Cup of Tea? 🫖

Back - in moderation. Trying to find the whimsy and theatre-y and to avoid negativity and hate that this platform has in growing abundance. “If you’ve nothing nice to say then say nothing at all” is an adage many could remember online. Thank you to those who’ve reached out 🤗

A tenant farmer in the Cairngorms says land that sold for £500 an acre a few years ago now goes for £5,000. He is being moved off ground his family has worked for generations, because he cannot outbid the people buying it. The buyers are corporations, and they have no intention of farming a single acre of it. Here is how the trick works. A company keeps emitting carbon exactly as before. Same factories, same flights, same supply chain, same product. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants some trees, and announces to the world that it is now carbon neutral, or, if it is feeling brave, carbon negative. The emissions never fell. It simply bought a landscape to point at. Take BrewDog. In 2020 it bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, propped up with public grant money, and promised a million trees and the crown of the world's first carbon negative beer business, removing twice the carbon it emitted, forever. By 2023 roughly half of the 500,000 trees it had managed to plant were dead, killed by drought, with critics noting the planting was drying out the peat and releasing carbon of its own. The advertising regulator ruled its carbon-negative claims misleading. In 2024 it quietly dropped the badge and dismissed the entire carbon credit market as a flood of cheap schemes whose benefit was "questionable, maybe even non-existent." Then it sold the estate to a firm whose actual business is selling carbon offsets. That is the whole model in one story. Public money in. Dead trees out. A green halo worn for four years and then dropped. The farmer who used to be on that land, gone. The hillside passed to a company that exists purely to sell other people the right to keep polluting. This is no fringe case. In one recent year, half of every estate sold in Scotland went to investment funds, corporations and charitable trusts rather than anyone who would farm it. A third of the deals for plantable land are now done off-market, in secret, precisely so the local community never gets the chance to bid. So this is what net zero looks like on the ground. A man who produced food is priced out of his own glen. A corporation that produced emissions buys the glen, calls itself a force for good, and sells the carbon. The land stops feeding anyone. Nobody's emissions actually went down by a gram. The food was real. The farmer was real. The carbon saving is a line in a slide deck. And we have somehow decided the villain in all this is the man with the sheep.

Honey Bees make our food, A.I. doesn't. Save the Honey Bees, and not data centres

Honeysuckle (woodbine) is the birth flower for June, along with the rose. Woven around the front door it will protect your house from harm, & placed in a vase it will attract money. To Chaucer “wodebyne” symbolised steadfastness in love. #FolkloreSunday #FairytaleTuesday (CMB)

@rioserenity_ Definitely #SixOfCrowsSpinoff from Shadow and Bone. Need this gang on screen together

if you could get ONE more season of any TV show, what show would it be?

@Isaac2003_v2 8 for sure Btw I’ve never seen the map of the roads like this thank you

You just won a 2-week, all-expenses-paid vacation. But there’s a catch: you have to stay within one region the whole time. What region are you picking?

@hiccupism Same but I honestly don’t know why? Maybe because it’s so different and unsatisfying yet thought-provoking. I’m glad son had told me some of the lore and I’d seen the OG you tube and some videos about levels beforehand tbh because then it was more about admiring the art of it

@marypot I loved it

Saw #Backrooms yesterday with teenage son. What a weird, creepy and unsettling piece of cinema that is 😥

@sunshin3_wolfe @wylanvanfox Every single day 😭

I miss you wylan van eck.

@visitnorthyork Politicians who don’t take into account the lived experience and knowledge of the people who have tended the land for centuries

If you had to name the biggest problem destroying our beautiful countryside, what would it be?

@pinmrcus Congratulations on finishing! Keeping everything crossed that the perfect role comes your way

feeling a mixture of huge relief that i just finished uni and also dread because i have to find a job in a youth unemployment crisis

Oh, May. Every year I count down the weeks until your arrival, and then you pass in the blink of an eye. Here’s a look back at the beauty of May through my lens. Please follow my account if you’d like more. No politics, no AI, just countryside beauty. 📍 Peak District, England

@ItsRainingBen Thing is UK programmes are much better quality than playbills + have info on show, rehearsal photos etc not just cast list and bunch of adverts. With cheaper ticket prices I’ll happily pay a fiver for something like this one from show I saw few days ago + take photo of cast list

And this is why Broadway will always be superior to West End because what do you mean I have to BUY a program if I wanna take my silly little pre-show picture?

@weaselvontrapp @ItsRainingBen I wish there would be more places giving out cast sheets. A few places do that. Or the have to take a photo of the cast board when you go in.

@ItsRainingBen There’s a number of things prefer about London’s theatre culture, but it’s crazy to me that you have to go out of your way to find out the names of the performers you are seeing over there.

@yuribambis The bromance between Trevor and Jack O can never be beaten 💕

Jack O being Trevor's favorite is so cute and sweet and I love them to death

People 😩

"I asked ChatGPT" "I asked Claude" well I asked Aragorn son of Arathorn "what about second breakfast?" and he beaned me in the head with an apple

@WhatsOnStage #Redcliffe. I saw it in previews and was so blown away I’m going back in July

Which show have you bought tickets for most recently?

@yuribambis YES! I always think west end live weekend must be a bit bonkers seeing everyone just wandering about from the theatres to Trafalgar Square 😂

Imagine walking through the streets of London and casually seeing the cast of Next to Normal in full costume