Jennifer Iles

Their bravery is beyond words:

The Wren has lived in England since the last Ice Age, over 10,000 years. Despite its size, it produces one of the loudest songs in the countryside. A bird no larger than a thumb, announcing itself as if it owns the land. In English folklore, the wren was known as the “king of birds”. One story tells how it became king by hiding on an eagle’s back, then flying higher at the last moment. How to spot one: - About 10cm in length. - A small, round brown bird, feathers barred, with a pale stripe above the eye and a tail flicked straight up. - A loud and rapid song. - Found in hedges and undergrowth. Its rapid, bright song is one of the defining sounds of the English countryside. Have you heard their song where you live? Follow @oaksandlions for more posts about English wildlife. #England #EnglishWildlife #EnglishCountryside #Birds

Great work from The Daily Mail getting down there to confirm, expand and spread my story from Monday. dailymail.com/news/article-1…

Eduardo was sheared in May. He stood, as he stands every May, with the patience of a camelid who has done this nine times. He hummed once. The glossary lists it as "acknowledgement of necessary inconvenience." He did not move. He did not flinch. His fleece weighed three point eight kilograms. The fibre measured 22 microns. Sheep's wool from a typical British breed sits between 28 and 36. Eduardo's wool is finer than cashmere. No lanolin, so no chemical scouring. Hollow-cored, so it traps more warmth per gram than the wool of any sheep on this island. It does not pill. It does not itch. It sheds water in a way that synthetic fibre engineers have spent forty years trying, and failing, to replicate. The vegan alternative is acrylic. Acrylic is petroleum. Polyacrylonitrile, derived from crude oil, polymerised in a chemical plant using a hydrogen cyanide catalyst, dyed in processes that have, on more than one occasion, made the news. An acrylic jumper sheds approximately 730,000 microplastic fibres per wash. Into the rivers, the seas, the food chain, the placentas of unborn children, the lungs of the rest of us. Eduardo's jumper sheds nothing. At the end of its life, it goes back to the soil. The acrylic jumper goes to landfill for two thousand years. Now. The suffering question. Eduardo was, for eleven minutes, mildly inconvenienced. He stood still. He tolerated the sound of clippers he has heard nine times before. He was handled by a shearer whose hands he recognises by smell. Afterwards, he was lighter, cooler, and visibly relieved. He hummed twice in the register the glossary lists as "satisfaction with current arrangement," walked to the geometric centre of the field, and kushed. If he had not been sheared, the fleece would have grown through summer and caused him to overheat. By autumn it would have felted against his skin, harbouring parasites. The shearing is not the suffering. The shearing is the relief. The fleece is in Powys. Eduardo is humming. The summer is properly underway.

The dandelion The sun, the moon, the stars

Found these photos dating from June 1969. The man on the beach landed on Gold Beach on #DDay with Hampshire Regiment. The little girl behind him is oblivious to what happened 25 year earlier. Veterans can be seen in @CWGC Ranville War Cemetery remembering their comrades. #ww2

A 3,500 year-old Minoan clay pot looking like a modern shopping bag! 🛍️ From Pseira, Crete. Heraklion Archaeological Museum. 📷 by me #Archaeology

“If we didn’t step in, what would happen here?… in this case, it would just sit there, the holes in the roof would get bigger, the ivy would take over, it would still be a problem in 10 years’ time – just a bigger problem.” 1/7

What a showstopper of a topper! Brilliant 😀👏

@nickwallis It's a sorry not sorry announcement.

Scope cancelled a choir who wanted to raise money for them because of one member's lawfully held views. They have now done a reverse ferret. Hapless clowns. scope.org.uk/news-and-stori…

@division_opaque @Mr_Husky1 It was a disgraceful, heartless part of its history.

@JenniferIles @Mr_Husky1 I met one of those children as an adult. There had been a 4 Corners episode on Barnados, & someone mentioned it. He went very quiet and said "some terrible things happened in the home".

A 7-year-old boy slept under a bridge in London. No shoes. No food. No one who knew his name. A young stranger stopped and asked him a simple question — and what the child said next changed history forever. His name was Jim. The year was 1866. London was choking under black factory smoke, and the East End was a maze of sewers, starvation, and invisible children. Jim was one of them — filthy clothes, matted hair, eyes that held pain no child should ever know. Thomas Barnardo was just a 21-year-old medical student, quietly preparing to travel to China as a missionary. Then he met Jim crouched in a doorway, shivering. "Are there more like you?" Thomas asked. "Heaps of 'em, sir," Jim whispered. "More than I can count. We sleep where the dogs won't go." A few days later, Jim was dead. He died alone in the cold, another child the city had simply forgotten to notice. Thomas Barnardo never boarded that ship to China. Instead, in 1870, he opened a small home for abandoned boys in East London. Above the door, he hung a sign that read: "No destitute child will ever be refused admission." One night, the home was full and he turned a boy away. Two days later, that same child was found dead from hunger and cold. Thomas wept. He made a vow he never broke: the door would always open. When critics told him he was crazy and would run out of money, he kept building. More homes. Foster families. Vocational training. He gave street children — children people called "rats" — a trade, a name, and a future. He didn't ask for papers. He didn't ask for backgrounds. He simply opened the door. By the time Thomas Barnardo died in 1905, he had rescued more than 60,000 children from the streets of Britain. Today, Barnardo's is still one of the UK's largest children's charities — still keeping a dead boy's whispered words alive, 160 years later. Everything began with one man who stopped walking, looked down, and truly saw a child that the rest of the world had decided wasn't worth seeing. Tag someone who still believes one person can change everything. 💙

My MA by research thesis titled, "KEPI ROUGE TO BLEU HORIZON" (featuring my private collection) is now available to read! This has been an intensive 18 month project under the supervision of Dr. Tim Bowman, Dr. Mario Draper, Dr. Will Philpott, and Dr. Stefan Goebel.

They're back. ❤️ 1,476 Giants representing the number that died on D-Day stand in the Memorial meadow fields overlooking Gold Beach. Two nurses alongside them. From 25 April to 19 September. We look forward to seeing you. #standingwithgiants #dday

THE MAN THEY CALLED A NUTTER JUST GOT A KNIGHTHOOD In 2003, the Post Office fired Alan Bates from his small branch in Llandudno, Wales. The reason? He refused to repay £1,200 that the Horizon computer system had invented out of thin air. He invested £65,000 in that post office. He made 507 calls to the helpline. He kept meticulous records proving the software was broken. The Post Office's response was to terminate his contract and walk away. Their own internal documents called him "unmanageable." People at industry conferences called him a nutter and a thief. He couldn't afford a hotel room at one protest event. He slept in a tent. So naturally he spent the next 20 years building the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance, dragging the Post Office into the High Court, winning a landmark judgment in 2019 that proved Horizon was riddled with bugs, errors and defects, and triggering the overturning of more than 900 wrongful convictions. Over 900 people were prosecuted. Around 700 convicted. 236 went to prison. The scandal was linked to at least 13 suicides. The compensation bill has now passed £1.2 billion. Fujitsu (@Fujitsu_Global) knew about the bugs from 1999. The Post Office (@PostOfficeNews) knew. They prosecuted people anyway. Then they destroyed the evidence, sacked the forensic accountants when they got too close to the truth, and deleted social media comments from victims. Paula Vennells, the CEO who presided over much of it, collected a CBE. She kept it for years. Bates turned down an OBE in 2023 specifically because of that. He finally accepted a knighthood in 2024. After the ITV drama. After the public inquiry. After the nation had caught up with what he'd been saying since 2003. Twenty years. Sleeping in a tent. Called a thief by the people who were supposed to represent him. Sir Alan Bates was right from the start. The institution was lying from the start. That is the whole story. Sources: @ComputerWeekly | @BBCNews | @ITVNews | @guardian |

@chrisshipitv Harry is just after the reinstatement of his taxpayer funded police security. All of a sudden he wants to belong to the very family that he said used him.

Prince Harry: I will always be part of the Royal Family as he says he doesn’t want to be “gagged” when it comes to speaking out on issues like Ukraine. itv.com/news/2026-04-2…

@TheWoolPainter It’s fabulous.

Finally finished this beast. It’s the first coatigan I’ve ever made and it’s in super chunky, and very heavy. Those of you who know my artwork will know how much I love bright colour but I know this isn’t for everyone. However, I won’t be cold next winter. Hope you all have a fabulous weekend. 🫶

Howard Kevin hiding acrylic on board

Keith is a three-year-old Anglo-Nubian goat in a field in Devon. Keith has opened 7 gates, occupied a barn roof for 11 consecutive days, cleared an entire knotweed stand worth £4,000 to remove chemically, eaten Steve's bindweed, been in the churchyard twice, been in the road an estimated 14 times, eaten the water heater instructions, been in Dave's kitchen (standing there, not eating anything, just standing), and filed the structural details of every fence on the farm into a memory that has never once been cleared. He has done all of this while also being the single most cost-effective conservation intervention on the property. These are not separate facts. They are the same fact. Keith does not distinguish between the work and the escape. The escape is work. The work is escape. The fence is a project. The project is completed. The project leads to the next project. The knotweed leads to the churchyard. The churchyard leads to the road. The road leads back to the east ditch. The east ditch was cleared in one season. There is a man named Steve who has filed twenty-nine formal complaints about Keith. Steve's bindweed is gone. Steve does not yet understand that these are the same story. Dave has £387 in gate receipts, a positive net outcome column on every row since entry seventeen, a churchyard booking for next month, and a corner post with a 4mm flex that Keith has known about since Margot's visit and has not yet acted on. Not yet. Keith is not done. Keith is never done. Keith is ten thousand years of Zagros Mountain goat compressed into a Devon field, and the fence between him and the rest of the world has always been a negotiating position rather than a boundary. Be ungovernable. Do the work. Leave the field better than you found it. The knotweed is at 6%. Keith is thinking.