Margaret Leigh

As his eyes reached the level of the quarterdeck he saw a wave, a green-grey wall towering above the taffrail, racing towards them – swift inevitability. He strained his head back to see its top, curving beyond the vertical as it came yet still balancing with the speed of its approach, a beard of wind-torn spray flying out before it.

We can see this, for example, in the straightness and high quality of the roof timbers used for houses at Must Farm. This timber must have been grown and set aside for building purposes – people didn’t just stumble upon such well-formed young trees by accident. There is now abundant evidence that prehistoric woods were being carefully managed as lo

Writer and suffragist Lucy Mallory on the power of thoughts:

"Every thought a person dwells upon, whether he expresses it or not, either damages or improves his life."

He was growing fat again, but in any case he had no intention of getting out of the way of running up and down the rigging, as some heavy captains did: the feel of the shrouds under his hands, the give and spring of live rigging, the heave and swing on the roll as he came over into the top made him deeply happy.

It was a beautiful day, warm, though it was late autumn. I felt a childish pleasure walking along the streets, on the sunny side, and seeing the trees still green and people happy as they always seem to be on holidays. So I decided to take a short stroll and go to the tobacco shop in the square. Along the way I saw that a lot of people were stoppin

A so-called picture-stone memorial from the island of Gotland, dating to the fifth or sixth century and showing the characteristic burning disc thought to denote the sun, with the moon and stars. During the sixth-century climate crisis, such imagery disappeared as the sun lost its power, never to return in the Iron Age art of the North. This stone

Then I catch myself standing in front of a newsstand where fashion magazines are displayed, trying on, in my imagination, the whimsical modern hat pictured on a cover. If someone approaches, I let my glance slide over to the closest daily paper and pretend to be reading the headlines of the political articles. Then, as soon as I’m alone again, I re

• How can I use this experience?


• How does this experience relate to other situations I've been in? What can I learn for that situation?


• Knowing what I know now, what would I do differently next time?

In an age when paper was expensive, they were often recycled, hence their nickname ‘bum fodder’. For further toilet-related fun, the word ‘bumf’, or ‘bumph’, is a shortened version of this.