Sleeping pitch side at Hampden Park on Friday night for Action for Children's Boycott Your Bed event puts things into perspective. Trading a mattress for a sleeping bag at the national stadium is a direct way to raise money and awareness for young people facing homelessness. But the reality check doesn't stop when you pack up at dawn.

Driving this morning (Monday) to grab a coffee before leaving to head back south, the news on the radio brought the whole thing straight back into focus. Commentary and reports highlighting warnings from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation that the Scottish Government is way off track on child poverty targets. Hearing those numbers about families stuck in temporary accommodation right after spending a night out on a pitch hits differently.

Then came leaving Scotland, heading to Glasgow central train station, and seeing people actually sleeping rough on the streets. Reading a report or listening to a broadcast is one thing, but walking past someone trying to survive the elements outdoors is a brutal reminder. The discomfort of one night in a stadium is a choice. For too many, it is a permanent reality.

Events like Boycott Your Bed raise vital funds for frontline support. More than that, they strip away the comfort and force you to look at a broken system where safe housing is treated like a luxury instead of a basic right.

The photos from Friday capture the laughs, the cold, and the community effort. But the real work starts when the sleeping bags are rolled up and we actually have to deal with what is happening - right outside our front doors….

You can still sponsor me right here 👉

Last year I wrote about the Americans beating the French at cheese, and I mean in a proper actual cheese competition, as opposed to another Tromp-claim to be fact checked. At the Mondial du Fromage in Tours, an American team won the international cheesemonger competition. I imagined the news going down about as well in France as Scotland losing at Haggis making.

Now my friend Rashik Parmar has sent me a World Population Review newsletter titled The World's Biggest Cheese Lovers, Ranked, and it poses a different question: who eats the most?

According to one set of figures, it's Denmark, where people eat around 28 kilos of cheese each per year, just ahead of the French. That's about 75 grams a day, every day, or two or three decent portions before anyone has mentioned crackers. Another ranking names the United States, though it groups the EU into a single figure rather than counting Denmark and France separately. I'm not sure you can declare victory over countries that aren't individually on the list.

Scotland doesn't get its own line either, being quietly folded into the UK figure. We Scots usually are, right up until Andy Murray, or any other competing Scot, loses. Then he's definitely Scottish. Not that a Scottish fridge would trouble the Danes. The average one holds a standard cheddar (Scottish of course) a rubberised smoked cheddar on Sunday, occasionally a cheap Edam at Easter and, of course, Dairylea (every day). Ok I concede - there may be something more exotic making an appearance at Christmas. With cranberries.

Still, this has all given us two quite different cheese contests. The Americans won one with skill, presentation and storytelling. The Danes appear to be tackling the other with admirable commitment over breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I'd like to put the question to the brilliant rock guitarist Rachael Wood. When we spoke on The Third Half, she told me one of her passions was trying cheeses from around the world. She's also got definite views - sharp British cheddar is welcome, mascarpone is not. I suspect she'd judge a country by what's on its cheeseboard before asking how many kilos it gets through.

Julie Cheyney of St Jude's Cheese gave me another reason to look past the rankings. When I asked her which cheese deserves more credit, she picked goats' cheese, which she reckons suffers because too many people tried a strong one once and never went back. Her advice is to taste your way down the counter at a good cheesemonger and expect something fresh and creamy. Having started my cheese education on Dairylea, I'm in no position to argue.

So congratulations to the Americans for winning in Tours, and possibly to Denmark for eating the most. Thanks to Rashik for ensuring I've spent another morning thinking about cheese. And as I’m in Paris, that could be expensive - and fatal.

And Rachael, if you're keeping track of the world tour, how far have you got?

Happy Sunday.

It’s been a busy few weeks for a variety of reasons. Lots of domestic stuff going on and then a mad week in London - four days negotiating with the rail system (delays every day!) an IDC event on Agentic AI (not as boring as it sounds), a new emerging partnership, then an afternoon with inspiring impact driven start ups in Tower Hamlets.

Here’s a few links to what we’ve published on our re-vamped Substack over the last couple of weeks. Have a look around…. Some great chats with some brilliant people (more in the pipeline), and some written stuff that will hopefully inspire, or at least make you smile.

Eleemosynary - A Very Long Word for a Very Simple Truth

On The Turntable: Rachael Wood and her new solo album. And cheese.

Fyfe Dangerfield of The Guillemots. Living life more lightly

Baumpatenschaftsprogramm

Plastic bags on beaches - less of them!!

‘Margaret only has Tuesdays’. But she’s still keen to help….

And there’s more.

Click and browse.

Like and share.

And have a great weekend.

Baumpatenschaftsprogramm. What a word. Catches the eye, and great to say (if not spell). It means "tree sponsorship programme", and in Freiburg, Germany, it gives residents a way to care for the patches of soil around street trees. Which sounds formal for something that began, in at least one case, with a woman getting fed up with the mess outside her front door.

Olivia Besters started tending the ground beneath a chestnut tree because it was compacted and littered. Thirty-five years later, she cares for 36 tree beds around her neighbourhood. Other residents have joined in, and Freiburg now has hundreds of people looking after these little spaces.

I love that Olivia wasn't setting out to save biodiversity. She wanted her doorstep to look nicer. The biodiversity came along too. Researchers found that tree beds tended by residents supported around 1.6 times as many plant species as similar untended beds. And when people are out gardening, neighbours stop to talk. Some decide to have a go themselves.

It took me back again to my chat with Alex Montgomery of Generation Soil, who made me think differently about the life in the ground beneath our feet. In Bristol, his team turns local food waste into living compost. And to Matt Knight of Freely Fruity, whose half-time-in-the-pub question was so straightforward - why don't we plant more fruit trees where people live?

Neither conversation left me feeling that everyone needs to become an expert gardener. Freiburg's story doesn't either. It's about noticing a place you pass every day and giving it a bit of care. Sometimes the neighbours notice. Sometimes the plants notice too.

I may need to practise saying Baumpatenschaftsprogramm. The idea, thankfully, is much simpler.

Read the Freiburg story in The Conversation.

Next Friday, I’m taking part in Action for Children’s Boycott your Bed challenge and sleeping outside overnight. 

Over the past year, I’ve jumped in to support plenty of people and causes without asking for a single thing in return. But with under a week to go, my fundraising total for this sleep-out is looking embarrassingly low, and I really need everyone to now back me on this one.

Right now, 4 million UK kids are living in poverty - going to bed cold, hungry, or without a safe place to sleep. I'm braving the elements for one night to help Action for Children supply hot meals, warm clothes, and safe beds. 

Even just a few quid makes a massive difference. If you can chip in, I’d deeply appreciate it.

PLEASE DONATE - CLICK HERE

Thank you. Sleep well.

Great environmental news. Actual proper great news. No asterisk, no complicated graph showing that it is only technically good news if you stand on one leg and ignore North Lanarkshire…

As reported by Positive News, in 2014, volunteers working with the Marine Conservation Society found an average of five carrier bags for every 100 metres of UK coastline surveyed. That has fallen by 80% over the past decade.

Five becoming one. That is worth celebrating.

It appears that the humble plastic-bag charge worked. Five pence at first, later ten. A small enough sum to be almost inconsequential, yet apparently sufficient to make millions of us think: “I’m not paying that. There are fourteen bags for life breeding in the boot of the car.”

And so our behaviour changed.

Not perfectly, obviously. Many British homes now contain a cupboard which, if opened carelessly, releases enough reusable bags to bury a medium-sized Labrador. But fewer single-use bags are being taken from shops and far fewer are ending up on our beaches.

That matters.

I have recently bought my daughters jewellery made from pieces of sea glass found washed up on the shore. There is something lovely about it: an object once discarded, softened and reshaped by years in the water, then found and made beautiful again.

Beach glass, yes. Beach bags, rather less charming.

This 80% fall is encouraging because it shows what can happen when sensible policy meets ordinary human behaviour. Nobody was asked to become a full-time environmental activist. We were simply given a small reason to stop taking a new bag every time we bought milk and a packet of crisps.

One person remembering a shopping bag changes very little. Millions of people doing it, week after week and year after year, changes a coastline.

Progress often happens like that. Quietly, cumulatively and without a grand launch event featuring a minister in a hard hat.

There is more to do, of course. Bottles, cans, lids and other single-use waste are still found across our shores. And dog-shit (that does drive nuts). But perhaps we can resist our peculiar urge to greet every piece of good news with an immediate list of reasons not to feel good about it.

This policy worked! People changed and now the beaches have become a little cleaner. Yay!!!

At The Third Half, we often talk about the fact that growth, contribution and reinvention do not suddenly stop. That applies to societies as much as individuals. We can learn, change our habits, repair some of the damage. Un-f*** some of the things we f***ed up (as one of my sea glass jewellery wearing daughter’s once challenged me to do).

Sometimes the evidence is sitting in a report.

Sometimes it is a piece of sea glass made into a necklace.

And sometimes it is simply the plastic bag that is no longer there.

Source:

Positive News

Residents of Little Standing have surprised themselves by discovering that it is possible to object to a government proposal and offer someone a cup of tea at the same time.

The discovery followed an announcement that a disused site nearby was being considered for asylum accommodation. Villagers had questions about the numbers involved, transport, healthcare and how a small community was expected to manage such a significant change.

The Government promised to listen carefully. Unfortunately, its first available listening appointment appeared to be shortly after everything had been decided.

A meeting was called in the village hall, where residents expressed understandable frustration and the microphone made everyone sound considerably more threatening than they intended.

Some wanted the proposal stopped. Others thought a smaller, properly supported centre might be workable. Several wanted more information before deciding anything, an approach which briefly confused those who had already printed the banners.

Then a woman near the back asked whether they might need two conversations.

“One about whether this is the right plan,” she said, “and another about what we do if people actually arrive”.

Nobody immediately objected, although the parish clerk wondered whether that would require separate minutes.

After considerable discussion, Little Standing put a question to its residents:

Should challenging the proposed centre mean ruling out preparations to welcome the people who might live there?

The village voted no.

It was not a vote to approve the centre. Nor was it a declaration that every concern could be resolved through goodwill, homemade cake and a slightly expanded rota for the village hall.

Residents still wanted answers. They wanted the numbers justified, local services properly funded and safe transport provided. They wanted meaningful consultation, rather than the opportunity to download a document explaining why they had been consulted.

But they also wanted to know what a workable relationship with their potential new neighbours might look like.

The parish council therefore continued its objections while a separate group spoke to a refugee charity about practical support. This involved an important early clarification - villagers would not be expected to become unpaid substitutes for the Home Office.

“We can offer friendship,” said one volunteer. “We cannot offer an entire asylum system. Margaret only has Tuesdays.”

A retired teacher offered help with conversational English. The football club suggested an introductory session. The gardening group wondered whether some of the newcomers might know rather more about growing things than it did, having recently devoted an entire meeting to identifying a courgette.

A bicycle repair workshop was proposed, subject to somebody locating the key to the shed.

Not everyone joined in. Some remained strongly opposed to the centre. Others were sympathetic but had neither the time nor the capacity to volunteer. The welcome group did not claim to speak for the whole village, and the parish council did not treat its existence as a betrayal.

There was also no assumption that the newcomers would be grateful, gifted gardeners who immediately improved the football team. They would be people - some sociable, some withdrawn, some struggling, some irritating. Getting along would take more than a photograph of everyone smiling outside the hall.

The village’s message to the Government became rather more demanding:

“If you believe this site is suitable, show us why. If you intend to use it, provide the services and support. And while we continue that argument, we will explore how to make contact with the people who may be coming.”

A television crew arrived to cover the disagreement and found plenty of it. The council chair remained angry about the process. Residents still differed over the proposal. The football club was embroiled in a separate dispute about whether its offer included lending boots.

But the reporter also found people preparing to help, without pretending that doing so settled the argument.

It made a rather good story.

Little Standing has not solved Britain’s asylum policy. It has not established that every accommodation proposal should go ahead, or that communities should quietly absorb decisions made elsewhere. Its preparations may prove inadequate. The plan may change or never happen.

What it has done is leave room for a welcome alongside an objection.

There is something appealing about that possibility, although I say this from the considerable comfort of not having been asked to accommodate a large centre next to my own home. It is easy to prescribe generosity when somebody else will be doing the work.

Still, I wonder whether these discussions have to become a choice between accepting everything and rejecting everyone. A community might reasonably say, “This proposal is wrong,” while also asking, “If it happens, how do we avoid making life harder for one another?”

In Little Standing, they decided those questions could share the same village hall.

They are currently arguing about who should put the chairs away.

As we speak, the first identified ‘new villagers’ have been on Zoom calls with the local parish - a new left back has already been identified and papers are being drawn up for inclusion in next season’s inter-village 7-a-side cup….

If you’ve been reading The Third Half for a while, you may recall a previous post where I openly wrestled with my own worst linguistic habits:👉 "Circumlocution or Sesquipedalianism?"For the uninitiated,sesquipedalian literally means "a foot and a half long." It is a brilliantly ironic, multi-syllabic term used to describe people who use unnecessarily long words when simple ones would do just fine. I am, as my friends and readers know all too well, repeatedly guilty as charged. I use to think it made me sound clever. It doesn’t. It’s now a form of self ridicule (like laughing about my baldness). Left to my own devices, I will happily trade a perfectly good two-syllable word for a five-syllable monstrosity, usually under the guise of "precision," but mostly out of an unabashed fondness for intellectual linguistic clutter. So, consider this my fair warning - I am about to do it again.

Except this time, I promise there is a genuine, human point behind the vocabulary.

Enter "Eleemosynary"

Pronounced el-i-MOS-i-ner-ee, it looks like the sort of word that escaped from an 18th-century tax manual or got lost on its way to a Victorian court document.

Despite sounding like a medical condition or an overly complicated legal clause, its definition is surprisingly gentle. It simply means relating to or dependent on charity, or charitable.

It traces back to the Ancient Greek eleēmosynē”, meaning compassion, mercy, or pity. Where modern usage of the word "charity" can sometimes feel transactional (tax deductions, annual gala’s, corporate press releases), eleemosynary retains a quieter, older resonance. It isn't just about writing a cheque - it is about the underlying posture of compassion that prompts us to look out for one another.

Beyond Big Words

In my earlier muttering on sesquipedalianism, I celebrated the sheer playfulness of language. It’s fun - honestly - to collect rare words the way some people collect vintage watches or obscure vinyl records. Ahem. But as much as I enjoy dusting off a foot-and-a-half-long term to see if anyone notices, vocabulary for vocabulary's sake is just intellectual decoration.

Where sesquipedalian is self-indulgent, eleemosynary points outward. It asks a practical question - What are you actually doing with what you have?

On The Third Half, we spend a lot of time talking about what happens after the traditional finish lines of career and ambition. When you stop sprinting toward the next milestone, what fills the space? The answer, more often than not, comes back to eleemosynary pursuits (redirecting our time, energy, and accumulated perspective toward helping others flourish).

What an Eleemosynary Life Looks Like

You don't need a grand foundation or a trust fund to live in an eleemosynary way. In fact, some of the most meaningful charitable acts have nothing to do with money at all:

• Generosity of Time. Showing up for people without an agenda, mentoring someone starting out, checking in on a neighbour, or volunteering for a local cause that gets zero spotlight.

• Generosity of Knowledge. Sharing what you’ve learned (especially the mistakes) without charging a consultation fee or holding back the "secret sauce."

• Generosity of Attention. In an era where everyone is competing for clicks and eyeballs, simply giving someone your undivided, unhurried focus is an act of genuine quiet charity.

A Resolution to Use Fewer Words (and Do More)

I will probably never fully cure myself of sesquipedalianism. The urge to use a word like eleemosynary when I could simply say charitable is a personal failing I’ve largely come to accept.

But if we’re going to indulge in long words, we might as well pick ones that inspire us to be better humans. A big vocabulary might make for an interesting essay, but an eleemosynary spirit is what actually builds a good life and a better community.

And it’s better than the dreadful ‘I want to give back’ (as you know…)

always show your source!

There is a brilliant, near-mythic piece of British cultural history making the rounds again.

Richard E. Grant was recently announced as the face of Oxfam’s ‘Second Hand September’. While doing the media rounds, he revealed a detail about his career that sounds like something cooked up in a screenwriter's room. His entire career break happened because of a secondhand coat.

Back in 1986, a young, broke Grant turned up to audition for Withnail & I soaking wet. He was wearing an oversized, secondhand Burberry trench coat he bought from an Oxfam shop. Director Bruce Robinson looked at him and instantly saw the manic, aristocratic, threadbare poet-slacker he was trying to cast. Grant had not just auditioned, he had arrived in character. As he put it himself, "No Oxfam, no Withnail!"

It makes you wonder. What life-changing role, pivot, or new chapter is sitting on a charity shop rail right now, just waiting for someone in their Third Half to try it on?

The Superhero in the Pre-Loved Cloak

Now, I am not saying I am destined to be the world’s next cinematic superhero in my Third Half, but I am certainly not ruling it out.

The main thing holding most of us back from global heroism is not a lack of origin story or a missing radioactive spider. It is simply finding the right wardrobe. Hollywood insists on custom leather and million-dollar CGI tights, but real, authentic Third Half heroism is likely hanging quietly on a plastic hanger between a pre-loved tweed jacket and a retro bowling shirt.

If I can just track down a suitably dramatic, secondhand velvet cape at my local shop, the world better be ready. The best heroes do not wear fast fashion, they wear stories.

The Art of the Secondhand Persona

In our first half, we spend a lot of time trying to look the part by dressing for the job we want, fitting into corporate uniformity, or keeping up with whatever fast-fashion trend is currently clogging the algorithm.

In The Third Half, the goal shifts. We care less about standard templates and much more about character, provenance, and stories.

A brand-new jacket from a high-street store tells you what a designer thought was trendy six months ago! A secondhand jacket, whether sourced from Oxfam or a British Heart Foundation home store, has a history. It carries the patina of someone else’s life, ready to be inherited and rewritten.

Cue Chris Brocklesby: Where Purpose Meets the Rails

When we talk about high-performing systems and charity retail, you cannot help but think of our recent TTH Blueprint guest, Chris Brocklesby.

As CTO of the British Heart Foundation (BHF), Chris operates at the intersection of scale, technology, and purpose. When you walk past a BHF furniture shop or browse their clothing rails, it is easy to see just a shop. But as Chris pointed out during our conversation, behind every store is a massive operational engine.

He summed it up brilliantly when he noted that the bottom line does not say profit, it says funds available for research.

That shift in perspective changes how we view pre-loved shopping altogether. Buying secondhand is not just a quirky aesthetic or a way to find a bargain. It is an ecosystem where logistics meet life-saving cardiovascular research.

While Chris and his team are building the digital infrastructure to keep those donations moving, you might just find the very suit, coat, or vintage cape that sparks your next big chapter.

Auditioning for Your Next Act

Whether you are stepping into the arts, saving the world in a vintage cape, launching a passion project, or simply redefining your everyday style, there is a clear lesson in Richard E. Grant’s trench coat.

• Originality is not manufactured. The best style and the best stories come from things that have lived a little before you.

• Accidental preparation. Sometimes, trying too hard to look the part holds us back. Stepping into something pre-loved allows a bit of serendipity to take over.

• Circular progress. Reusing, upcycling, and supporting organisations like Oxfam and BHF keeps great clothes in circulation while fueling vital research and community impact.

So next time you pass an Oxfam or a BHF store, step inside. You might not be auditioning for a cult movie or fighting crime in a pre-loved cape, but the costume for your next big breakthrough might just be hanging on the rack.

Enjoy the weekend. And if you can, watch Withnail and I.

Or Batman.

A week has passed since we crammed a room full of people into The Flēot, served Yogi’s Sri Lankan food, cut into Dani’s cheese, listened to My Girl The River, and ran an accidental experiment in modern community.

The immediate post-event noise has quieted down. The train to Glasgow is long behind me. Now that the dust has settled, the real lesson of the evening isn’t about how many people showed up or what was served: it’s about what happens when you strip away the social script.

1. Predictability is Comfortable, but Curiosity Needs Room

When you gather people with no pitch, no commercial objective, and no clear target demographic, you take away the safety net.

As Fyfe Dangerfield observed when we discussed his open-ended music project, The Stream, there is a place for everything. There is still a necessary, functional role for corporate hotel conference rooms, structured decks, and curled-up triangular sandwiches on white platters. Predictability offers safety. You know why you’re in the room, what performance is expected of you, and how to exit gracefully.

When you replace that with refugee storytelling, live acoustic tracks, and an open door, you create a different frequency. For some, dropping the agenda feels like fresh air. For others, it’s disorienting. A week out, it’s clear that both reactions are completely valid. We don’t need to reject traditional structures; we simply need to keep offering an alternative door for those who are still curious about what’s next.

2. Silence Isn’t Absence

Watching the reactions trickle in over the past seven days was a quiet lesson in human processing.

Some sent deeply reflective notes about Yogi’s story: his journey rebuilding his life and moving fifty of us before feeding us incredible food. Others dropped a digital icon, while some quietly went straight back to their busy lives without a word. Some were overtly grateful, some quietly so. Some just.. well, quiet (and that’s ok!)

This has been a powerful reminder that genuine community doesn’t require uniform reactions. Silence isn’t absence; it’s just reflection happening on someone else’s timeline. People digest experiences in their own time and on their own terms, and the quiet processing was just as valuable as the effusive praise.

3. The Third Half Space

Behind the scenes, Happy kept logistics running seamlessly all the way from Abuja, missing the event to support from afar (we’ll ensure she’s front and centre next time). Writing this, I’m reminded of how easily we take seamless, remote collaboration for granted.

Jo, Lucille, and the team at Community Coworking provided the brilliant, quirky spot that allowed strangers to become collaborators over Dani’s curated cheese, artisanal kimchi from The Ferm, and CANS drinks.

The core belief behind The Third Half remains simple: good conversations matter, progress should benefit people as well as balance sheets, and curiosity becomes more valuable, not less, as we get older. Life doesn’t move in neat quarters, and growth doesn’t stop at an arbitrary milestone.

To everyone who made the room what it was, contributed their craft, or simply stepped through the door: thank you for being part of the experiment.

People. Planet. Progress.

On The Third Half, we talked about soil recently with Alex Montgomery of Generation Soil. This morning I read an article in the paper that therefore resonated straight off, and then hit quite hard.

46%. Almost half of the world’s farmers and farm workers are being poisoned by pesticides every year. Not exposed to them. Poisoned by them.

A new study, reported by The Guardian today, estimates 402–433 million cases of acute, unintentional pesticide poisoning every year among a global farming population of 934 million. It estimates another 11,000 people die every year as a result.

And pesticide use is going up, not down. In 2023, 3.8 million tonnes were used globally, twice as much as in 1990.

Those numbers are difficult to get your head around. But one sentence immediately chimed loud

“We are just taking food and not giving anything back.”

When I sat down with Alex a few weeks ago, we were meant to be talking about food waste and composting. But, as often happens on The Third Half, the conversation ended up somewhere much bigger.

Alex talked about our relationship with soil. “The relationship we currently have with soil isn’t a reciprocal relationship. We are just taking food and not giving anything back.” And then this. “What we are giving back is harmful pesticides and fertilisers which damage the soil health, the microbial health, our own health.”

Our own health. That’s quite a different message.

It’s easy to make soil health sound worthy and slightly abstract, something involving compost bins, worms and people who know considerably more about gardening than I do. (I had a wormery once, when the kids were young. It was a disaster). But it isn’t. Soil is where our food comes from. Farmers are the people who grow it. And we have somehow built a food system in which hundreds of millions of those people are being poisoned by the chemicals used to produce that food.

The study doesn’t even attempt to quantify the long-term health effects. Nor does it include the estimated 84 million children working in agriculture. Think about that for a moment.

This isn’t anti-farming. Quite the opposite.

Farmers are being asked to feed more people, produce food cheaply, cope with increasingly unpredictable weather and somehow make a living at the end of it. The answer cannot simply be to wag a finger at them and tell them to stop using pesticides.

The researchers want farmers given access to safer alternatives, and the most hazardous pesticides phased out. That’s a sensible place to start.

But perhaps there’s a bigger question too. What kind of food system have we built if poisoning the people producing our food has become an accepted cost of feeding ourselves?

Back to the soil

Alex wasn’t arguing that everyone needs to sign up to Generation Soil. He told people who can compost themselves not to pay them to do it. His point was simpler. We take from the soil. At some point, we have to start putting something good back. Fresh organic matter. Nutrients. Life. Not just more chemicals.

When we spoke, that felt like a conversation about soil. Today it feels like a conversation about people too. 402 million of them, at the very least.

That should bother us. A lot.

Read: The Guardian’s report on the new pesticide study

Last night I was on a bit of a high. The Third Half Live had been brilliant, a room full of the great, the good and the bloody brilliant, music and food and cheese and conversations with old friends and new ones, and all the slightly chaotic stuff that makes TTH what it is.

This morning I woke up feeling amazing, if slightly sleepy. Then I got on a train and reality kicked in.

I’m heading from the South East to Scotland today, and instead of cataloguing the woes of my particular journey, it feels like a fairly decent snapshot of something bigger. Problems around Wokingham and Reading meant my train north was late before it had even started. More problems around Wolverhampton, track issues, trespassers, trains and people displaced as one problem seemed to lead another. I suspiciously think they weren’t actually connected, but those infrastructure peeps would like to make you think they are. And all that’s just about getting the train to move.

I’ve barely managed ten minutes of continuous connection all day. Forget 5G. For huge chunks of the journey I can’t even get a usable 4G signal, in 2026, on one of the country’s major inter-city rail corridors. The train Wi-Fi isn’t much use either. The air conditioning in my carriage appears to be attempting cryogenic preservation, and there’s no power at the tables. For the privilege, the train is costing me roughly twice what it would have cost to fly.

I’m deliberately not flying. I’m trying to make the lower-carbon TTH choice when I can. But we’re making that choice remarkably difficult.

None of these things individually is the end of the world - I know that - and that’s the point. We’ve become so ok accepting infrastructure that nearly works. A train that gets there eventually. A mobile network that disappears. Wi-Fi that connects occasionally. A plug socket that may or may not contain electricity. A lower-carbon way of travelling the country that costs twice as much as getting on a plane.

We talk endlessly about productivity, growth, regional connectivity, net zero, getting people out of cars and planes, building a modern economy. But sometimes the grand strategies meet the slightly less glamorous reality of a man (me) trying to get from Berkshire to Scotland, do some work on the way, charge his laptop and remain roughly the same body temperature, without paying twice the price of flying. (I am also of an age that when icily cold, I need to go pee more often - fine if the loos are working, and unusually today, they are…)

If we actually want people to choose the lower-carbon option, it surely can’t be the slower, less reliable, less connected and more expensive one.

Yesterday, surrounded by brilliant people doing brilliant things, the world felt full of possibility. Today British infrastructure would just like to remind me who’s in charge.

Still feeling amazing tho. Just slightly sleepier, and considerably colder…..

I know you’re all bored of me referencing Positive News, but here we go again. This time it’s black tomatoes, white aubergines and an Italian farm that thinks quantum physics might have something to do with the future of food. Obviously, I clicked.

Quintosapore is a family-run farm in Umbria growing around 1,500 varieties of fruit and vegetables. No pesticides, no tilling, microorganisms rather than synthetic fertilisers, seed saving, agroforestry, biochar. Lots here to like. I think. (If I knew what it all Meant). Then it gets a little stranger. Solar-powered speakers play particular frequencies to deter pests. Irrigation water is treated with electromagnetic frequencies. There’s even talk of reproducing the vibrational frequency of minerals such as calcium rather than simply adding more calcium.

Hang on, I thought. Aren’t we still messing with nature?

Of course we are. We’ve been selecting seeds, breeding animals, clearing land, moving water and deciding what grows where for thousands of years. Modern intensive agriculture has taken that considerably further through pesticides, synthetic fertilisers, monocultures and industrial-scale intervention, so perhaps the people at Quintosapore would argue they’re actually interfering less. They may have a point. Plants that survived the brutal 2022 drought are providing seeds for future crops. The soil is treated as a living ecosystem rather than simply something to stick plants into. Some biological inputs, the farm says, cost less than synthetic alternatives, and the business itself is growing.

I’d just recorded a Third Half conversation with Alex at Generation Soil. One teaspoon of healthy soil, he reckons, can contain billions of microorganisms. Once you start thinking about what’s happening beneath our feet, farming looks rather different.

But it also makes me wonder about unintended consequences. If you use sound to deter an insect, where does the insect go? What does that frequency do to pollinators or other beneficial insects? If you introduce microorganisms to change the soil, what happens to the ones already there? And if you continually select plants that survive drought, heat or disease, are you helping nature adapt, or deciding what you want nature to become? There may be very good answers to all of this.

There’s another reason for a little caution too. “Quantum” is one of those words that can make something sound scientifically impressive without the science itself being impressive. Quantum physics is real, that doesn’t mean every idea with “quantum” attached to it has been proven, and some of these claims need proper independent evidence. Dismissing the whole thing because some of it sounds bonkers would be equally lazy, though. Agriculture has enormous problems to solve, soil degradation, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, climate change, chemical dependency, and rather importantly, the need for farmers to make a living while still producing enough food for the rest of us. We need people willing to experiment. Some experiments will work, some won’t, some things that sound ridiculous today might become perfectly normal, and some will indeed turn out to have been ridiculous.

Perhaps the question isn’t whether we should interfere with nature. We already do. It’s how much, in what way, based on what evidence, and what else happens when we do. I think I need to talk to these people. And I definitely need to try a black tomato.

What do you think? Clever way of working with nature, or are we getting a little too clever for our own good?

#PeoplePlanetProgress #RegenerativeAgriculture #SustainableFarming #Biodiversity #SoilHealth #TheThirdHalf

Amongst other things.... Cheesemakers get up at 3am. There are billions of living things in a teaspoon of soil. Punk apparently has no retirement age. And creating a new way to release music doesn’t mean you have to stop making records.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks at The Third Half. One of the things I love about doing this is that I can spend one day talking about charity and the next talking about cheese, soil, punk or the future of music, usually without much of a plan, but nearly always coming away with something I didn’t know before.

So here are seven things I’ve learned recently, in seven short films, some of which where the full versions are in the editing studio. Stick around for Fyfe Dangerfield at the end, because his view of where records fit in a world of streaming, fragments, unfinished ideas and instant everything is rather more nuanced than you might expect.

1. Your cheesemaker may well be working while you’re asleep

“What is your cheesemaker doing at 3am?” Possibly not a question you’ve asked yourself recently.

Julie Cheyney makes St Jude cheese, and we talked about farming, craft, place and what actually goes into making something most of us simply pick up from a counter. Turns out quite a lot happens before breakfast.

2. It’s worth asking where the money actually goes

We’ve been having loads of conversations about charity recently. We hear the appeals, we sponsor people, we donate, we occasionally sleep outside, but what happens next tends to get less attention.

Ken Deeks joined me to talk about Boycott Your Bed and Action for Children, and I wanted to get beyond the fundraising total to understand what that money actually does. There’s a reason people give up their time for this, and seeing the other end of the donation is a pretty good reminder of it.

3. Punk doesn’t appear to have an upper age limit

We’ve had Americana, indie and classical composers, so it was probably time for some punk.

Fal is the frontman of The Indestructibles, and our conversation went into music, attitude, getting older, making mistakes and what happens when the bloke singing punk has accumulated rather more life experience than the bloke who started doing it. Has he mellowed? I’ll let you decide.

4. Forty years can go remarkably quickly

Heather Manson and I were at Airdrie Academy together, before life happened: dance, America, Ironman, and helping raise millions of pounds for Street Soccer Scotland. We hadn’t properly caught up in about 40 years.

This isn’t really a story about looking backwards though. It’s about just how much can happen when life takes you somewhere you never remotely expected to go.

5. A teaspoon of soil is considerably busier than I thought

About 10 billion microorganisms, in a teaspoon. That was one of the things Alex from Generation Soil told me, and frankly I’ve been looking at the ground rather differently ever since. Soil isn’t just the brown stuff underneath us, it’s an extraordinary living ecosystem connected to our food, our environment and ultimately us. Not bad for a teaspoon.

6. If we want tomorrow’s musicians, they need somewhere to be rubbish first

Before artists fill arenas, they need somewhere to play first, somewhere small enough to experiment, get things wrong, find an audience and learn how to get good.

My conversation with Mark from Music Venue Trust was a reminder that when a grassroots venue disappears, we don’t just lose a building. We potentially lose part of the pipeline that creates what comes next, which brings us neatly to someone who has spent a lifetime thinking about exactly that.

7. The future of music doesn’t have to replace its past

Fyfe Dangerfield is probably still best known to many people through Guillemots, but our conversation went considerably further than that: songwriting, creativity, unfinished work, the strange places ideas come from, and The Stream, which Fyfe created as another home for music that doesn’t necessarily need to wait until it fits neatly onto a conventional album.

The important point is that Fyfe is still making records. The Stream isn’t an argument that albums are dead, or that one way of making and releasing music has to replace another. There’s a place for the record, a place for the finished album, a place for a song released into the world on its own, and a place for ideas and music that might otherwise sit unheard because they don’t fit the traditional model. In Fyfe’s philosophy, there’s a place for everything.

Cheese. Charity. Punk. Street football. Soil. Grassroots venues. Songwriting. On paper, not much connects them. In practice, perhaps more than you’d think.

And on top of all that, next week is our inaugural anniversary event, Third Half Live. A year of these conversations, in one room, for one evening. It’s all organised and ready to go, which is a bit of a worry in itself.....

People. Planet. Progress. And a fair amount of thoughtful chaos.

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Greenock. Home of Morton FC, oft-times competitors of Airdrieonians. And a town I’ve long associated with IBM, where I spent a sizeable chunk of my working life. At one point IBM employed more than 5,000 people at its Greenock campus. I visited a few times when there were many less…. and there, kindov, starts the story.

I heard a BBC report on the radio today saying the local council actually wants more migrants to move there. And that’s not a story we’re hearing very often at the moment. I looked it up afterwards, and the piece underneath it is fascinating.

Inverclyde has 22,000 fewer people than it did in 1981. Its current population of around 78,000 is projected to fall another 16% over the next twenty years.

IBM has gone. Amazon has gone. EE has gone. Another 1,500 jobs have disappeared in just four years. As one woman in the BBC piece puts it rather more succinctly:

“When the work disappears, people disappear.”

And now Greenock has a problem. It needs people. Not in some abstract economic-model sort of way. It needs people to work in the hospitals and care sector. People living in the houses. Kids going to the schools. People spending money on the High Street. People paying council tax.

Increasingly, some of those people are coming from elsewhere. There are now hundreds of Africans living around Greenock, many working or studying in Glasgow and Paisley, attracted partly by relatively cheap housing. There are refugees from Syria, Ukraine, Afghanistan and elsewhere. African food shops have opened on a High Street where plenty of other things have closed.

The council wants more.

Now there’s a sentence to drop into the middle of the current UK immigration debate.

I’m not remotely suggesting there’s a simple answer here. There isn’t. Some locals quoted by the BBC make the fairly obvious point that if Greenock hasn’t got enough jobs for the people already there, bringing more people in isn’t magically going to fix that. And asylum seekers largely aren’t allowed to work while their claims are being processed, even when they desperately want to. The council itself thinks Inverclyde has been given a disproportionate share of asylum accommodation.

There have been tensions too. Some horrible ones.

So this isn’t a cosy little tale about immigration saving a Scottish town.

But it did make me think about something slightly different. Maybe we spend so much time arguing about people coming into Britain that we don’t talk enough about why people leave bits of it.

There’s a 19-year-old called Matthew Quinn quoted in the article who absolutely nails it:

“It’s not that people are desperate to leave, it’s that there’s no reason to stay.”

That’s the bit I keep coming back to. Because perhaps Greenock’s problem isn’t really immigration. It’s reasons to stay. Work, obviously. But also decent schools, transport, shops, places to eat, things happening, football clubs, music, community, opportunity. The stuff that makes somewhere feel alive.

There’s another guy in the piece, Derek Mitchell, trying to turn an old sugar refinery into an education hub for young people. He’s fed up waiting for somebody else to sort things out.

“If you build a sense of belonging, naturally and organically, people don’t want to leave.”

I like that.

And perhaps that’s where Greenock gets really interesting. Not because it has discovered that immigration is the answer. It hasn’t. But because it’s been forced to ask a question that quite a few more towns may eventually have to ask.

How do we make this a place where people actually want to live?

Whether they were born in Greenock, Airdrie, Lagos or Damascus seems almost secondary to that.

Although obviously, if they choose Greenock, we’ll need to have a word with them about supporting Morton.

The BBC’s original report, “The town whose council wants migrants to move in”, was published on 21 August 2026.

I know Simon Robson through Wokingham Theatre and have done for years, but I hadn’t realised he was writing a book until he handed me a copy. It screamed to me initially, ‘coaching book’. Oh God, I thought.

I should probably declare an interest here. I’m not a great consumer of ‘self-help’ - seminars, webinars, any-ars, or books. There seem to be an awful lot of people prepared to tell us how to be happier, richer, calmer, more productive, more resilient, better leaders, better parents and presumably better at loading the dishwasher. So I started flicking through Simon’s book like it was half time at Airdrie FC and we were, of course, 2-0 down. But then something slightly annoying happened. I quite liked it (there endeth any comparison to Airdrie FC).

That’s because I don’t really think it’s a coaching book. It’s a book about Simon, about the stuff that’s happened to him, the people he’s met, the things he’s got right and the things he’s got spectacularly wrong. Work, relationships, resilience, vulnerability, and the various bits of baggage we all accumulate while pretending we’ve got everything under control. It’s funny in places, and then later it’s uncomfortable in a way that makes you squirm. Simon isn’t showboating in any of it. There’s no sense of a man performing his own vulnerability for effect.

It reads like someone genuinely opening up, which is a rarer thing than the coaching shelves would have you believe. Somewhere amongst all of that are ideas that might actually be useful, which feels a lot more interesting to me than someone standing at the front of a room telling us the seven habits we need before breakfast.

It also feels very Third Half. Most of the conversations I’ve enjoyed over the past year haven’t really been about what somebody does, they’ve been about how they got there. The diversions. The cock-ups. The people who changed things. The moments when life didn’t follow the PowerPoint…..

So when Simon suggested launching the book at Wokingham Theatre and asked if I’d sit down with him and have one of those conversations in front of an audience, I said yes.

On 20th November, that’s what we’re going to do. No presentation, no 47 slides on unlocking your potential, just Simon and me talking about the book, the life behind it, and this rather provocative idea that none of us are broken. Because I’m not entirely sure I agree with him. What does “broken” mean anyway? Are there things that happen to us that actually do break something? Is resilience something we possess, something we learn, or something

we only discover when life gives us no alternative? And when you write a book based heavily on your own experiences, how comfortable is it when someone else starts poking around in them? I’d guess the evening will have the same shape as the book. Some things to laugh at, and one or two moments where the room goes quiet.

We’ll find out. We’ll also open it up to the audience, so I won’t be the only one asking questions, and we’ll record the whole thing as a special edition of The Third Half.

None of Us Are Broken: The Launch 20th November 2026 Wokingham Theatre, Cantley Park

Reserve a place here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/none-of-us-are-broken-the-launch-tickets-1993916349476

Come along. You don’t have to agree with Simon. I’m not promising I will either. That might be the interesting bit.

People. Planet. Progress. The Third Half

But…. I started to think.

We know the signs. We’ve probably all thought about putting one up.

Don’t knock on my door. Don’t put stuff through my letterbox. Don’t try to sell me something I didn’t ask for.

Fair enough.

Except we spend the rest of our lives being sold things we didn’t ask for.

The new SUV that suggests our perfectly serviceable car isn’t quite good enough anymore. The watch that signifies success. The kitchen that suddenly looks dated. The holiday everyone else seems to be having. Deliveroo when there’s food in the fridge. A £1,200 phone that’s fractionally better than the £1,000 phone we already own. Klarna making something we can’t afford feel strangely affordable. Dating apps quietly suggesting there might always be someone better if we just keep swiping.

Upgrade your phone, your car, your house, your teeth, your body, your holiday. Upgrade your life.

(I’ve gone a bit Trainspotting again).

An awful lot of modern advertising isn’t really selling us products. It’s selling us dissatisfaction with what we already have, and we barely notice it anymore.

But put a badly photocopied circular through the letterbox and it’s outrage.

Except who’s actually sending those circulars? The local Indian restaurant. A window cleaner. Someone who’s just started a gardening business. A plumber. The village fete. A charity shop looking for donations.

And those dreaded “hawkers” we want to avoid? Yes, sometimes they’re flogging rubbish. But quite often they’re asking us to give a few quid a month to a charity, and we’ll slam the door or cross the road to avoid them while drinking a £4 coffee we’ve just been persuaded 20 mins earlier we needed.

Then there are Jehovah’s Witnesses. For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not religious and I don’t want converting. But strip away whether you agree with them and consider what they’re actually offering: their version of meaning, faith, community, a better way to live. You can completely reject their answer while acknowledging that those aren’t inherently terrible things to advocate for.

Which leaves us with a rather weird hierarchy of acceptable persuasion. Someone knocks on our door and says you might be happier if you found God, and they’re an irritating nuisance. A multinational corporation, armed with an extraordinary amount of information about us (bloody algorithms), whispers you might be happier if you bought this, and that’s just everyday life. One asks for five minutes of our attention. The other has built an entire economy around capturing as much of it as possible.

Perhaps there’s a consequence. We have more possessions, more convenience, more choice and more ways to consume than any generation before us. Yet we talk endlessly about loneliness, debt, anxiety, disappearing communities, struggling local businesses and the nagging feeling that somehow our lives don’t quite measure up.

I’m certainly not suggesting the answer to modern society is Jehovah’s Witnesses and a bloke selling dusters at the front door. But I do wonder whether we’ve spent decades shutting the door on people selling community, causes and local enterprise, while leaving it permanently open to people selling us dissatisfaction.

Maybe we’ve got the sign on the wrong door.

Scott

People. Planet. Progress. #TheThirdHalf #Community #Consumerism #PPP

“Let’s end youth homelessness by the year 2000.”

He decided to do something about it.

Twenty-eight years later, what started with 34 people sleeping out for one night has raised more than **£14.6 million** for Action for Children.

Ken joined me on The Third Half to tell the story of Boycott Your Bed, the people it has helped, why he still does it, and why one uncomfortable night can make a very real difference.

Full transparency: I’m on the Glasgow organising committee, so yes, I’m selling this one. Shamelessly.

Here’s a little taste of our conversation.

Full episode coming soon.

2nd October 2026 - London-Leeds-Manchester-Glasgow.

Here’s how to get involved: https://www.actionforchildren.org.uk/support-us/boycott-your-bed/

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I’d been following her from afar for a while, even before Street Soccer Scotland. She helped lead fundraising at the Prince & Princess of Wales Hospice in Glasgow, part of the team that raised £21 million to build the new hospice, and it was obvious even then that this wasn’t just a job for her. It’s who she is. Plenty of people talk about giving back as though it’s another line for the CV. Heather just gets on and does it, and she doesn’t seem to know how to do anything by halves: she dances competitively, she’s completed an Ironman, and she’s built an entire career around helping charities change lives rather than simply supporting them from a distance.

I came away from the conversation properly in awe of her energy, her humility, and her commitment to making a difference.

Here’s a short trailer. The full conversation lands soon.

People. Planet. Progress.

#ThirdHalf #Reinvention #Purpose #Community

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