Dear readers, I need your support at an event. My talk at Forest Arts Centre on the 24th October 2019 at 7.30pm, needs an audience. Tickets are £5.50, all proceeds go to the arts as I speak for [...]

As we approached The Church House Inn, a car reversed from its frontage. The aged driver was not watching his rear view mirror and the car smacked straight into the wall of a house. It then [...]

Pigs are given an unfair reputation. Fat pig, dirty pig, filthy pig, all derogatory terms of insult which demean the pig. Yet, in 2500 BC at the builder’s camp near Stonehenge, called [...]

I am going to eat like an ancient human being – it’s doctors orders! Like my pagan ancestor Zuri, I must consume meat and offal. Oddly enough, in my book I did mention iron and the [...]

That yew is the pagan’s favourite tree is an easy assumption, but is it true? The conflict is that the best examples sit in churchyards, the Christian centre of our communities. The [...]

The avenue at Stonehenge is enigmatic, an enduring mystery. It links to the River Avon and is 1.7 miles long even though there is now little to see. Away from Stonehenge, it crosses private [...]

It was a programme on skin and why the Navajo have skin problems that put me onto this theme. It appears that when the Navajo Indian people were forced on the Long March in 1864, many died. The [...]

Sarcopenia is the real killer of the aged; muscle wastage. It starts much earlier than you think. Most people are forced to exercise, like walking, because they have to work. As soon as they [...]

The world’s first civilizations, in 3500 BC, were often called riverine cultures. Mesopotamia, ‘the land between the rivers’ and those on the Nile typify these. Riverine [...]

The post arrived today, reminding me that bulb catalogue fever is a seasonal ailment. Impulse buying is not my weakness, except when it comes to plants. I look at the gleaming catalogue photos [...]

Perhaps, like me, you occasionally think you are falling apart. Then you read a report in the paper and you suddenly realise you are okay; everybody else is nuts! The report that an MP has called [...]

I just love growing lilies. The blousiness, the exotic odour, the haughty demeanor, all the things that I am not. Perhaps this contrast between a gardener and his favourite flowers has a deep [...]

We writers, when we are planning to write a book, keep an ear to the ground. A few years ago, the pundits told us to avoid misery memoirs like the plague, no publisher wants or is interested in [...]

I have to admit I include a dog joke in my forthcoming book about prehistory. Zuri, my pagan ancestor, aware of all these dogs on our beaches, asks me when they are ready to eat. In truth, [...]

Flint powered the first industrial age might be a slight exaggeration. Yet, this amazing mineral was a vital commodity to early peoples. It was used to make tools like axes, arrow and spear [...]

Chalk is familiar to us in the white cliffs of Dover. They are notable because chalk is relatively rare around the world and gives our island a unique appearance. The use of chalk from the [...]

My pagan ancestor Zuri is published and comes alive today, five years after she was conceived. She will burst into the world and, in her quiet and unassuming way, will show the planet what women [...]

I love the sea and its ever changing perspectives. For certain, hardly a day passes that I don’t look out and across the bay to The Needles. All that light, ozone and clear air; no wonder [...]

We should consider rewilding the River Avon. I would never have suggested this a few years ago but recent experience has changed my mind. Ann and I walked the Avon Valley Footpath recently and I [...]

Professor Brian Cox recently introduced a BBC programme on music. It utilised the profs planetary skills because it was all about Holst’s suite called The Planets. He spoke about each [...]

When I began to write about Zuri in my forthcoming book, I was aware that my own childlessness would have to be faced. She had to have a child or feel wretched in the face of her society. A woman [...]

BBC Springwatch asked us to enter our gardens into Gardenwatch and we did so. It seemed an apt moment because a nest of long tailed tits had erupted into our garden. Yet, disappointment arose [...]

A theme of my forthcoming book is about how much the past, including the prehistoric past, still touches modern life. The joy of getting back in touch with the land and even utilising the beauty [...]

A dubious benefit of a failing prostate is that I get up for a pee at least once in the night. I always look out and at 4.10 am on the 30 June I saw a tiny crescent moon. I took this photo but [...]