It’s some American guy named Robert Prevost who has now accepted the purported mantle of infallibility and divine favor from an imaginary god. Just once I’d like to see one of these clerical nobodies admit that they don’t have any special powers and therefore need to turn down the unjustified honor. But no, this one is calling himself Pope Leo XIV and is already spewing pious declarations.

He does meet one of the necessary prerequisites to be a Catholic authority figure: he does have a distinguished history of concealing child-rape accusations against the priesthood.

OK, everyone, we can go back to ignoring and occasionally sneering at the ridiculous man at the top of the hierarchy.

Huh. I woke up this morning to do as I usually do, browsing the news and commenting on it, and I just can’t. Nope. Nothing inspires me today.

My mistake might have been first reading about RFK jr’s policies.

I can’t expand on that. The man is a walking catastrophe, an incompetent buffoon who has been shielded from the consequences of his actions by wealth and privilege, and now he’s inflicting his uninformed, insane opinions on everyone else. He’s a madman, given control of HHS and NIH and dictating policy on everything from autism to infectious disease, while we sit around gawping at the spectacle. Our elected representatives are doing nothing to stop the disaster, and in fact rubber-stamped his appointment. What am I supposed to do?

I have to wonder how such a pathetic creature could acquire so much power. Naomi Klein explains that we must blame the rich.

Klein recently co-authored an essay for The Guardian, sounding alarm about the dark worldview of politically insurgent tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Klein views these men — who are guiding Donald Trump’s presidency — as abandoning any positive vision for our collective future, and instead retrenching in preparation for a dark, nearly end times-level social collapse, from which they and other elites emerge unscathed, and all powerful. “The governing ideology of the far-right in our age of escalating disasters,” she writes, “has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.”

So the guys with billions of dollars are telling people like me, who is facing existential uncertainty about personal issues like retirement and health with virtually no financial backup, that we don’t matter, that there is nothing we can do, that we might as well die and get it over with. I’d be happy to do so if I weren’t so full of rage and frustration. Unfortunately, writing on the internet does not relieve my anger. We need to literally destroy these monsters of greed.

Today is the day everyone is required to have that RealID/enhanced ID if you want to fly anywhere. It’s an incompetently managed sham.

I applied for mine two months ago, when I went to the DMV to renew my driver’s licence. I’m still waiting. Today I received email from the DMV saying they were rejecting my application, because I hadn’t included enough bank account information. Apparently you now need a verified bank account to drive or travel anywhere, so I’m going to have to resubmit the entire application all over again, and wait a few more months. This is particularly galling because I did go in person to the local license bureau (not any problem at all, this is a small town, no waiting) and had everything verified right there. I have a valid passport, so I could fly if I wanted to, but the airports are so chaotic that I don’t want to.

My wife has been struggling to get her realID for a while now, but she keeps getting rejected. She showed up at the license bureau with her birth certificate, social security card, etc., but she made the terrible mistake of changing her name when she got married, so they won’t accept it. We ordered a certified marriage license from King County, but they just sent us a photocopy, which doesn’t count.

On the bright side, ladies, I guess I’m now single and available. Except you can’t travel anymore.

This nation with the impressive interstate freeway system and huge airports in every major city is now effectively killing travel within our borders. We’re also not going to be getting much traffic from international travel, either. Tourism, who needs it? Next stop will be armed guards at the boundaries for each state, and you’ll have to show your papers if you visit any city…except that you can’t, because the bureaucracy is too incompetent to issue them.

Stay home, everyone.

Mark your calendars. Donald Trump is planning a gigantic military parade — $90 million dollars sunk into rolling tanks and missiles down Pasadena Avenue — but the rest of us should be planning to rise up in protest on Saturday, 14 June, instead. There will be No Kings rallies all across the country on that day. Right now, the nearest event near me is in Fargo, so I’m planning on trooping north on that day to wave a sign and chant angry slogans. Look up the rally nearest you and try to hit the streets on that day!

The DOGE scam is fading, at least in the sense of helping Musk skim off money from the government, so now he’s pivoting to maximizing fear in the uninformed. Forgive me for including this clip from Fox News of that walking smarmy smirk, Jesse Watters, encouraging Musk to expound on his nonsensical imaginary apocalyptic claims of the coming doom of Earth.

He can’t even get the numbers right. He says that the sun is going to expand and swallow up the Earth in a few hundred million years — the end is imminent! It’s more like 5 billion years, but even a hundred million years is an immensity of time for a species that has only existed for maybe 300,000 years, and it’s ridiculous to be trying to terrify stupid people, like Jesse Watters, with the news of an apocalypse sometime. It’s a good way to shake down the rubes, though, just like the opening claim that the Biden administration stole billions of dollars from the gullible geezers watching Fox News.

I’m not being pessimistic to say that Musk will never build a colony on Mars; I doubt he’ll even get a single mission to land there and return. He is not saving humanity. He’s the biggest grifter to ever exist, and Fox News has cultivated an army of goobers who will direct the federal government to shovel their tax money into the gaping maw of this horrible person.

“Truth’s a menace, science is a public danger,” says Mustapha Mond, the “Controller” in Aldous Huxley’s iconic dystopian novel Brave New World. “That’s why we so carefully limit the scope of its researches.”

If you want to constrain free and rational inquiry, at some point you have to go after the sciences. And that’s what seems to be happening in Trump’s America, from putting vaccine critic and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr in charge of the country’s health policy to deleting datasets from government websites to mass layoffs at scientific agencies.

Meanwhile, staff at federal science agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation have been scrambling to comply with directives that end federal funding for work involving “gender ideology” and diversity, equity and inclusion. Climate research is also being targeted.

While each agency has taken its own approach, most have purged their websites of certain terms, removed some academic papers and circulated lists of words that can get work deleted or sent for review.

The words displayed above, for example, would all get research projects flagged and possibly modified – in a bid to protect them from termination – at the National Science Foundation, which supports $9 billion worth of scientific research and education annually.

Most refer in some way to diversity and marginalised groups. It is telling, for example, that “women” and “female” are on the list, but not “man” or “male”. Others are ridiculously broad-brush – see “historically” and “systemic”, words that seem to target the identification of trends, although whether this would be enough to get research banned depends entirely on the trend being identified and whether it displeases the administration.

In the US, many scientists have been afraid to speak out publicly for fear of losing funding for their teams, or in some cases even their visas. And so others must step up. As the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities said in a statement: “The research ecosystem is global in nature, and what’s happening in the US threatens scientific endeavour everywhere.”

This article is a preview from New Humanist's Summer 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

I have recently carried out some detective work into one of my favourite paranormal studies.

It all began with an article that I co-wrote for The Psychologist about how research into the paranormal is sometimes ahead of psychology. In the article, we describe a groundbreaking study into eyewitness testimony that was conducted in the late 1880s by a paranormal researcher and magician named S. J. Davey (1887).

This work involved inviting people to fake séances and then asking them to describe their experience. Davey showed that these accounts were often riddled with errors and so couldn’t be trusted. Modern-day researchers still cite this pioneering work (e.g., Tompkins, 2019) and it was the springboard for my own studies in the area (Wiseman et al., 1999, 2003).

Three years after conducting his study, Davey died from typhoid fever aged just 27. Despite the pioneering and influential nature of Davey’s work, surprisingly little is known about his tragically short life or appearance. I thought that that was a shame and so decided to find out more about Davey.

I started by searching several academic and magic databases but discovered nothing. However, Censuses from 1871 and 1881 proved more informative. His full name was Samuel John Davey, he was born in Bayswater in 1864, and his father was called Samuel Davey. His father published two books, one of which is a huge reference text for autograph collectors that runs to over 400 pages.

I managed to get hold of a copy and discovered that it contained an In Memoriam account of Samuel John Davey’s personality, interests, and life. Perhaps most important of all, it also had a wonderful woodcut of the man himself along with his signature.

I also discovered that Davey was buried in St John the Evangelist in Shirley. I contacted the church, and they kindly send me a photograph of his grave.

Researchers always stand on the shoulders of previous generations and I think it’s important that we celebrate those who conducted this work. Over one hundred years ago, Davey carried out a pioneering study that still inspires modern-day psychologists. Unfortunately, he had become lost to time. Now, we know more information about him and can finally put a face to the name.

I have written up the entire episode, with lots more information, in the latest volume of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. If anyone has more details about Davey then please feel free to contact me!

My thanks to Caroline Watt, David Britland, Wendy Wall and Anne Goulden for their assistance.

References

Davey, S. J. (1887). The possibilities of malobservation, &c., from a practical point of view. JSPR, 36(3), 8-44.

Tompkins, M. L. (2019). The spectacle of illusion: Magic, the paranormal & the complicity of the mind. Thames & Hudson.

Wiseman, R., Jeffreys, C., Smith, M. & Nyman, A. (1999). The psychology of the seance, from experiment to drama. Skeptical Inquirer, 23(2), 30-32.

Wiseman, R., Greening, E., & Smith, M. (2003). Belief in the paranormal and suggestion in the seance room. British Journal of Psychology, 94(3), 285-297.

Henry Blodget, the co-founder of Business Insider, recently made headlines because he used ChatGPT to create a digital assistant, made it a woman, had it generate a headshot, and then immediately sexually harassed it. And the most unbelievable part of all of this is that he POSTED ABOUT IT ON HIS SUBSTACK. He admitted it. …

People are often surprised that I spend so much time with Corry, my ex-husband’s second wife, and that I speak so fondly of her. I love the woman, so do my children, and she loves them. Obviously, she comes as a package with my ex-husband, so he always comes too when we hang out, but I enjoy our time together nonetheless.

Traditionally, women who have bonked the same man are not expected to be friends with one another – definitely not if marriage is involved. If the second wife is younger, the first is assumed to be bitter and jealous, as though all that had attracted the husband to this new woman was the elasticity of her skin. The “newer model” is then often accused of having “second wife syndrome”’; insecure and resentful that her beloved had built a whole life with someone else that she will never live up to, even though it all went tits up.

The expectation that we must hate each other has forced both Corry and me to defend each other many times over the years, when friends and acquaintances presumed that they can make disparaging remarks about one of us to the other. But I am not envious of her, and she has never tried to get my ex-husband to lure our children into the forest and leave them there with only a husk of bread to eat.

Before Corry, when my ex and I were still deep in the agony of divorce, he began seeing a woman who did have a more Grimms Fairytales approach to blended families. I suppose a romantic meal with a new beau is slightly marred when he notices his ex-wife has left him 20 messages alternating between screaming rants and sobbing contrition. But so what if we need to spend a little time fantasising about blasting the “other woman” into outer space, while we process our fear or hurt? Women in particular are shamed for feeling jealous. But the more we can talk about this emotion, the quicker it will pass.

Years ago, when I was a student, I was furiously jealous when a very pretty woman in my local pub flirted with my then boyfriend, who flirted back. At one point she was on his lap. After trying to act like I didn’t care for a while, I flounced home in tears. The next afternoon, the girl turned up at my door. I was taken aback. She had bags full of grocery shopping. “I was horrible last night, I’m a bit jealous of you and, I dunno, I was a cow. I’ve come to cook you lunch to say sorry,” she said. We spent a happy afternoon drinking wine, giggling and scoffing food straight from the pan.

Everything is fixable if you own how you feel. Sometimes you can admit you are a boyfriend-stealing fiend and be forgiven. Especially if you are bearing food and booze. I broke up with the boyfriend but remain friends with The Cow to this day.

So are Corry and I really unusual? Or do we only notice when women are hurt and not coping well with being pitted against each other? We are constantly given the message that other women are either friends or foes, either we trust each other with our lives or we freeze each other out. We are expected to define our relationship with each other, good or bad. It’s not the same for men. I can’t think of a time when a first and second husband have been splashed on the covers of magazines and newspapers inviting us to compare them and decide who is better.

The first time Corry, my ex and I all went out for a pub lunch with the children, she and I had an arm-wrestle to determine which of us was the best wife. We all laughed ourselves silly, putting aside any notion that we would ever be seriously competitive with each other. (That said, it’s important for me to tell you that I won the arm-wrestle. Fairly easily, if I am honest, which is possibly why I mentioned it at all.) I quite enjoy the kudos I get when people know that I do not wish to boot my ex-husband’s second wife into a lake of fire. I casually drop it into conversations: “Flat white, please, no sugar, and did you know my ex-husband’s second wife knitted me this shawl?”

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Well, it’s a day that ends in “Y” so I guess it’s time to talk about RFK, Jr. again! We’ve already gone over his history of being an anti-vaccine psycho, and if you know …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Welcome back to the Continued Documentation of America’s Backsliding, where today we get to revisit a Religious Right classic: the parents’ right to control what a public school teaches their children based upon their …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! So, a number of you have let me know that there’s a hot new book coming out soon all about The War on Science. Now, it’s not out yet so obviously I haven’t read it …

The Diaries of Mr Lucas: Notes from a Lost Gay Life (Atlantic Books) by Hugo Greenhalgh

Meet George Leo Lucas. At the turn of the 1970s, he is a middle-aged civil servant in London, working for the Board of Trade, where he is responsible for overseeing the papermaking industry. Mr Lucas (never George) is a bespectacled and conspicuously bald-headed figure, conservative in politics and formal in attire.

Outside work, Mr Lucas lives a rather different life. A gay man, not “out” in contemporary terms, but active on the urban “scene”, he tramps the streets and haunts the bars of Soho in pursuit of intimate companionship with younger men – for a price. At a time when same-sex desire between men was stigmatised – and, until 1967 in England and Wales, criminalised – Mr Lucas is ever conscious of the dangers of his double life and perpetually fearful of arrest and exposure.

Between 1948 and 2009, he recorded his everyday life, observations and innermost feelings in the pages of a long series of hand-written diaries. These eventually passed into the ownership of writer and gay rights activist Hugo Greenhalgh, following a chance meeting and a somewhat awkward friendship. Lucas died in 2014, and Greenhalgh’s book, which draws upon and curates the diaries, was published last year.

Greenhalgh guides us through Mr Lucas’s life, starting in the late 1940s when the diarist is oppressed by his homophobic parents, and his national service in Germany is curtailed when he is caught cruising by the military authorities. The bulk of the book, however, explores Lucas’s rackety life in the 1960s, when the diarist was physically and emotionally entangled with a series of younger male sex workers. One of these connections, with a rent boy, “Irish Peter”, brings Lucas into dangerous proximity to a world of violent criminality.

More generally, Mr Lucas – even then a self-consciously old-fashioned figure – is unimpressed by the advent of the 60s’ “cultural revolution”, perceiving a mixture of social decline and “frivolity”. Greenhalgh is a perceptive guide to the diaries, shepherding the reader through an England long disappeared, in which the very real threat of arrest and prison haunted queer men. His narrative treatment of the diaries includes elements of his own biography, as well as providing a more general meditation on sexuality and sex work.

Diarists may be ordinary, but they are perhaps rarely normal. This is certainly the case with George Lucas, an obsessive who seems to have written his diaries in character as an idealised version of himself with an eye to posthumous publication, yet at the same time used them as a kind of confessional in which he reveals himself as a libidinous misanthrope and an incorrigible suburban snob. The result is a unique view of queer male life in postwar London. Lucas’s diary entries are often characterised by a mixture of sexual intrigue, gossip from the scene, the crushingly trivial and the absurdity of the human condition.

Greenhalgh is candid about his own youthful experience as a sex worker, something which provides him with insight into the emotional and psychological impact of transactional sex. One of the most startling revelations in the book, which considers the moral ambiguities and power dynamics of both commercial and intergenerational sex, is not from the life of Mr Lucas, but Greenhalgh’s own.

Meanwhile the question of whether Mr Lucas exploited his “boys” – all of whom were in their early twenties – is one which the book does not shirk. A pious if unconventional Catholic, the diarist had convinced himself that his patronage of sex workers not only helped them financially but provided them with a relatively harmless client. Similar to the 19th-century tourists of East London slums described in Seth Koven’s book Slumming (2004), Mr Lucas’s motives encompassed a jumbled combination of eros and altruism. He seems to have genuinely wanted to help young men in distress – but ultimately, Greenhalgh writes, only on his own terms.

There is a sense, too, that Mr Lucas was drawn to the drama provided by the damaged lives of his “rent boys and Irish layabouts”, even to the point of quietly attending their courtroom appearances.

A product of his times and his dysfunctional upbringing, Mr Lucas seemed unable to form a companionate intimate relationship. Greenhalgh concludes that his diarist’s unusual and unhappy life, full of emotional pain and the associated miseries of living in an age when simply being gay was illegal, offers few direct lessons for the present day. He does, however, take heart from Mr Lucas’s tenacity as a diary keeper and his resilience in the face of adversity.

We might also see Mr Lucas’s life as an exemplar of the messy ambiguity of the queer past and his diaries as a fine introduction to a vanished social world.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

Breaking news, a study published this month in Nature Human Behavior has found that American conservatives hate science. This news comes as a shock to everyone who has spent the past several decades not born yet. The researchers told the Associated Press that they hope this finding helps kick start their next project, determining the …

A Nose and Three Eyes (Hoopoe Books) by Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, translated by Jonathan Smolin

Egyptian author Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, who died in 1990, is one of the 20th century’s most prolific and popular writers of Arabic fiction. Born in Cairo in 1919, a contemporary of Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, Abdel Kouddous also enjoyed a long career in journalism. He was editor at the daily paper Al-Akhbar and editor-in-chief of the political weekly magazine Rose El-Youssef. His bestselling novel A Nose and Three Eyes, deftly translated by Dartmouth professor Jonathan Smolin, is being published in English for the first time, despite having twice been adapted for Arabic-language films – in 1972 and 2024 – and produced for radio and television. The novel explores lust, love and deception in 1950s Egypt, while critiquing the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser. According to Smolin’s enlightening introduction, some knowledge of Abdel Kouddous’s biography is necessary to fully appreciate the novel, and I’m inclined to agree.

Abdel Kouddous first rose to prominence as a writer in the 1940s, befriending Nasser and other Free Officers (nationalists in the armed forces, drawn from the ranks of the middle class, young workers and government officials) in the early 1950s. He used his position at Rose El-Youssef to uncover scandals among the ruling elite and to call for revolution. When King Farouk was eventually toppled in a coup d’état by the Free Officers Movement in July 1952, Abdel Kouddous was a prominent supporter of their reforms.

However, by January 1953 the writer realised that Nasser did not intend to hold democratic elections. A year later, annoyed by his former friend’s denunciations, Nasser imprisoned Abdel Kouddous for three months. On his release from jail, the editor turned to fiction, deciding to employ “the tools of metaphor and symbolism to retell his deeply fraught history with the revolution and dissent against Nasser”.

Like many of his previous novels, A Nose and Three Eyes was serialised in Rose El-Youssef. Abdel Kouddous would finish each chapter hours before it went to press, giving a sense of immediacy to the story. Smolin believes that “Ihsan’s relationship with Nasser – and Nasser’s romance with Egypt – provide a crucial lens through which to understand the work.” The novel’s main protagonist, the titular “nose”, is Dr Hashim, who is considered a “thinly veiled double of Nasser himself”. The eyes are three of his lovers, who represent “the three distinct phases of Nasser’s relationship with the nation” – first, the misplaced belief that he will overcome corruption, second, that he will heal Egypt, and finally his failed desire for pan-Arab unity.

In the autumn of 1963, Abdel Kouddous was seeing a young Lebanese woman, Hanan al-Shaykh, who went on to become a successful author herself (her novels in English translation include The Story of Zahra and Women of Sand and Myrrh). In her excellent foreword to this edition of A Nose and Three Eyes she confirms that she represents the novel’s third “eye”, embodying “a generation that believed in existentialism and modern society with progressive values”.

The first section of the novel is set in the early 1950s. After teenager Amina falls for Dr Hashim, she divorces her businessman husband, a representative of Egypt’s corrupt previous era and a man she has come to loathe. Amina believes that the sophisticated, eloquent, much older doctor will marry her, but he is a lothario, and Amina is eventually discarded.

The second eye is Nagwa Tahir, whose controlling mother turns her into a nervous wreck. When Dr Hashim treats her anxiety, they fall for one another. But Nagwa’s mother has already “sold” sexual rights to her daughter to the wealthy Uncle Abdu. The final part takes place in the late 50s as our protagonist pursues a young Lebanese woman, Rihab, who refuses to be confined by him. Smolin suggests their relationship provides “an obvious parallel for Nasser’s delusional infatuation with Syria in his failed romance with the United Arab Republic”.

While serialising the second eye, Abdel Kouddous was charged with “harming public morality”. He abruptly concluded the serialisation of the novel and left Egypt for the summer to allow things to cool down.

Even today, many may find the book’s themes unpalatable. Hashim repeatedly pursues younger women and exploits their infatuation with him. But reading the novel with its political context in mind, one realises that Abdel Kouddous was indeed challenging a deeply conservative society, and condemning the strictures and expectations faced by women.

A Nose and Three Eyes provides a fascinating entry into Egypt’s past, while also serving to illuminate how powerful men are able to abuse their position in order to dominate and assault women without censure. Plus ça change.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

Delighted to say that tonight at 8pm I will be presenting a 60 min BBC Radio 4 programme on mind magic, focusing on the amazing David Berglas. After being broadcast, it will be available on BBC Sounds.

Here is the full description:

Join psychologist and magician Professor Richard Wiseman on a journey into the strange world of mentalism or mind magic, and meet a group of entertainers who produce the seemingly impossible on demand. Discover “The Amazing” Joseph Dunninger, Britain’s Maurice Fogel (“the World’s Greatest Mind Reader”), husband and wife telepathic duo The Piddingtons, and the self-styled “Psycho-Magician”, Chan Canasta.

These entertainers all set the scene for one man who redefined the genre – the extraordinary David Berglas. This International Man of Mystery astonished the world with incredible stunts – hurtling blindfold down the famous Cresta toboggan run in Switzerland, levitating a table on the streets of Nairobi, and making a piano vanish before hundreds of live concert goers. Berglas was a pioneer of mass media magic, constantly appeared on the BBC radio and TV, captivated audiences the world over and inspired many modern-day marvels, including Derren Brown.

For six decades, Berglas entertained audiences worldwide on stage and television, mentoring hundreds of young acts and helping to establish mentalism or mind magic as one of the most popular forms of magical entertainment, helping to inspire the likes of Derren Brown, Dynamo and David Blaine. The originator of dozens of illusions still performed by celebrated performers worldwide, Berglas is renowned for his version of a classic illusion known as Any Card at Any Number or ACAAN, regarded by many as the ‘holy grail’ of magic tricks and something that still defies explanation.

With the help of some recently unearthed archive recordings, Richard Wiseman, a member of the Inner Magic Circle, and a friend of David Berglas, explores the surreal history of mentalism, its enduring popularity and the life and legacy of the man many regard as Master of the Impossible.

Featuring interviews with Andy Nyman, Derren Brown, Stephen Frayne, Laura London, Teller, Chris Woodward, Martin T Hart and Marvin Berglas.

Image credit: Peter Dyer Photographs

Dawn today is a line of apricot beyond the trees. It starts as a smudge behind Credenhill, the silhouettes of pines sketching themselves in. The valley seems sunk in half-light, without birdsong. But if I peer into the dimness below the brightening sky, I can see the valley being revealed, like a diagram of itself.

Pay attention to any slice of the British landscape and you begin to understand how it works, and why and when it took shape. In 1954, W. G. Hoskins’s popularising study The Making of the English Landscape helped a post-war generation realise that the British countryside is as manmade as any townscape. More than 70 years on, as the experience of the majority in Britain becomes ever more urban and digital, those lessons are increasingly forgotten. The rural environment is often disdained as boring, irrelevant or – worse – a kind of reactionary force in society.

Yet the countryside feeds us and provides our clean water and air. To state what should be obvious, these are the building blocks of life. They sustain everything, including the complexities of urban and indeed digital experience. The countryside is also at the cutting edge of climate change, and what’s being done here to minimise it should be at the forefront of our minds. We need to be able to read the countryside in order to understand both global markets and the sweep of history, as well as the effects of locality and individual action.

Right now, for example, the road at the end of this valley is still silent. But I know that in farm kitchens up and down these hills the lights are on, kettles are boiling and toast is being vigorously buttered. The agricultural working day starts early. For some, there’s milking to be done, usually around 5.30am or 6am before the cattle start to feed.

Herefordshire is the home of the Hereford breed, muscular champions with distinctive cream faces and red and cream coats. Herefords are beef cattle, grown for meat and not milked, but there are plenty of dairy herds in the county too. The early spring is when these herds are most likely to be dry – that is, not milked for a couple of months – in preparation for calving. It’s a time of year when cowmen may be freed up for other work. On farms that bring their cattle in there are still barns to be mucked out, and slurry pits to be tackled. Still, every half hour extra in bed of a frosty morning is a bonus.

Yet the kitchen lights are on; and many have been burning all night. Round here, this is high season for lambing. To our east, in the Cotswolds, lambing can be as late as Easter (that moveable feast). Go for a walk in March and you’ll often come across flocks of ewes corralled into small home fields or turned onto almost bare fields where winter kale has already been cropped, so they lose a bit of weight to help with the births. These practices are inflected by the modern Agricultural College, but they’re also traditional to those areas of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire: literally built into the landscape of dry-stone walls and stone-walled sheep folds.

Lambing season

Sheep have shaped the environment of those limestone wolds since medieval times, when wealthy landowners elbowed other forms of farming aside to capitalise on an international wool trade. Their wealth is celebrated by the pinnacled “wool churches” they built to dominate Cotswold towns and villages. Some traditional breeds, like the shaggy-fleeced Cotswold Lion, have always been kept for meat as well as their yellowish “golden fleece”. But this landscape – today again a wealthy enclave – is one of the first in which profit replaced husbandry of that human necessity, food.

Sheep farming is equally traditional to our west, in the mountains of Powys and Ceredigion, where lambing can start in January or even December. The received wisdom is that this gives lambs time to grow hardy enough to survive winter on the open fields. But lamb for the table is slaughtered at less than a year old: after a year, it becomes hogget and, after two, mutton. New season lamb is four to six months old and, traditionally, the biggest demand was at Easter: you do the maths, as the saying goes.

In a post-Christian Britain, where Easter tends to be celebrated with chocolate rather than a meat freighted with religious symbolism, the seasonal premium may be less marked and imported New Zealand lamb – product of the mirror annual cycle – irons out consumer demand. Still, any bonus helps hill farmers, labouring to make often less than a living. The Welsh government calls these holdings Severely Disadvantaged Areas, SDAs, and records that the average income of an SDA sheep farm fell by 45 per cent in 2022-3 to £28,700, the result of these shifts in global trade.

Geophysically, and so economically, Herefordshire is neither Cotswold tableland nor the slate mountains of Wales. It finds itself somewhere in between. Our characteristic Old Red Sandstone, which colours the county’s fields every shade from orange to plum purple, produces a rich clay loam. We’re a region of fertile river valleys, several of which map the county’s boundaries: Wye, Lugg, Teme and Monnow. This is a watery region, from the Golden Valley to Ross-on-Wye, which saw the birth of the world tourist trade in the shape of the Romantic era’s commercial Wye Tour. That also makes it prone to flooding. Thinly populated and therefore impoverished, the rural county’s infrastructure has been battered by this winter’s succession of storms.

But lambing must go on, come hell or literal high water. In neighbouring valleys, and up lanes so narrow that to drive them is like threading a needle, sheep farmers are “keeping watch over their flocks by night”. Lambs, like human babies, most often get born in the small hours. Farmers on well-appointed holdings may try to drowse indoors, helped by infra-red cameras in birthing pens. But the traditional way to do it is to wait up with the expectant ewes, in byres or even open pens. It’s a time of sleep-deprivation piled on sleep-deprivation, and the sharp chills of below-freezing nights do nothing to help.

The MP for Cider

Then all at once the sky lights up, and here we are. With little haze in the atmosphere, the landscape brightens into blocks of colour. The orchard lawn where young trees, not yet with bushy crowns, stand awkwardly cocked. A silver-and-shadow lake, where the ice has thawed and refrozen in fracturing patterns that look like fish scales. A hedge line. A wide slope of arable, this year planted with winter wheat. Smaller grazing paddocks on the hillside; and, above them, woodland. Coots are beginning to pick through lakeside grass, a buzzard lifts from his hilltop perch and glides overhead. Wherever I look, wildlife is beginning to stir.

Yet, layer on layer, this is a manmade landscape. The new orchard is part-replacement for the orchards that grew here until the middle of the 20th century. This is traditional orchard country; at the end of the 19th century, Hereford was even represented in parliament by a gentleman cider farmer. The Rt Hon Charles Cooke was known as the “MP for Cider”. Many of the orchards which remain within a radius of 10 or so miles of the county town are planted with sour cider apple or even perry pear trees. Their fruit can’t be used for anything else – it purses the mouth like a sloe.

In the UK, commercial large-batch cider increasingly uses apple concentrate – sourced from large-scale, cheaper growers in countries like China, Turkey, the US and Poland. Those countries are now the apple behemoths, and they’ve driven if not a coach and horses then certainly a fleet of articulated lorries through the countryside recorded in the Herefordshire Pomona. This seven-volume catalogue of the county’s apple, perry and pear species, much treasured by 21st-century biodiversity specialists, was compiled in the late 19th century. But today it reads as a lost environmental idiolect: Bastard Foxwhelp, Cock-a-gee, Golden Moyel, Hagloe Crab, Jolly Beggar, Peasgood’s Nonesuch, Gipsy King, South Queening.

Hundreds of acres of orchard have disappeared; more are grubbed up every year. But the mistletoe that floats its goldish balls among the orchard branches is visible at a distance, even in the subdued light of this early morning. This “golden bough”, which gave its name to the hugely influential “study of magic and religion” published by J.G. Frazer in 1907, catches my eye here and there this morning.

Family farms

Nearer the house than the glowing mistletoe, but further than the orchard field, the lake lies cockled with ice. About an acre in extent, this medieval carp lake is a record of over 500 years of settlement on this site. What’s more, it’s still full of carp. In summer these large, lazy fish reveal themselves idling in the shallows, or as they leap for flies. Mirror carp in silver and primrose; bronzed leather carp; common carp. Today it looks like habitat. It’s enough of one for a local wildlife trust to release otters here, but the pond was dug as a fish farm. And the fish resting under this morning’s lid of ice have unimaginably distant ancestors who were introduced to this water in the 15th century.

A. E. Housman’s “valleys of springs and rivers, /By Ony and Teme and Clun” lie north of here, in the country where Herefordshire meets Shropshire. But in this valley, too, there’s an abundance of springs, whose sites keep shifting. Though this pond is spring-fed, there’s a whole system of stream-fed carp lakes of similar size on the other side of the valley, in the lea of the hill. The waterway that feeds them used to be a major tributary of the River Wye. It appears on even the most sparsely detailed of county maps between the 16th and 19th centuries. Today it’s shrunk to a modest brook – not quite a winterbourne – which only comes to life when there’s flooding.

The field beyond the lake is huge and gently convex. It keeps the floods away from here. In the 20th century some ambitious estate manager ripped out hedges to create the “prairie farming” open field that was fashionable at the time. The 1970s were a decade in love with modernity, and big fields suited new super-sized agricultural machinery: combine harvesters in place of tractors, and closed cab tractors several storeys high to replace the old open saddle on a couple of axles, plus trailer.

Today this field is an almost luminous green in the intensifying morning light. But prairie farming, though it may suit the plains of Hungary, or the Ukrainian breadbasket, can be an awkward fit in the variegated, contour-rich terrain of British farmland. The destruction of hedges decimates wildlife. It also leaves topsoil free to shift and slip away – as dust when it’s dry, or mud when it’s wet. Herefordshire is lucky that, unlike the biodiversity deserts in parts of Wiltshire and south Oxfordshire for example, it remains largely worked by family farms. These small businesses, usually run by a single family that’s lived on-site and managed the same few fields, hedges and ditches for generations, aren’t seduced by “economies of scale” and “investment in plant” in the same way as the huge estate farms owned by land banking corporations, or wealthy farming consortia.

You can often guess at a glance whether land is being farmed by actual food producers whose home it is, and who therefore have every personal incentive to sustain their land. The more naked a landscape looks, the more likely it’s managed by a company primarily concerned with extracting profit.

Legible in the landscape

Of course, there are exceptions to this rule of thumb. Chalk downland is just one grassy habitat where hedges are non-traditional. Besides, hedges themselves are a quirk of British history. “Vegetable walls”, as a distinguished Romanian writer I know once described them.

Cheaper and quicker to build than masonry walls, and more durable than fences, hedges seen close up are trees trimmed short. In best practice, they’re knitted together by laying: their stems nicked and forced sideways in a long line of diagonals. It’s traditional, if only loosely accurate, to date a hedge by adding a century per species. The hedges on the hill opposite contain hawthorn, ash, hazel, field maple; but not all in the same stretch. Dog rose and bramble, nettles and dock mesh them together. They elbow up towards the wooded and impractically terraced and ditched terrain of the Iron Age hillfort, lozenges of paler green against stands of mixed forestry.

The hedged fields are a product of the Agricultural Revolution which saw gentry landowners enclose their estate land. Enclosure was a paralegal process that closed off common ground on which ordinary people practised subsistence farming. Common grazing land and strip farming had been part of the post-feudal deal by which an English peasantry with few rights continued to labour for local landowners.

But at the end of the 18th century, landowners embraced agrarian modernisation. Mechanisation meant they needed fewer workers, who instead of being settled were re-hired as day labourers. As William Cobbett records in his state-of-the-nation Rural Rides, written in 1822-26, among the many left without means of support or even a home, starvation was commonplace: “How long; how long, good God! is this state of things to last? How long will these people starve in the midst of plenty?” Like the desperate poor everywhere and at all times, they were delivered up to the Industrial Revolution as infinitely exploitable labour.

Yet perhaps the biggest monument to power within this landscape is the wooded top of Credenhill, which draws the eye constantly up towards a sky of by now almost Mediterranean blue. Here the second largest Iron Age hillfort in Britain encloses nearly 50 acres in a tremendous complex of banks and ditches, which centuries of farmers have dismissed as impractical to farm. The resulting woodland is now conserved by the Woodland Trust and home to fallow deer, muntjacs, foxes and raptors.

This typical valley, on this typical morning in February, is an environment of great beauty. But it’s absolutely without innocence. Britain’s social and political history is as legible in its landscapes as its townscapes. If we were to learn habitually to read it, we might begin to think about the rural environment as that which has undergone continual change – and so can be changed again.

Decision-makers could reinterpret the places from which our human essentials come: biodiversity literally keeps the planet alive. They could learn from what works here, and what doesn’t. Who knows what could be gleaned from a set of interlocking practices and systems such as this valley records. In taking advantage of how things work rather than trying to defeat them, the way sustainable family farming does, we might even survive.

Fiona Sampson’s “Limestone Country” is reissued by Little Toller.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

I have lots of talks and shows coming up soon. Meanwhile, here are two podcast interviews that I did recently. ….

I hope that you enjoy them!

 

The Edinburgh Magic Festival takes place soon, and I am staging a few events, including a talk on the magical history of Edinburgh, a magic workshop (joint with slight of hand expert Will Houstoun), and my ‘Invention of Magic’ show. For details, please click here. 

As part of the event, I have teamed up with Festival co-founder Svetlana McMahon and the amazing Young Carers charity to produce a fun optical illusion exhibition. Together, we created some mind-bending illusions, and then photographed the carers staging the images around the city. Each photograph features young carers doing what they do every day – making the seemingly impossible possible. 

If you are in Edinburgh, please pop into the Storytelling Center on the High Street, enjoy the free exhibition and watch our behind-the-scenes video. Here are a few of my favourite images….

 

I recently received a lovely email from a pal of mine, Ian Franklin. We met when I investigated alleged ghostly phenomena at Hampton Court Palace, and so I thought that it would be a good time to re-visit the work.

As a kid, I was fascinated by ghosts and hauntings. In the 1990s, I obtained a PhD in the psychology of the paranormal from Edinburgh University and then started my own research unit at the University of Hertfordshire. One day, I received a curious letter from Hampton Court Palace.

This historic Palace has been home to many British monarchs and is now a popular tourist attraction. It also has a reputation for being haunted, with many people experiencing unusual phenomena in an area now known as ‘The Haunted Gallery’. The letter invited me to carry out an investigation (the first at a Royal Palace).

I put together a team of researchers (Caroline Watt, Paul Stevens, Emma Greening and Ciarán O’Keeffe) for a five-day investigation. It proved to be lots of fun. For instance, before we started, the Palace staged a press conference to announce my study. During a break, I stepped outside to get some fresh air and some teenagers drove past. Weirdly, one of them threw an egg at me and it smashed on my shirt, leaving a large stain.  I returned to the press conference, said that the stain was actually ghostly ectoplasm and that this is going to be a tough investigation. 

At the time, Ian Franklin was working as a palace warder. He was kind enough to go through the historic records and figure out where people had reported unusual phenomena in the Haunted Gallery.   

Each day, I asked visitors to walk through the Gallery and write down any unusual experienced (e.g., suddenly feeling cold or sensing a presence). They were also given a floorplan of the area and asked to indicate the location of their experience. About 600 people participated. Interestingly, the experiences from those who believed in ghosts tended to take place in areas that Ian had identified from historic reports. Before the study, we had asked everyone to rate their previous knowledge about strange happenings in the Haunted Gallery, and we could see that that wasn’t a factor.

So, what was going on? We discovered that some of the experiences were caused by natural phenomena (e.g., subtle draughts), and speculated that others might be due to areas looking dark and scary. But who knows, maybe there actually are ghosts at the Palace! Importantly, the work showed that it was possible to carry out a rational and open-minded investigation into an alleged haunting, and it paved the way for my later ghost work (more about that in another blog post). Alas, little did I know that there would soon be lots of people (including those on TV) carrying out somewhat less scientific investigations into alleged ghostly phenomena!

Anyway, it was wonderful working with Ian, and the journal article about the study is here, and it also described in Paranormality. 

check, 1, 2…is this thing on? hi everyone! it’s been a while.

Someone contacted me hoping to find young atheists who might be interested in being part of a new series. I’m not particularly interested in having my mug on TV, but I would love to have some great personalities represent atheism on the show, so I offered to repost his email on my blog: My name […]

All throughout my youth, I dreamed of becoming a writer. I wrote all the time, about everything. I watched TV shows and ranted along with the curmudgeons on Television Without Pity about what each show did wrong, convincing myself that I could do a better job. I flew to America with a dream in my […]

A friend linked me to this. I was a sobbing mess within the first minute. I sometimes wonder why I feel such a strong kinship to the LGBT community, and I think it’s because I’ve been through the same thing that many of them have. So I watched this video and I cried, because, as […]

UPDATE #1: I got my domain back! Many thanks to Kurtis for the pleasant surprise: So I stumbled upon your blog, really liked what I saw, read that you had drama with the domain name owner, bought it, and forwarded it here. It should work again in a matter of seconds. I am an atheist […]