Over the last couple of days, my inbox has taken an interesting turn. I have received a growing number of emails asking Cats Protection to campaign for the mandatory neutering of owned pet cats. They come from different people and addresses, but the text is identical. This is clearly a coordinated campaign, although despite some…
Local government reorganisation is, by its nature, a conversation that can very quickly become dominated by structures. Which councils will exist? Where will the boundaries fall? Who will be responsible for what? How will services transfer? What will the new governance arrangements look like? All of those questions matter enormously. Here in Oxfordshire and West…
Today, 8 August, is International Cat Day. Which seems as good an excuse as any to write about Blenheim. Not that I generally need much of an excuse. Living with Blenheim is one of the great joys of my life, but it is also a useful daily reminder that loving an animal and understanding an…
There is something profoundly captivating about standing a few metres from a lion. It is not simply the sheer beauty of the animal, nor even the extraordinary power that seems to ripple through every movement. It is the unmistakable recognition that, despite millions of years of evolution and very different lives, the lion and the…
There is something rather reassuring about arriving at a large Scout camp. Before you have spoken to anyone, before you have seen the programme or unfolded a map, you know roughly what you will find. Leaders wrestling with logistics. Young people laughing, building, exploring and making new friends. Somewhere, someone looking for a missing mallet….
Buckle up. This is an essay, rather than a short read… The Scarf Every year on 1 August I open a drawer containing rather more Scout scarves than any sensible person ought to own and spend a few moments deciding which one to wear. It is never quite as straightforward a decision as it sounds….
Yesterday evening I had the pleasure of visiting WINGS, and I drove home feeling reminded why events like this matter so much. For those who do not know it, WINGS is one of the UK’s largest international Scout and Guide camps. Every few years it brings together thousands of young people from across Britain and…
I have spent a good part of my working life travelling, working with people from other countries and, from time to time, trying to explain Britain to them. That is not always easy. The country we describe abroad is often tidier than the one in which we actually live. We talk about parliamentary democracy, ancient…
Whenever a long-established youth organisation changes its uniform, somebody inevitably declares it the end of civilisation. This week it is Girlguiding, which has announced the first significant whole organisation redesign of its uniform in more than three decades, (there have been other section redesigns along the way) alongside a simpler expectation of what members need…
One of the unexpected pleasures of leading Cats Protection has been discovering just how much there is still to learn. People sometimes assume that when someone becomes the Chief Executive of a charity, they somehow become an expert overnight in whatever that organisation exists to do. The reality is rather different. I arrived with many…
