co.uk/author/debbie-rolls/). She is in process of writing a children’s book presenting world history through the eyes of a spider. She can be…

Sunday book review – Mistletoe Winter by Roy Dennis

This is a companion book to Roy Dennis’s acclaimed Cottongrass Summer (reviewed here) which came out last year. It is another series of essays and they are wonderful. They certainly don’t feel, even remotely, like the ones that didn’t make it into the first volume. The standard is very high and I’ve read most of…

Changes in the NGO world

Plantlife is one of my favourite small wildlife conservation charities and over many years I’ve worked with them and in the last decade done a few bits of work for them. And to be fair, in the past I’ve pinched a couple of their staff to come and work at the RSPB. There seems to…