Callow Hill

@DeniseM67887845 Congratulations - this is a wonderful achievement. Siobhán

SNA for 18 years. NQT today. Officially began my registration and I couldn't be prouder. The long way round is still the way. 15 year old me who left school & thought her dreams of becoming a teacher were over, would be proud. Never give up on your dreams ✨️

Heat kills dogs only walk from Dawn to Dusk

If you need to be told not to leave your Dog in a car on a hot day you don’t deserve to have a Dog!! #DogsDieInHotCars 🔥🔥

Put your dog first. If in doubt don’t go out

So true

Nobody deserves today more than Sienna ❤️ Her family came all the way from Wales to pick her up and put her at ease. Huge smile on my face

It's 37°C IN THE SHADE on our patio this afternoon. If you are one of those utter idiots walking your dog you are clinically insane. And cruel. No dog has ever died NOT having a walk... @Ralph_Retriever is keeping cool on his ice mat which has been in the freezer for an hour.

This

@ckb104 @itsme_urstruly I am so glad that you enjoyed being in Ireland🩷. Siobhán

@itsme_urstruly Ireland. I wanted it to be beautiful and magical and it exceeded my expectations.

What's one destination that completely lived up to the hype? 👀 Not just pretty on Instagram. Actually worth it!

A farmer dies in April 2026. His son inherits the farm. The farm has been in the family since 1847. The farm consists of: 300 acres of grazing pasture, a farmhouse built in 1892, a barn, a milking parlour, two tractors of varying ages, a Land Rover that runs about 70% of the time, and a herd of 180 Hereford-cross cattle. On paper, the farm is worth approximately £3.2 million. This is because land near him has been bought recently by a London hedge fund looking for carbon credits, which has dragged the comparable value of every field within forty miles upward to a number nobody local can justify. In cash, the farm produces a profit of about £28,000 a year in a good year. In a bad year it loses money. The son also works as a fencing contractor three days a week to keep the operation viable. The inheritance tax bill on a £3.2 million estate, even at the reduced 20% rate, comes to approximately £140,000 after the increased threshold is applied. The son does not have £140,000. The son has never had £140,000. The son has £4,200 in his current account and an overdraft. The son sells 60 acres to a developer to pay the tax. The developer puts solar panels on the 60 acres. The remaining herd cannot be sustained on the reduced land. The herd is sold. The barn becomes a holiday let. A different family eats Brazilian beef this Christmas without knowing why the price went up. The Treasury collects £140,000. The land never produces British food again.

@ElaineC54590844 And we had the most fabulous childhood...

This is exactly how life was, no eating out, no going for coffee, no restaurants and no holidays either. It’s just the way things were, there was no disposable cash and no ‘canned entertainment.’ The world of expectation is very different now.

@patrickdextervc I am so, so sorry. Nisha was so beautiful and such an important part of your videos...🩷. Siobhán

Last week, we said goodbye to our beautiful Nisha. She came to us as a rescue, after being found as a stray, and became a deeply loved part of our family, and part of the music too, appearing quietly in so many of the cottage videos. Thank you to everyone who noticed her, asked about her, and loved her from afar. The music in the video is called “Nisha”, it's a melody we used to sing it to her at home during Covid lockdown, and I later recorded it on my album Solace. She was deeply loved. We miss her so much

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next. Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it. Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

@CathySpark6512 @mattvanswol ❤️❤️

@mattvanswol I lost a child in pregnancy. Was never able to be pregnant again. I’m in my mid-60’s. I wish I’d been able to be a parent.

It is nearly an impossible task to convey just how amazing kids are to someone who doesn’t have any. The best way I can describe it is this: You spend your whole life thinking you understand love. Then one night, you’ll find yourself standing in a room at 2 a.m., just watching your newborn baby breathe, just to make sure they are still alive. And you realize in that moment that you would burn the entire world to the ground for the slow rise and fall of that tiny chest. You become braver and absolutely terrified at the same time. You start looking for exits in restaurants and worrying about that weird stranger in the parking lot. You discover a capacity for anger and violence you never knew lived in you until you think you might need it because someone might hurt your kid. The first time you see your kid, the entire world changes. You realize you are meant to live for them… not for you. And it feels good. It feels right. Like a key to a door you have always been looking at but could never open. And one ordinary afternoon probably while you’re folding socks or something dumb, it will hit you… This is how your parents loved you. This is what she felt watching you sleep. This is what your dad felt every time he watched you walk out the door. And you had no idea. You spent your entire childhood with no idea.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ It’s so beautiful, words fail to describe it. It’s just right, it was always meant to be this way. ❤️

@history99917180 Ha ha - love it🤣

Afternoon all. Sam got a new T- Shirt. Your thoughts.

We were raised on leftovers, secondhand clothes, and knowing when to shut up A trip to the seaside was the closest we got to a holiday Did we have a happy childhood? God damm right we did! Appreciate the little things and find joy in what you have, it won’t last forever.

Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada spoke about the contradictions of human nature: “Some people dream of having a swimming pool at home, while those who have one hardly ever use it. Those who have lost a loved one feel a profound sense of loss, while others often complain about their living relatives. Those without a partner long for one, while those who have one often don't appreciate it. The hungry would give anything for a meal, while the satiated complain about the taste of their food. Those without a car dream of owning one, while those who have a car are always looking for a better one.” The key to happiness is gratitude: truly seeing and appreciating what we already have, and understanding that somewhere, someone would give anything for what we take for granted.

playing hide-and-seek with 3yo son. just the two of us. he wants to hide together. we are hiding together. we are in the closet. it’s perfectly dark. we’re very cramped. there is no one looking for us. i am trying to explain this. he is laughing uncontrollably