I have signed the Stop the Guga Hunt. Now I am not someone who thinks that nature conservation can be done without reference to human realities and needs (I think doing so is at best naive and at worst nefarious and malevolent), nor someone who considers culture unimportant. But I do believe ethics is always rooted in time, and hence never static.

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I was in the process of writing a detailed 2025 retrospective, then I thought, FFS, really?! So here are just some bullet points:

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Looking back at 2025, I spent a great deal of time reflecting on the dissatisfactory, and deteriorating, reality of land ownership in Scotland, and being particularly frustrated by the willingness of Scottish nature conservationists and outdoor folk to side step this issue.

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Today I found an online UK supplier that sells 25kg of Sodium Thiosulphate (aka hypo) for £70 delivered! I am thrilled.

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I gather the Garmouth Viaduct has collapsed. It’s a shame, it was a wonderful structure, the likes of which they don’t make any more. I got a chance to photograph it back in 2021, but only got to printing it this year, it came out pretty well, if I say so myself. I might have to go back next year to revisit that one, maybe I can convince Linda to run the Speyside Way race again.

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A good, concise summary of the socio-economic reality of Scottish rewilding in yesterday’s Scotsman (paywalled, also on Apple News). In spite of these issues being raised again and again for years, I am yet to hear any of the Scottish rewilders to even acknowledge them. Mind you, they do get rather worked up when someone is planting the ‘wrong kind of’ trees, or, increasingly, planting trees at all. Ideologies are powerful, reality distorting, mind numbing, conscience silencing things, that’s for sure. And as I said before, the inherent misanthropy of rewilding and the sociopathy of extreme wealth are a match made in heaven.

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The battle against the AI slop taking over our day to day existence has been lost, it’s everywhere we look, and the nature of the beast is such it can only get worse, will get worse. Some welcome it, some do not care, but for those of us who do care the options for effective resistance are limited:

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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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