I’ve been spending time with an old school friend of mine who is aghast at the amount of stuff I have:

• The clutter on my kitchen counter (but I like cooking! And preserving. And it’s a galley kitchen with very little storage space).

• The fact that I have more than one swimsuit (I hate having to put on a wet cozzie).

• The storage room that is full of the food I can’t fit in the kitchen, tools, camping gear and sports stuff.

• All the gear I take to Portland*

My friend has one swimsuit, and she swims almost every day. If she sold her house, she could fit everything she needs in a backpack. And it would still weigh less than 20kg.

She is definitely not preparing for the apocalypse.

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How Did I Get Here?

When I left home I went off to university with two suitcases. Until I bought a house, I spent my twenties with pretty much only what I could fit in the back of a car (and cars were smaller then).

By the time I shipped all my worldly goods from New Zealand to the UK last year I had four cubic metres’ worth. The shipper told me that is equivalent to the volume of four tall fridges. That’s a lot of stuff.

What happened? How did I go from a couple of suitcases to four fridges?

If you discount the diaries (journals) I’ve kept since I was 13 years old, and photograph albums, and a selection of letters from friends and relatives, most of what I have is useful. The books are mostly reference. My work requires pencils, pens, ink and paper, with the occasional use of watercolour (When I moved, I got rid of the majority of the originals, ripping them up and feeding them into the fire, spreading the ash on my compost). I definitely don’t have as many clothes as most women I know (except for my friend). All of my shoes are sensible. So how do I have so much stuff?

A One Bedroom Bungalow is Not a Tiny Home and it is Packed Full of Stuff

Though I’m in a good spot right now—close to my parents, in the countryside, with access to the beach (20 minutes by car, 45 minutes on the electric bike)—I have always liked the idea of a tiny home on a big bit of land, growing a lot more of my own fruit and veg.

Who am I kidding? I’d never fit four fridges’ worth of stuff into a tiny home.

I think I can blame one thing for my excessive amount of stuff: hobbies. I would love to be a minimalist, but how do you do that if you have so many hobbies? Until I get rid of the hobbies, I can’t get rid of the stuff.

Maybe. I’m not being completely honest here: I do have a tendency to hold on to things just in case. I like to know that if I need to repair or make something, I have the means to do it. I don’t know why I can’t just buy the thing when I need it. Perhaps the oil crisis of the 70s, and Covid, and the idea that one day I might not be able to buy the thing I need because of an AI-mediated apocalypse, is what makes me hold onto things.

And worse, makes me buy more than I need: five canisters of gas for camping trips I’ve yet to make. A sewing machine for a project later decided against. Four cans of paint to redecorate the bungalow (okay, I’m definitely going to use those, but it could be some time before I do).

Which brings me back to the time-consuming hobbies. I’ve got too many blooming interests: gardening, stand-up paddleboarding, swimming, bodysurfing, cooking, DIY, reading. This is a real problem and I don’t know how to resolve it.

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Maybe it Will Resolve Itself

I guess I’ll sort all this out eventually; realistically the next part of the life curve is likely to mean less stuff. Injuries, ageing and my general risk aversion will mean I’ll give up all of my hobbies in time.

Or maybe my next move should be to a tiny home—it would force me to work out what I really need in my life.

Though I’d definitely have more than one swimsuit.

Thank you for being one of the good humans.

Alex

P.S. *Molly has a lot of stuff.

She would love to get rid of her coat

and harness.

But she definitely would keep hold of all the food and at least one ball…until the next time she loses it, of course.

No ball games for now, though. The vet physiotherapist has prescribed strict, I mean strict, rest, with no ball games and absolutely no swimming for the next couple of weeks to allow her cruciate ligament to heal.

Let’s hope this platelet therapy does the trick.

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You can read more about my previous little lives in New Zealand and the Basque Country by checking out the book page at alexhallatt.com.

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I started this newsletter less than a day before the drought broke. Yippee!

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I remember 1976, that summer of drought that was so bad I was afraid my one-year-old sister was going to fall through the cracks in the fields and reach the centre of the Earth (mainly because Mum told me that’s what would happen if I let go of her). But 2026 feels fiercer. I don’t remember it being unbearable at school in 1976, but now schools are sending kids home, or teaching them in World War II era tunnels.

1976 was an anomaly. Most summer school holidays in the seventies and eighties featured days, even weeks, of being stuck inside, looking wistfully out of windows streaked with rain. I read a lot of comics, played a lot of board games, and never, ever went camping. Even in my twenties, you’d be mad to plan a barbecue more than a couple of days ahead.

When I moved to the bungalow at the end of last year, I bought a couple of 200 litre rainwater tanks to collect water off the roof. I figured we’d have enough rainy days in summer to fill them several times over, meaning I’d rarely be watering the garden with mains water. How wrong I was. An excruciatingly wet winter was followed by a long, hot summer of drought (worst in the usually wet West Country). This is exactly what climate scientists and their models have been predicting (since the early 90s!) would come to pass if we didn’t act on climate change.

Well, we didn’t.

So, after another long, dry summer, England is finally taking action!

With hosepipe bans.

This week, a day before the drought broke, Wessex Water instituted one (A Bere Regis local told me that a Minister for Drought was appointed by the UK government in August 1976, just before relentless rainfall ended the drought in spectacular fashion).

Understandably, the grumpy gardener is even more grumpy than usual. For him, the ban seems ridiculous. And he’s insisting,

As if that’s going to work.

The water industry was privatised by Thatcher in 1989. Pretty much as soon as that happened, they stopped building reservoirs, because there’s no profit in building infrastructure—only in charging more and more for a worse service (as I was updating this post in the rain, Surfers Against Sewage alerted me of unsafe water quality in Weymouth’s Bowleaze Cove and Portland Castle’s beaches. Because they haven’t invested enough into the aged sewer system either)

Now, decades of underinvestment in water are showing us the consequences. Perhaps, like with the renationalisation of South West Trains, the government will take real action.

Or perhaps next summer I’ll grow prickly pears instead of beans.

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Thank you for being one of the good humans.

Alex

P.S. I took Molly to the vet on Tuesday. She went in for x-rays, which confirmed what the vet physiotherapist had suspected—a tear to the cruciate ligament of the knee. The vet drew blood, spun it down, and administered platelet-rich plasma to promote healing. Molly had to be sedated for the whole procedure, but unlike when she had an x-ray last year, she didn’t come out completely zonked, and she demolished her dinner when we got home. She was looking a little sorry for herself, not because she looked like she’d been in a fight with a hedge trimmer, but because she wasn’t allowed to go for a walk at all.

Hopefully this treatment and her gradual reintroduction to exercise, will get her back to being fighting fit.

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You can read more about my previous little lives in New Zealand and the Basque Country by checking out my book page at alexhallatt.com.

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Why I Didn’t Buy a Shed

If you want to buy a shed in England (just a normal, no-frills shed, not a fancy place for sleeping in or entertaining guests over summer) it’s going to cost you. A basic one typically runs around £500 and you’re getting a shed made of thin wood that isn’t suitable for English conditions. Most cheap sheds become dilapidated pretty quickly. There was a shed in the garden of my bungalow before I moved in, but the roof went, so Aster (the company that sold the bungalow to me and the one that barely maintains the bunaglows it rents to my neighbours) tore it down.

I didn’t want to buy a fancy shed I could rent out on Airbnb, and I didn’t want to buy a shed that would be rotten within a couple of years. So I made one. I learned how to do it using books, YouTube videos and by building a really bad shed.

The Bad New Zealand Shed

When the ex-boyo and I moved back to his house in New Zealand in 2017, the back of the house had been badly damaged by a “slip”. A combination of earthquakes, loess subsoil, under-runners and days of heavy rain made the slip inevitable. Over a tonne of dirt slid down from what was a steep paddock. The upsides were that the bad tenants moved out immediately and that the insurance paid for a terrace that became part of my garden.

Getting planning permission to repair the back room took forever. When the work was finally done, there was a shedload of material that came from the old, shonky add-on: corrugated steel roofing, lumber and windows. I decided to make a potting shed, and the only thing I had to buy was screws. I nearly always build things using screws, so that if I get things wrong, I can take them apart and put them back together again.

Which happens a lot.

Before I left the boyo and came back to the UK with Molly, I asked whether he wanted me to take the shed down. He did. I took it apart and gave away most of the materials on Freecycle to someone else.

The Good New Zealand Shed

Far more successful, in that New Zealand garden, was my studio. It was a kitset shed from SheShed (terrible name, good sheds). The hardest part was preparing the super steep slope. It took four months to dig out a platform in the hillside with a shovel, then dig deep holes to put in the eight piles (I wanted the shed to stay put and not slide down the hill. Happily it is still there, six and a half years later). I also carried up the literal metric tonne of timber from the road.

When the builder who helped me assemble the shed over a couple of days arrived, he carried the remaining heavy bearers up the hill as if they were matchsticks. It still took the two of us two long days to assemble the shed. But all the work was worth it. It was the studio I worked in through lockdown and beyond. I was gutted to leave it when I moved back to the UK last year.

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The Bungalow Shed

The view from the shed in my back garden at the bungalow isn’t quite the same, but it doesn’t matter. All I needed was somewhere secure and weather-tight to store my electric bike and garden tools. I bought the wood for the framing, because I wanted the shed to be straighter than the first one I built, and I bought wire mesh to keep rats from nesting underneath. Everything else was recycled.

The wood cladding was either from pallets, or the skip near the Dorset Reclamation place in Bere Regis. I also clad part of the shed in ex-army corrugated steel (very strong, very heavy), which I used on the roof. I used stakes from trees released at Brian May’s Wood for the roof supports. The perfect door for the gap I’d left was also in the Dorset Reclamation skip.

The foundations are old sleepers, dug into the clay soil, charred on the outside to give them an extra layer of protection against rot. The paint came from two different sources: brand-new, grey shed paint for a little more than a tenner, from someone selling it on Facebook (because you aren’t allowed wooden sheds in park home developments due to the fire risk), and orange paint (yay!), for nothing, off Freecycle. I finished painting it last weekend, and I’m pretty happy with it…

…except I put it at the wrong end of the garden—it might shade my windows in the winter. We shall see.

At least I built it using screws.

Here’s a video of the process for anyone thinking of making their own shed.

If I can do it, anyone can!

Thank you for being one of the good humans.

Alex

P.S. Molly has been good this week, mainly because she has had pretty much no opportunity to be bad. Except for chasing the sea birds at the local beach.

Bad for them and bad for her.

The amazing vet physiotherapist said that her limp wasn’t due to her hip dysplasia (something that was only found by x-ray when the Portland vet suspected she had a cruciate ligament tear. It was the vet physiotherapist who suspected focal seizures. A ketogenic diet is keeping those under control).

No, now it is a cruciate ligament tear, probably. Anyone who doesn’t know us would suspect Munchausen syndrome by proxy (now called “fabricated illness by proxy”, apparently. I wonder if we are gradually renaming all diseases named after men), given the number of ailments Molly has had since we arrived in England.

She’s back to the vet on Tuesday for another x-ray to confirm, platelet therapy to follow if that’s the case. I hope the insurance will pay for this without me having to fight for it. But mainly I hope that the treatment will get her back to her normal, active self.

If you’d like to support my work without an ongoing subscription you can click the image below to

You can read more about my previous little lives in New Zealand and the Basque Country by checking out my book page at alexhallatt.com.

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The “something much naughtier” is paywalled at the very bottom of this post, just in case anyone from the Lulworth Estate is a free subscriber. Because there is no way they would pay riffraff like me to read my work.

Bums Banned, Guns Fine

I’m always amused by the offence taken by a vocal minority of Americans (I’ve not had a single complaint by any other nationality) to the bottoms in the second book in the FAB (Friends Against Bullying) Club trilogy.

Bottom Alert

Scroll down quickly if you do not like to see cartoon bums!

Being kids, this was the password to the FAB Clubhouse. The 8-12 target demographic for the book love it!

You can live in a country that terrifies children with metal detectors in schools and training to prepare for possible shooters, but you cannot show them a cartoon of a bare bum.

I can’t imagine those folk could stomach a trip around Dorset, seeing the Cerne Abbas Giant, Shitterton and Scratchy Bottom.

Scratchy Bottom

The impact of tourism on my local beach is stark.

Tourists used to be put off by the big walk down and up, but now they arrive en masse. Consequently, there is much more litter—cans, sweet and crisp packets and so many plastic bottles.

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Unlike in the past, when no one would dream of staying on the beach, it’s now common for me to encounter a tent. Are they the ones leaving the litter? Because if they were the types to leave a place better than they found it, they’d set up their tent late and pack up early.

But I’m just jealous. I wouldn’t have the nerve to camp on a beach owned by the Lulworth Estate, who charge a fortune for parking, camping, filming and anything else they can think of on the land that their ancestors stole from us commoners (on this topic, I highly recommend The Book of Trespass).

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There’s a path to the beach that I’ve taken since I was a kid, that goes through Scratchy Bottom.

Any steps down to the beach were eroded a long time ago, but we always used to go down there anyway. I don’t know whether the estate has fenced it off because it’s dangerous, or because they don’t want to maintain it— probably the latter. They must make a shed load of dosh from tourists, but they don’t like spending it on the infrastructure needed for all those people who come to visit this UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Anyway, I don’t mind the fence and the sign that the path is closed, but I do mind the barbed wire they use in the fencing. If people want to go down there at their own risk, why not let them?

And why not have a litter bin by the fence so that tourists don’t throw their litter over the fence for people like me to pick up?

Rant over.

(Paid subscribers, scroll to the very end)

Thank you for being one of the good humans.

Alex

P.S. Molly has limited scope to be naughty at the moment, because she’s being carried around a lot (and on a lead when she isn’t). But I don’t carry her indoors, so she used that as an opportunity to be very, very naughty this week.

We went over to Portland to join my sister and her dog. Oreo is considerably bigger than Molly, and Molly can’t terrorise her the way she terrorises smaller dogs. So when Oreo barked at her before she came in, and asserted the fact that it was her house (fair enough), what did Molly do?

Well, I didn’t witness the act, but I am almost 100% sure that the little puddle of pee right next to Oreo’s food bowl was Molly putting her in her place.

Bad dog.

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Right, now to the secret part…

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The village shop in Bere Regis is amazing. It’s a Nisa, aligned with the Co-op (though I’m not sure quite how that works, because I can’t use my Co-op card there), but it has very personal service, with staff who are all friendly and chatty (even the teenagers). It is small on the outside:

On the inside, it’s a rabbit warren of all sorts of things. Store cupboard staples, bread, veg, household essentials, a chiller of meat and dairy and a freezer of ice cream (I’m sure there are other things in that freezer, but I never get beyond the ice cream). Keep going back and there is a whole little stationery section, plus papers, magazines and a big rack of crisps. You’ll also find wine, and beer, and spirits (things you aren’t allowed to buy in a New Zealand supermarket, no matter how big it is). The opening hours are fantastic, it’s got a post office, and I have benefited greatly from the seeds they give away when the front covers of the unsold gardening magazines are returned.

And it is a five minute walk away. I don’t have to turn on Zippy when I realise I don’t have yeast for the bread I’m making, or milk for an unexpected visitor.

Piddle Valley Post Office

The shop in my parents’ village in the Piddle Valley is on another level. When I was a kid, it was a boring little post office with confectionery, crisps and a few basic staples. It has since moved to an even smaller building, the old granary, but it seems to do more with the limited space it has.

It’s bursting with far more things I actually would buy than the bigger Bere Regis shop: Purbeck ice cream, Dorset flapjacks, Morgan’s Dorset honey, Jurassic Juice (of course), a huge selection of cheeses, and locally baked bread and pastries. And then there are the blueberries…

Secret Wartime Blueberries and Other Delights

The fresh fruit and veg is fantastic, because it comes from the market in Wareham. Much of it is the same stuff you’d find in a supermarket, but it’s fresher. There are also things grown very, very locally. Watercress comes from Waddock Cross (I should note that the Bere Regis shop sells Bere Regis watercress), and the blueberries are hand-picked by Gerald (name changed as I’ve never met him to ask permission). and come from a secret location, described only as the rolling hills of Dorset.

Gerald takes pride in picking only the ripe blueberries, so you won’t find the nasty hard reddish ones that take you by surprise in a supermarket punnet. And the blueberries are probably bursting with polyphenols and other things that are good for you, because the plants have been growing since the 1940s (which means they’ve had decades to build a much richer relationship with the fungal networks in the soil that feed them).

There are also unique cards by local artists, a fully functioning post office, and some really good chat (although if they haven’t seen you in there before you’ll probably be interrogated as to where you come from).

Village Shops Beat Supermarkets

Village shops are usually staffed by locals and supported by locals, and they’re an important part of the community.

• Unlike the supermarkets, my heart doesn’t sink when I walk in; I’m not assaulted by aisle after aisle of ultra-processed food with low nutrition but high profit margins.

• Unlike the supermarkets, local shops aren’t out to make money for distant shareholders, but try to survive and serve their community.

• Unlike the supermarkets, they’re not replacing their counter staff with robots.

For many people, going to the shop might be the only contact they have with anyone all day—that’s often the case for me in winter, when the rain is keeping the walkers away and the grumpy gardener isn’t out tending his plot.

Yes, village shops might cost a few pence more here and there, but that’s a price worth paying to resist the robots.

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Thank you for being one of the good humans.

Alex

P.S. Molly isn't as bothered by her lameness as I am, and is itching to get back to her swimming. We're off to Portland today, and I'm sure she'll go absolutely bananas when I carry her down to the sea.

She’s not quite so keen on the backpack.

If you’d like to support my work without an ongoing subscription you can click the image below to

You can read more about my previous little lives in New Zealand and the Basque Country by checking out my book page at alexhallatt.com.

More Reviews Help Cartoonists Make a Living by Selling More Books

If you are one of the many readers who have enjoyed my books (usually available for free in libraries, like my latest, A New Zealand Diary), please leave a review, ideally on Amazon (where many people research books, even if they don’t buy them there) or Goodreads.
It costs only your time and helps me do battle with the algorithms.

Thank you.

Over Two Years of Cartooning in the Age of AI

I started playing around with Midjourney, an AI-powered image generator in 2022 (not knowing at the time that our copyrighted work had been used to train it). It was like using a sophisticated stock image in my work (and now stock images are full of AI-generated images). It was a novelty that quickly wore off, as the images it generated weren’t mine.

I wrote the first Cartooning in the Age of AI newsletter in June of 2024 .

Much of what I have written over the last two years was about how we could do two things:

1. differentiate ourselves from AI by leaning into what makes us human (lived experience and connection with other humans), and

2. use AI to help us do the non-creative parts of our work.

   

In 2024 I was using ChatGPT to do the mundane things in life, like writing to the council about allowing dogs on buses (Christchurch is now doing this! Yay, AI emails!). I continue to use AI to draft book blurbs and bios because I am rubbish at this:

I sometimes use AI to research topics, but find that it often hallucinates responses, so you have to read the sources for yourself. And there is something about doing your own research which leads you to places you didn’t know you were looking for, and gives more depth to your writing and work.

The new Mac OS wanted to activate AI assistance this week. I declined. I imagine in the future that won’t be an option. Because AI is being integrated into everything now. There is no putting these genies back in their bottles.

Even as American AI companies fight to dominate the market with their pay-to-play products, and the US government makes half-hearted attempts to rein them in, the Chinese are catching up and disseminating open-source models around the world. AI will soon be impossible to opt out of without going fully off-grid. And I’m not sure even that will work (does anyone else feel like we are living in The Circle?).

I now see AI-generated imagery in real life. Here are posters that have been put up around the village:

The person creating them is probably using a tool like Canva, and has no idea that the images have been generated by an AI that has been trained on our data, with no consent from us and no compensation. This is the major beef that we have as creators, and most people are still blind to it.

They don’t even think twice about using AI-generated content when they are asking whether artists would like to take part in something:

I only hope that as AI slop becomes the new clip art, potential clients will look for human artists doing something different.

AI Slop vs. Real Connections

I tried to use AI as part of an AI-assisted action plan to increase my visibility on Amazon. Despite getting AI to write the blurbs of my books, help me with A+ content, and generally use all the tools I could to make my books stand out, the marketing was a resounding failure. I have had success marketing on Amazon in the past through their ads. But now you cannot compete with the mountain of AI slop that is on there. People cannot find you, even if you pay Amazon to advertise to them.

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Instead, we come back to making connections with people who then want to support your work.

I wrote about my first (hopefully not last) real-world book launch, and how that lead to selling out the first edition of A New Zealand Diary to launch the book into the world. I had way more success selling that book in person, than I have had paying for marketing on Amazon.

This newsletter is another way I connect to people. And I am also part of a wonderful community of like-minded people on the New York Times Connections comments page.

One of my supporters there recently recommended Reasons to be Cheerful. After not selling any copies of this book on Amazon for months, I suddenly saw dozens of copies sold in a few days. The money will be welcome when Amazon finally credits my account, as it should pay for the doggie backpack I’ve had to buy to carry Molly.

Being More Human With Dogs

There is a dog on the cover of that book, my previous Jack Russell, Billie. One of the ways that many cartoonists connect with people online (and in real life) is with their dogs. Anyone who reads this newsletter knows that Molly is an important part of it. Dogs make people more human.

What’s Next

AI is not going anywhere, but neither are creative people. AI will probably dominate creativity in the way that processed food has dominated nutrition. Most people will gravitate towards it as the easier, cheaper way to harness creativity, even if that has terrible consequences for working artists (or wannabe ones).

But there will be people who won’t have an interest in run-of-the-mill AI output that has no soul. It’s not art if there is no human behind it. If I’m going to be successful as a creative person, I have to connect with people on a human level—showing the real person behind the work, meeting them where they are online, or in real life, and focusing on finding those who appreciate what is unique about my work.

Being more human seems to be the only way forward. Otherwise we’re in a race to the bottom that AI is winning.

I found an audience with this newsletter, and I appreciate everyone who has connected with me. But I don’t want to repeat myself, and I don’t have the mental energy to find more cartooning in the age of AI topics to write about. I’ve written everything I need to say about this for now.

Because there is another project that needs my mental energy: a novel that is currently in a very shitty first-draft stage. Once I’ve wrangled it into a better draft, I plan to serialise it in a different Substack newsletter, and I’ll let you know when that happens.

Probably.

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I’ll also keep writing about my little life in England in my Illustrated Epistle; Molly and I hope you keep reading.

Thank you for being one of the good humans.

Alex

P.S. Molly and I went to Portland at the weekend and enjoyed swimming at Chesil beach and off the rocks at Portland Bill. But despite me carrying her as much as I could, she got away from me at times and was limping badly by the time we got back.

She is now on a stronger painkiller and enforced rest.

She does not like it.

But we have to think long term about all the summers to come (and perhaps she can be more active towards the end of this one).

And if you’re not the subscription type, you can also support what I do by buying me a coffee, or Molly a treat (or a ball), by clicking the graphic below.

More Reviews Help Cartoonists Make a Living by Selling More Books

If you are one of the many readers who have enjoyed my books (usually available for free in libraries, like my latest, A New Zealand Diary), please leave a review, ideally on Amazon (where many people research books, even if they don’t buy them there) or Goodreads.
It costs only your time and helps me do battle with the algorithms.

Thank you.

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The post I had planned to do this week (dinosaurs! RAAAARRRR!), has to be postponed; my work week was upended by the discovery that Molly had fleas.

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Molly, the ex-boyo and I arrived back from our holiday late last Thursday and have been getting back into our routines. For the ex-boyo, that meant flying back to New Zealand. It was sad to see him go, but his dog was overjoyed to see him come home after the six weeks he was away.

The Patch Has Grown. And some.

It's amazing how this part of England has tr…

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Molly and I have left our little life in England for a holiday in France and Spain, visiting old friends in the Basque Country and tiki-touring a little further afield, with Zippy being tested to his limits along the way.

Paid subscribers are invited to join us as I sketch postcards and send out little posts via my phone. Everyone else, we’ll see you next week!

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Molly and I have left our little life in England for a holiday in France and Spain, visiting old friends in the Basque Country and tiki-touring a little further afield, with Zippy being tested to his limits along the way.

Paid subscribers are invited to join us as I sketch postcards and send out little posts via my phone. Everyone else, we’ll see you at the beginning of July.

Laredo

We left our friends in Hondarribia and drove on to a campground in Laredo. It was by the River Treto estuary and had a dog friendly beach. We found out why when I walked around it at low tide. It was dirty, and not because of dogs… I’m glad I didn’t swim with my head below the water. Neither did Molly. At least dogs were allowed on the cleaner main beach in town before 9 am.

We noticed a lot of differences between the campground in Spain and ones we had stayed at in New Zealand (I don’t have much experience of camping in England—my parents are not fans of being under canvas)…

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Molly and I have left our little life in England for a holiday in France and Spain, visiting old friends in the Basque Country and tiki-touring a little further afield, with Zippy being tested to his limits along the way.

After a long drive through France, we made it to the Basque Country. The ex-boyo and I are still talking. But it was touch and go during the drive.

Paid subscribers are invited to join us as I sketch postcards and send out little posts via my phone. Everyone else, we’ll see you at the beginning of July.

Hondarribia

Now I understand why old people holiday in the same place year after year.

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Molly and I have left our little life in England for a holiday in France and Spain, visiting old friends in the Basque Country and tiki-touring a little further afield, with Zippy being tested to his limits along the way.

I haven’t fallen out with the ex-boyo who is joining us for the ride.

Yet.

It was a pretty close thing navigating through France yesterday.

Paid subscribers are invited to join us as I sketch postcards and send out little posts via my phone. Everyone else, we’ll see you at the beginning of July.

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A Jack Russell, an Ex and an Electric Car in Europe—What Could Go Wrong?

One of the advantages of living in England is being so close to mainland Europe (New Zealand is four hours by plane to get to its nearest neighbouring country, Australia). Assuming she gets her Animal Health Certificate (ove…

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Growing Problems

There is no weekly farmers’ market anywhere near here; there isn’t even one I can walk to once a month; I would have to drive. It’s a 40 minute cycle ride to Wareham, which has supermarkets and a market on a Saturday. Even there, the fruit and veg come from wholesalers. So the best way to get fresh fruit and vegetables is to grow my own.

…

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I was going to write about weeks five and six of the AI assisted action plan, but ran out of time (the ex-boyo arrives tomorrow and I have so much to do!). I was also distracted by AI spam.

Are You Getting Tailor-Made, Pe…

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I have a fair amount of experience of wild camping. It is very common in New Zealand, where there are national parks where you can set up a tent and camp for free (not on the Great Walks, but on most of them). And many years ago, when I walked the Coast to Coast in the north of England, the ex-boyo and I wild camped a lot (even though it wasn’t strictly legal). We set up late, packed up early, and always left the campsite the way we’d found it, or better.

The Gear

When I moved back from New Zealand, I brought nearly all my camping gear with me, including a little camping stove that has served me well on many a trip in England, Australia and New Zealand. The one thing I couldn’t bring back was the gas canisters, so I bought a few before my trip and took the smallest one.

Big mistake.

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(I’ve gone long, so you may wish to click the black text title to read this on Substack)

A little Road Trip

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Is This AI Action Plan a Pointless Exercise?

As I looked at this fortnight’s action plan, I wondered how much of my time I should be investing in something generated by AI.

But then I thought: I spend so little time think…

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It’s fascinating that Dorset features that seem permanent and immutable, were formed from living organisms and can be rubbed out by weather and waves. The hard flint used to make blades in the Stone Age came from the silica in sea sponges! And then there is the limestone.

The Cretaceous takes its name from the Latin for chalk, ‘creta’. Tiny organisms that were alive about 100 million to 65 million years ago died. They were compacted to create limestone (chalk is one kind of limestone) cliffs and downs hundreds of metres tall. In the South Dorset Ridgeway, near Weymouth, you can see King George III (the mad one) and his horse carved into the chalk. And then there is the notorious Cerne Abbas Giant.

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Swallet Holes

Limestone is all over Dorset, and it behaves very badly with water. Rainwater contains dissolved carbon dioxide from the air, which makes it mildly acidic. It reacts with calcium carbonate in limestone to form calcium hydrogencarbonate, which is soluble and washes out of the stone (this water is now “hard” water), often causing the ground to collapse. Because of this, the landscape around here is peppered with swallet holes. The largest I know of in Dorset is in the Piddle Valley and is known as Culpeppers Dish (with various spellings and uses or not of the apostrophe. The Spoon is nearby). It seemed enormous and vertiginous as a child and is quite big for a Jack Russell. But Molly loves to race up and down it in pursuit of balls and sticks.

And Then There is Limescale

But swallet holes aren’t the worst thing about limestone. The real bugger is limestone’s evil twin: limescale. When hard water is heated the calcium hydrogencarbonate breaks down to form calcium carbonate, water, and carbon dioxide. Calcium carbonate is not soluble in water and forms limescale. Limescale has caused the death of many an electric kettle and the slow demise of my hot water immersion cylinder (HWC). I use rainwater for my kettle, but that’s not an option for the HWC.

When the plumber took out the cylinder, he warned me that it would be heavy. Not so much because of the casing of copper (especially with the thin metal they use these days), but because of the huge build-up of calcium carbonate that had killed it. And rolling it around I could hear it rattling within.

But I was still surprised at how much came out when I took it to the metal recycling place (plumbers will take your old cylinder away for “free”, but I got £66 for taking it to the recyclers myself).

I celebrated the new cylinder installation by having a stupidly hot bath. It was wonderful.

Thank you for being one of the good humans.

Alex

P.S. This week Molly and I went on a couple of trains. She loved it.

I don’t think there is a form of transport (except perhaps a plane, though I bet she wouldn’t mind if she were in the seat next to me instead of in a cage in the hold) that she hasn’t liked. The last Jack Russell I was a guardian of was a lot less enthusiastic about being on a bicycle, or paddle-boarding, or kayaking. One time I took him on a rollercoaster. He did not like it. I bet Molly would think it was awesome.

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You can read more about my previous little lives in New Zealand and the Basque Country by checking out my book page at alexhallatt.com.

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