Jess Patteson 💙

[上田優紀 / 写真家 @nature_yukiueda]

南極からの帰りの航海中に何百というイルカの大群と出会いました。

こんなにも美しい風景が世界には人知れず存在していることになにか救いのようなものを感じました。

世界で最も荒れる海、ドレーク海峡が信じられないほど穏やかだった日にほんの数分だけ出会った奇跡みたいな景色。

[Pam Ayres MBE @PamAyres]

Look what’s been built in Cardiff for swifts. My niece sent me these photos and said the structure was alive with birds. Heartening to see. It’s shaped like a swift in flight I think. Other towns have created similar swift nest sites including Exeter. Thank you for caring.

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

In a workshop in Ulverston, on the edge of the Lake District, a few dozen people are the last in Britain who can do a thing this country once did better than anywhere on earth: take molten glass, blow it by lung and hand, and cut it until it throws light like nothing else made by man.

The company is called Cumbria Crystal. Its craftsmen were brought up from Stourbridge in 1976, out of the old heartland of English glass - and then, one by one between 1990 and 2007, every great Stourbridge house shut its doors, until a skill that once had its capital across the West Midlands had its last redoubt in a single building in Cumbria.

This year, Heritage Crafts placed hand-cut crystal on its Red List of Critically Endangered Crafts. One more workshop gone, one more retirement that goes unreplaced, and three centuries of mastery simply end - it goes the way of stonemasonry or, you probably wouldn't believe is increasingly the case, metalwork.

There is a detail here on which the picture revolves. The crystal on the tables of British embassies, the glass set before presidents and kings when this country wishes to show the world what it is, comes in good part from that same endangered workshop in Ulverston. We use the craft to impress the world and cannot trouble ourselves to keep it alive at home. The glass that says "look what Britain can do" is being quietly permitted to become the glass that says "look what Britain used to be able to do."

There is no villain in this, not exactly. No minister set out to kill English crystal. It is dying the way most things die here now - by inattention, by an energy bill the kiln can barely meet, by a culture that spent two generations teaching the young that working with your hands was a lesser destiny, by the lazy faith that someone, somewhere, would always keep the old skills going so the rest of us needn't think about it.

Progress takes the opposite view of a thing like this. A skill is capital - the most patiently accumulated capital a country owns - and a nation that lets its mastery lapse is poorer in a way no quarterly figure will ever record. And a nation that barrels its energies into skill capital is rich.

Our Hallmark system exists to stamp such skills, to honour them, and to pay the people who hold them to teach the next hands, because the distance between a living craft and a glass case in a museum is exactly one generation that could not afford to pass it on.

The men and women in Ulverston still know how it is done. For now. The only question is whether a country that can fill an embassy, an office, a home, with their work can be bothered to ensure that, fifty years from now, there is still anyone left who can make the next set.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Marc Bouldoukian captures a heartwarming moment a mama bear carrying her three cubs across the water.

[𝕐o̴g̴ @Yoda4ever]

Mama Kestrel and her tiny babies..🦅😍

[Twiggy Bigwood @devilscustard]

So lovely to see a Barn Owl hunting over Cley marshes this evening. Watch for the swoop at the end!

[Clinton @614clinton]

I forgot to post my D-Day joke yesterday, so here it is! 😂

An old veteran was looking through his bag for his passport. The woman on passport control asked him, “Have you visited France before?”

“Yes,” replied the old man.

Sarcastically she responded, “Well surely you should know to have your passport ready,” to which he answered, “I didn't have to show it last time.”

“Impossible!!” she barked.

The old man looked her straight in the eye and said, "Last time, when I landed on D-Day in 1944, I couldn't find a dadgum Frenchman to give it to.”

[Spencer Althouse @SpencerAlthouse]

omg Pink just did, like, 200 spins while 40 feet in the air while dressed as Peter Pan to open the Tony Awards

[Dr Helen Fry | WWII Historian @DrHelenFry]

In this photograph, a single poppy stands in a field in Calvados, Normandy, bathed in the soft light of the evening sun.

They were, and remain, the Greatest Generation.

We will remember them.

[Cat @catdeans]

This is awful. The last ever Denby Pottery going to the kiln. Why is there not uproar? Where’s the government in this?? We all have Denby in our homes, in family heirlooms, as our history and now it’s closing through lack of support, such a sad sad day. #SaveDenby @denbypottery

[Prince & Princess of Wales Fan @HRHCatherine]

Princess Anne in London today, ensuring a slightly soggy priest gets a brolly.

[Sue Wood @SW_PhotoNature]

Leveret ❤️

[ClarksonsFarm @ClarksonsFarm1]

Brilliant!🤣

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

A hand-knitting girl had the best idea in the world: this revolutionary coaster.

[Belle @RoyallyBelle_]

The way 3 month old baby Elena reacted to the Princess of Wales in Reggio Emilia today says it all 🥺👶🥰

Truly the Children’s Princess!

[The potting shed @GardenerFliss]

Who doesn’t adore a Bumblebee. Keep a look out for these furry pals. Grow plants that they love, create habitats that feel like home and they will reward you with their beautiful array of stripe jumpers. 💚

[RS Archer @archer_rs]

This is the choice. A highly regarded and admired former Director of Public Prosecutions and head of the Crown Prosecution Service, fully vetted by the Security Service or a lying, corrupt, chancer with no political experience who sold Britain out and is probably a Russian asset

[Bob Golen @BobGolen]

The irony

[JustRandomThoughts @randomstuffxzxz]

Just took my 93 year old grandmother to vote, she's registered blind. In a very loud voice she said, "which box is for scrapping the Debbie dementia storyline in Corrie so we can keep her?" A cheer went up from the waiting voters.