Hand Printed Gift Wrap Set

A selection of four hand printed gift wrapping paper sheets.

Designed and printed by Alice Smith for the Idler Academy.

The designs include a humorous Idler themed Toile pattern in two colours – sky Blue and charcoal Black, and the …

Ah, is this not happiness

We are introducing a new web project. It is based on a wonderful piece of Chinese writing called Chin’s Thirty Three Happy Moments. Chin Shengt’an was a 17th century playwright who once found himself stranded with a friend in a …

Country Diary 95

I’M AFRAID that I have many animal deaths and disappearances to report. The first is Twister the ferret. About six weeks ago, we separated him from Whisper, the female, because we didn’t want them to have babies. He was vasectomized, …

A Country Diary 81

Problems with Wood

OVER THE LAST two months, we have been mainly concerned with keeping warm. Now that we have two wood-burning stoves, writes Tom Hodgkinson, the amount of work for me in wood-chopping and preparation has nearly doubled.…

A Country Diary 71: A Vandal in the Veg Patch

Monday 7 January 2008

OF ALL THE animals we’ve had here, by far the most useless, costly, time-consuming, toilsome and stressful has been the pony. What an absurd indulgence. We have to rent its field, feed it, give it hay, …