Spending time in nature is good for our mental health and wellbeing. This might seem obvious, but it’s an idea now supported by reams of evidence-based research. I need to be in the green, but I also need culture and cities and grime and bustle. Is it possible to have both?
We meet Lizzy Humber to find out why the time is now to help parents and carers access art and culture in the city and how she’s helping to make it happen.
On the osteopath’s treatment couch, Louis is rocking me like a parent soothing a fractious child. “I don’t know what to do to make it better,” I say, meaning my problematic joints, meaning myself, meaning this whole shitshow of a world.
It was the middle of May and still there was no sign of the swallows. The roof of the yellow house, where every year since before even Greta could remember, a pair had perched, waiting for each other’s return, remained empty.
When I turned on the radio, the news was of continuing rioting across the country. It had stretched overnight, across the South West, beyond Bristol to Plymouth.
‘In the last week of March the blackthorn flowered. Rosettes as white as snowburied fields burst from stems black with witchcraft, from between the thorns of fairy tale and folklore; thorns whose vicious stab cast Sleeping Beauty into a hundred year sleep.’
“So my mind is full of what home means, whether it’s a place, a person, or a feeling, when the train pulls into the station and I climb aboard, looking for Dad.”
“Paolo felt for each step like a child in the dark. There was a rattle coming from his insides, like a shaken bag of scrabble letters; clink, clink, clink.”
As a conservation charity declares a butterfly emergency we meet Steven McCulloch to hear how he’s creating a pollinator-friendly meadow system for managing orchards in Mid Devon.
“The function of poetry is the function of being human. Of every civilisation we’ve uncovered, the earliest things we detect are not their governments or their money, it’s the things they made, and wrote.”
‘Yesterday blue fought through the cloud and the sun came out. In the walled garden, the birds sang, a hundred tiny voices making a chorus of good news.’
““I’m not a happy camper or festival goer”, I hear myself say over again in the run up to the festival. But as a kid I went to festivals and camped a lot, so maybe that’s not strictly true. Maybe I’d just forgotten how to do it.”
