In case you wonder how long it takes for a tea bag to rot away, all I know is this one is over 20 years old, for that’s when I planted this bush … adding plastic to tea bags to make them stronger must be one of the most pointless uses of the stuff ever.

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The unwillingness of Scottish politicians, and not least of the SNP politicians, to pursue meaningful land reform is frustrating to say the least, for without land reform Scotland cannot get out of the colonial rut we are stuck in (the use of ‘colonial’ is justified, I think, for everything we do in Scotland is dictated to us from the outside, and land is the pivot on which that external power hinges).

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There is honey fungus everywhere I look this autumn, and that’s a very bad news for the trees.

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To my great delight (and surprise) I have had one of my large format prints selected for the Center for Photographic Art 2025 Juried Exhibition, and so have spent much of this week working on getting it over there.

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I have never been much taken by Doctorow’s enshitification thing. Sure, the neologism is catchy, but there is no novel insight behind it. The fact that so many view it as somehow profound begs the question of how dumb have we become, but it hasn’t bothered me enough to write about it. But the Flying Penguin has, and it is worth a read for anyone who cares.

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When my outdoor adventures began back in the mid seventies, it was all about being in nature. The meagre equipment needed for that was mostly repurposed, often second hand, and always secondary. But somehow in the fifty years since it’s all come to be turned on its head:

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Pumped hydro makes sense in a grid where a steady supply needs small rebalancing around peak times; it makes absolutely no sense as a storage for an all-renewables grid, and least of all, one predominately dependent on wind.

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I made most of the short calm after the storm this morning to pick up the apples the wind knocked off. They pretty much exactly filled a 37 litre box, and got turned into 6 litres of apple juice by lunch time.

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BrewDog out, another lot in … the level of cognitive dissonance required to disassociate rewilding practice in Scotland from this sort of abusive land ownership reality is very high. Not much progress since the days of the Seven Men of Knoydart.

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In my mind Butcher is perhaps the greatest living B&W landscape photographer, and in this short interview he spills the big secret of his photography, among other things.

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The CNPA got the nod from the Scottish Government to ban campfires and barbecues in the Cairngorms National Park from next year; a step in the right direction, for sure. There will be outrage over this in some outdoor circles, and I will resist the urge to pre-empt that with a two word response, but my views on this have not change since I wrote Assynt Ashes eight years ago.

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I can’t draw, and I really mean can’t. When I first started school, my teacher was so concerned with my inability to draw, and to form letters in a neat enough fashion, that she summoned my parents to school to warn them that they should consider getting me some extra tuition if they didn’t want me to end up in a special needs school.

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Luong is one of the great living large format photographers, so him speaking about what still remains a taboo subject in some circles is most encouraging: link.

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On Friday I drove up to Kingussie to go to the opening of the Analogue 11 exhibition at the Eleven41 gallery; it is a fair way, but I am glad I went, for if anything, the event exceeded my expectations.

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This deadly poisonous mushroom, ubiquitous in Scotland’s spruce plantations, seems to be having a particularly good year — during a couple of hours of foraging this morning I saw hundreds of specimen in different stages of maturity.

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