Toity Deave

Researcher, iHV Fellow, interests are parenting, childhood injury prevention and fathers. I love cycling, walking and the outdoors. These are my personal views.

[Chris Packham @ChrisGPackham]

A fox quadrat ? ! Shared by Karen Chignell on Facebook for your #FoxOfTheDay today

[Chris Packham @ChrisGPackham]

Ah yes , a nice spot , tucked away and sheltered . Thank you to Katy Trevorton for today's rooftop snoozer #FoxOfTheDay

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

SIR ALAN BATES - THANKS GOD FOR THIS MAN. EH.

In 1998 Alan Bates and his partner Suzanne packed up their lives in West Yorkshire and moved to a small town in North Wales.

They put everything they had into a post office. Every penny. Every hope. A future they had planned together.

Two years later the software started lying. Money appeared to be missing. He called the helpline 507 times. He kept going. He kept records. He kept asking.

The Post Office's response was simple. It wasn't the software. It was him.

In 2003 they sent him a letter terminating his contract. No reason given. He lost £65,000. Everything he and Suzanne had invested, gone. Their private notes about him, revealed at the public inquiry decades later, described the situation with devastating corporate elegance. He had become unmanageable.

That is what they called a man asking why the numbers were wrong.

So he did what any reasonable person would do after losing everything to an institution that called them a liar.

He spent the next 25 years fighting back with nothing. No legal fund. No media empire. No government support. Just a burning refusal to let them win.

He wrote letters promising his continued and increased resolve to bring this to people who would have no choice but to act, regardless of how many years it took.

It took 25.

While he was fighting, at least 13 people who had been through the same thing took their own lives. People who couldn't hold on long enough. People who needed someone to believe them and found nobody there.

While he was fighting, the Post Office and its lawyers billed £265 million in legal fees between 2014 and 2024. Making sure the truth stayed buried. Making sure men like Alan Bates ran out of road before they ran out of fight.

He didn't run out of fight.

He rejected three compensation offers he considered insults. He watched an @ITV drama turn his life into a television event. He watched politicians suddenly discover outrage they had been too busy to feel for two decades. He watched the country cry at a story it had been ignoring since 1999.

In June 2024 they gave him a knighthood. Twenty-five years after calling him unmanageable.

In November 2025 he settled his compensation claim. He received 49.2% of what he was owed.

No executive has been charged. Fujitsu (@Fujitsu_Global) still holds government contracts. The Post Office (@PostOffice) is still standing.

This country failed Alan Bates for 25 years. It failed every person who could not hold on long enough to see what he saw. It handed him a title instead of justice and called itself generous.

He deserved better. They all did.

Teach this man in every school in Britain. Not as a feel-good story. As a warning about what happens when ordinary people trust institutions that were never built to protect them.

And as proof that one person, with nothing but the truth and the stubbornness to keep saying it, can make an entire country look at itself in the mirror.

Even if it takes 25 years to get them to look.

Sources: @ComputerWeekly | @BBCNews AND many others

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A tenant farmer in the Cairngorms says land that sold for £500 an acre a few years ago now goes for £5,000. He is being moved off ground his family has worked for generations, because he cannot outbid the people buying it. The buyers are corporations, and they have no intention of farming a single acre of it.

Here is how the trick works. A company keeps emitting carbon exactly as before. Same factories, same flights, same supply chain, same product. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants some trees, and announces to the world that it is now carbon neutral, or, if it is feeling brave, carbon negative. The emissions never fell. It simply bought a landscape to point at.

Take BrewDog. In 2020 it bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, propped up with public grant money, and promised a million trees and the crown of the world's first carbon negative beer business, removing twice the carbon it emitted, forever. By 2023 roughly half of the 500,000 trees it had managed to plant were dead, killed by drought, with critics noting the planting was drying out the peat and releasing carbon of its own. The advertising regulator ruled its carbon-negative claims misleading. In 2024 it quietly dropped the badge and dismissed the entire carbon credit market as a flood of cheap schemes whose benefit was "questionable, maybe even non-existent." Then it sold the estate to a firm whose actual business is selling carbon offsets.

That is the whole model in one story. Public money in. Dead trees out. A green halo worn for four years and then dropped. The farmer who used to be on that land, gone. The hillside passed to a company that exists purely to sell other people the right to keep polluting.

This is no fringe case. In one recent year, half of every estate sold in Scotland went to investment funds, corporations and charitable trusts rather than anyone who would farm it. A third of the deals for plantable land are now done off-market, in secret, precisely so the local community never gets the chance to bid.

So this is what net zero looks like on the ground. A man who produced food is priced out of his own glen. A corporation that produced emissions buys the glen, calls itself a force for good, and sells the carbon. The land stops feeding anyone. Nobody's emissions actually went down by a gram.

The food was real. The farmer was real. The carbon saving is a line in a slide deck.

And we have somehow decided the villain in all this is the man with the sheep.

[Chris Packham @ChrisGPackham]

Good morning , and thank yout to Helen Akif for today's #FoxOfTheDay !

[Chris Packham @ChrisGPackham]

Good morning . Today's #FoxOfTheDay is shared by Wicor Primary School , what a visitor to have !

[Paul Powlesland @paulpowlesland]

An historic day, as the River Wye becomes the first river in the UK to have its rights recognised by local authorities across its catchment.

Hundreds of people gathered on the banks of the river to watch as representatives from Monmouthshire, Forest of Dean & Powys Councils, Herefordshire County Council, the Wye Valley National Landscape & Bannau Brycheiniog National Park signed the pledge recognising the rivers rights and then spoke about why they had done so what it would mean for the relationship of their organisation to the river. It went beyond legal formalities into something of a service of thanks & honour to the river, with poetry, a choir singing songs, & offerings to the river.

It has been a real honour to witness & be part of the surging movement towards river rights & guardianship on the Wye. Four years ago I met & advised Herefordshire Councillor Elissa Swinglehurst, who wanted to put a voice of the river on the Wye Nutrient Management Board. A year ago I sat around a fire on the banks of the river with other Wye guardians & Earth lawyers as the idea of a charter was first mooted. To see it become a reality, & supported by 6 public bodies, in just a year is astonishing.

Now, of course, comes the hard work of making those rights a reality. But given the hundreds of active river guardians, & increasing public pressure to protect & restore the river, if it can be done on any river, it will be done on the Wye.

[Chris Packham @ChrisGPackham]

Thank you to Cathy Constable for sharing this image of three very relaxed garden visitors , your #FoxOfTheDay today !

[Chris Packham @ChrisGPackham]

A familiar visitor , shared by Claire Bruce on Facebook , your #FoxOfTheDay today !

[ALASTAIR CAMPBELL @campbellclaret]

What a great guy! What a great garden! Pleasure to meet Rob Hardy who was buzzing after just hearing he won 🥇 at Chelsea Flower Show with his @trusselluk garden. The fight against hunger and food poverty has found a great new ambassador. And thanks @projgivingback for funding it

[Chris Packham @ChrisGPackham]

Gorgeous ! Thank you to Anna Marlow for today's #FoxOfTheDay !

[Brian Gallagher @BGallagherColl]

Some clips of the Goosander families from around the River Kelvin in Glasgow over the last fortnight.

[Naomi Daw @Naomi_Daw]

Campaigners are racing to save the mother tree of the Bramley apple – a 220-year-old tree in Nottinghamshire that traces every Bramley apple in the world back to a single pip. Planted in the 19th century, it’s still fruiting today, but now faces an uncertain future as its cottage goes up for sale.

Supporters want to buy the site and turn it into a heritage centre, preserving a living piece of Britain’s culinary history for the nation.

#Apple #Heritage #Trees #Environment #FoodHistory #Conservation

https://t.co/dXjpDed1kR

[The English Oak Project @TheKentAcorn]

An English Bluebell a day until I run out of photos #3

[Iain Cameron @theiaincameron]

The Cairngorm reindeer herd this week welcomed a new member into the world. And what a looker!

https://t.co/cvZfTtdJDK

[Chris Packham @ChrisGPackham]

Good morning , and thank you to Leanna Anscombe for sharing today's #FoxOfTheDay

[Chris Packham @ChrisGPackham]

Good morning , and thank you to Mike Perry for your #FoxOfTheDay today

[🔥Teachers On Fire @TeachersOnFire]

Could it be that our schools are TOO SAFE?

Join me for a fascinating conversation with @MBrussoni and @RoomToPlay about child development, affordable risks, and outdoor play in our schools.

0:00:00 - Welcoming Dr. Mariana Brussoni and Dr. Megan Zeni

2:00 - Distinguishing between RISKS and HAZARDS in the school environment

5:24 - As safe as necessary but not as safe as possible

7:14 - Surplus safety as a barrier to development

10:06 - The 17-second pause before intervening

12:42 - Links between the decline of risky play and the rise in student anxiety

18:35 - Creating 'Yes spaces' in our schools

27:02 - Healthy rough-and-tumble play vs actual aggression

30:19 - Items to add to a playground

35:22 - Going outdoors consistently beats occasional trips

38:16 - How and where to connect with the authors online

[Chris Packham @ChrisGPackham]

Thank you to Mary Bishop in Ireland for sharing this beauty , your #FoxOfTheDay this morning !

[Chris Packham @ChrisGPackham]

Thank you to Colin Marshall on Facebook for sharing this young #FoxOfTheDay , a beauty !