When do Deer Rut in the UK? An honest answer to this question would be that the question is far too general for any of the three species of deer found in the UK. However, the seasons for the rutting seasons for Roe Deer, Red Deer and Fallow Deer do…
On a still morning in May, if you open a window about an hour before sunrise you should be able to hear the dawn chorus starting from virtually nothing. One bird starts to sing in the dark and is answered by another, and within half an hour the garden, park…
If you’ve ever heard a peculiar, wavering hoot of sound in the evenings of autumn days, you may have thought it was one of our Tawny Owls shouting out “twit-twoo”. But in fact, the famous call that everyone recognises as the voice of our woods at night is actually made…
From late September through to early October each year, the presence of jays in gardens becomes a familiar sight as they search for food to bury away in the lawn or under a plant in a border. The reason for their presence in such large numbers is simple – there…
Each year across the UK in the months leading up to winter, larger and more speedy spiders start to appear in baths, hallways and under skirting. So why do the spiders start to seek warmth in September? The reason behind the sudden influx of spiders seeking warmth in September is…
By early September your garden table becomes a wasp nightmare and all your open drinks and leftover BBQ food seem to attract small crowds of wasps. The reason for this is simple really. By September time the wasps have been busy all summer long looking after the colony and then…
By late September, all the Swallows that had bred in the UK for the year have usually departed for their wintering grounds in South Africa, although there may be a few late stragglers around in early October. By this time, the gardens and houses where they nested will be empty…
There is a moment, familiar to almost anyone who has ever tried on a shirt or a dress or a pair of trousers, where something is almost exactly right and yet somehow completely wrong. The shoulders sit perfectly. The chest is fine. And then there is this strange gaping at…
There are few things more disappointing than a garden that was bustling with birds in June, being virtually silent by August. None of the normal suspects seem to be around and people often ask the question, “Where have all the birds gone from my garden?” The Migration Myth So if…
Before the multiplex, before the popcorn, before the sticky floor you pretend not to notice, there was a projection booth in the dark with a man sweating next to a reel of film that was, chemically speaking, not very different from gunpowder. Nitrate film – the stuff that made cinema…
Walk through any old country house open to the public, and sooner or later you'll find yourself in a long gallery of ancestral portraits. You'll feel it – that low-grade unease, the sense that the eyes are tracking you. You'll laugh it off, or make a joke to whoever you're…
Somewhere in a van heading up the M6 right now, there are prints. Not posters, not reproductions – original limited-edition prints, signed and numbered, wrapped in glassine and sandwiched between sheets of corrugated board, vibrating gently at 56 mph past Stafford services. It is not a romantic image. But without…
Walk into any garden centre right now and you'll find a wall of seed packets dressed up in the colours of a summer meadow – cornflower blue, oxeye-daisy white, the warm yellow of birdsfoot trefoil. The fonts are hand-lettered. The copy talks about bees. There is usually a picture of…
Stand in a wood in early May and your brain does something sneaky. It takes the whole rattling, trilling, tapping cacophony and smooths it into one thing: birdsong. Pleasant, vaguely uplifting, not worth thinking about too hard. But here's the thing – birdsong is not one thing. It is a…
Somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, your destination is already getting to work on you. Not through the recycled air or the thin cabin pressure or the truly inexplicable sadness of an aisle seat – but through the window light. By the time you land, a small cluster of about…
"It smells funny." Every parent who has ever dragged a tired six-year-old off a long-haul flight has heard some version of this. The child stops dead on the jetway, wrinkles their nose, and announces it to the queue behind you like a small, unimpressed customs officer. You apologise. You move…
Step outside on a characteristically miserable Tuesday in November – low cloud, eight degrees, that particular British drizzle that can't quite commit to being rain – and you are standing in what the global technology industry considers ideal working conditions. Not for you, obviously. But for the machines that run…
Most people in Britain carry a vague mental image of the eleven-plus as a historical artefact – something that happened to their grandparents, got abolished in a fog of 1970s egalitarianism, and now exists only in nostalgic memoirs and angry letters to the Guardian. The truth is considerably stranger. The…
Most explanations of compound interest come with a picture. A curve that swoops upward. A table with numbers marching across columns, each one a bit bigger than the last. And if that picture clicks for you, great – you're done. But if it doesn't click, if charts are hard to…
On the 11th of May 1985, Bradford City were playing their last home match of the season, a celebration of winning the Third Division title. Fifty-six people died. The main stand was gone in under four minutes. That speed mattered. Not just as a measure of the tragedy, but as…
