Habitats

I’ve just arrived home from two weeks in Scotland – a combination of wild camping, youth hostelling and sleeping in a hand-built kata at Comrie Croft’s beautiful eco-site.

It was a lovely (if challenging!) adventure with the kids – fields of midges and ticks; a heat wave; brilliant white beaches; common seals; storms and high winds; campfires; compost toilets; red squirrels and common seals and even a trip to A&E in Fort William with a suspected toddler broken ankle (all was okay in the end!)

The trip made me even more grateful for what we have at home in Sheffield – running water, feathery beds and electric lights for reading in the dark. But more than that, using water and energy so economically made me really re-think our home habits. I think that we used less than 8 litres of water each a day at the kata, for cooking, washing and drinking, and now I’m home I’m thinking harder about how we can better conserve and re-use our water.

It wasn’t exactly a reading kind of holiday, but I did come across the excellent Highland Bookshop in Fort William, which stocks so many beautiful books that it’s a bit dangerous! I’m looking forward to learning from this lovely lot now that we’re back home!

And now that we’re home, one of the first jobs I need to get on with as the Guest Editor of The A3 Review, is to select a shortlist from the pile of great submissions we have received on the theme of ‘habitat’. And as I embark on the always-difficult process of making decisions about the longlists and shortlists, I’ll be reflecting harder on my own habits and habitats, especially in relation to water scarcity, the climate emergency and the huge inequalities that continue to structure our world.