The inaugural Oak Royd Beer Festival
One of life’s great pleasures is actually doing a thing that you’ve been talking about for years. In the case of last weekend, it was holding a charity beer festival…
Adventures in hatting
How quickly hobbies get out of hand. I wrote in a previous blog about how a habit of cleaning and maintaining my rather extensive hat collection had led to an…
The intricacies of bee etiquette
Fine news. Another edition of Ernest Journal is out. Featuring lots of grand stuff including pieces on Romanian bison, cocktail bitters, American shanty boats, death trees and paranoid French castaways.…
A trip to Japan
Last Friday, as most of the world was going about its more important business, I was sat in a restaurant on the outskirts of Kyoto eating candied crickets, bee larvae…
Shortlisted for the Bridport Prize
Ever read William Boyd’s Any Human Heart? I become increasingly convinced that his narrator, Logan, was onto something when he wrote that ‘all your life amounts to in the end…
Midsummer on the beach
I may have mentioned once or twice how much I love living in this inconvenient corner of North Yorkshire. However, there are some points in the year when it’s especially…
Field guns in the Kremlin
The other week, I took a little jaunt over to see my old mate P and his family in Moscow. I’ve been promising to visit him since he first moved…
Restoring a 1950s trilby
As those who’ve come across me in the unflattering light of the real world will know, I’m quite fond of wearing hats. They’re unfashionable and affected, of course, but then…
The Easter reset
A while ago, I was reading a fun article by Jeremy Anderberg on temporal landmarks, the basic idea being that there are ‘certain dates that naturally inspire us to turn…
Mead fit for a king
‘Turbulent old time, the 17th century. It was the age of characters like Cardinal Richelieu and the Duke of Buckingham; of Oliver Cromwell, Galileo and Guy Fawkes; of civil war,…
