In the ever-evolving landscape of contemporary art and emerging artists, few voices resonate as deeply and distinctively as Sarah Cunningham's. This burgeoning British talent's practice is firmly rooted in introspection and observation

The Beast, the Emperor and the Milkman: A Bone-shaking Tour through Cycling’s Flemish Heartlands [Pearson, Harry] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Beast, the Emperor and the Milkman: A Bone-shaking Tour through Cycling’s Flemish Heartlands

We didn’t have any heating, having naively swallowed the estate agent’s assurance that there was no such thing as cold weather south of the Loire. As the temperature during November plunged to zero and kept slipping ever lower, I was very seriously discomfited. The animals were fine, the poultry in their leaf and straw-lined coop – except for Sandra the bantam who continued roosting in M Meneteau's plum tree – the horses with their shaggy coats and access to a large barn, the dogs in nests of blankets in the straw, the cats seeking out sheltered corners in the barns, and the two parrots’ cages covered with a duvet. On the sofa-bed with its thin mattress through which I could feel the springs, covered by a skinny duvet and one blanket, I was colder than I believed it possible to be and still live. The house was damp. The north-east wind shredded the plastic sheeting we had so optimistically pinned over the gaping doorway in the barn, and in came the rain, hail and snow. It was too cold to cook there, so I put an electric kettle in the living room, which wasn’t a great deal warmer, and lived on hot drinks, cider and packets of biscuits. The electricity supply wasn’t capable of running even a small fan. The small room which in summer had been a cool haven became icily cold as the days shortened and the easterly wind started to bite. Despite the paint and polish I had splashed all over, it became mildewy in no time at all, with new colonies of mushrooms popping up on the walls. Most of the floor had collapsed onto the pungent earth below. As I lay in the dark, I was aware of things nibbling and scuttling around me. Once I’d tugged on the string that caused the light bulb to go off I was usually asleep in seconds, waking later to the sounds of scraping, munching and scampering. Occasionally, light, fast bodies with cool feet ran over the bed, chittering as they went. I burrowed further under the covers. Minimum daywear was at least one set of thermal vest and pants, tights, two pairs of long socks, jeans, T-shirt, jumper, scarf, gloves, woolly hat, sheepskin-lined denim coat. I looked like a cross between a scarecrow and a Michelin man. Instead of my usual Chanel No.5, I now slept fully dressed. And I was still cold. In the morning, I lay under the covers until the dogs demanded to be fed. I spent the rest of the day wandering around, banging my arms against my sides and stamping my feet, scampering around the field with the animals, or huddled in a chair with a blanket wrapped around myself feeling like a Siberian babushka. I ticked away the hours waiting for the first signs of evening, when l could feed all the animals and burrow back into my nest. Terry brought me a thicker duvet and an electric blanket from England. Night time became less arctic but made getting out of bed in the morning more of an ordeal. We had not been prepared for how cold winter can be in an old French farmhouse. One morning, I awoke and was sure I could hear a stream burbling close by; by the sound of it, almost in the garden. I clambered out of bed, into my Wellington boots and stuck my head outside the front door. There was a brisk brown brook swishing its way down the lawn towards the field. Two things immediately struck me as odd: first of all, we had not had a brook running through the garden when I last looked, and secondly, there had been no rain during the night. I followed the brook upstream through the plastic sheeting into the barn where the provisional kitchen no longer stood on a dirt floor, but in a spreading, chuckling ocean of mud. The copper pipes to the sink had burst, transforming themselves into ingenious water features gushing thin, high-pressure fountains from eight splits. The mud was ankle-deep and rising. I sploshed to the phone to call Terry. ‘I’m going to have to get a plumber in here quickly.’ ‘No, don’t do that. We can’t afford a plumber. You'll have to fix it yourself.’ I snorted. ‘Don’t be ridiculous! You’ve absolutely no idea what’s happening here. The water’s flowing through the barn and right to the end of the garden! It isn’t a little trickle, it’s gushing all over the place, and there’s mud everywhere!’ ‘OK. Listen. Go and find the toolbox, and the blow-lamp. And turn off the stopcock.’ ‘Where is the stopcock? What does it look like?’ ‘It’s a red-topped tap, and it’s somewhere beneath the basin.’ I found it just above the waterline and stopped the multiple squirts. Over the next two hours, Terry gave an elementary plumbing tutorial via the telephone. I did exactly what he said, cutting through pipes with a hacksaw, joining them up with little brass rings called, for a reason I couldn’t understand, olives, and soldering the splits in the pipes, all the time slithering and sliding about in the slimy residue left by the receding stream. I was colder than ever, soaked and filthy, and we still only had the plastic bucket to wash in. The contents of the refrigerator were frozen: butter, milk, eggs, fruit, cheese and bread were all solid. The washing up liquid had turned to crystals and if shaken made a noise like maracas. The jams and sauces in the jars were frozen solid. All our house plants were dead, turned to a limp green mush. My French dream had turned into a nightmare. A week later, six inches of snow fell overnight. The horses’ water buckets were frozen from top to bottom, so I scraped snow into plastic buckets and brought it into the house, but after four and a half hours in the icy living room, they were still buckets of snow. I borrowed a small heater and stood them in front of it. Within ten minutes, it had all melted, including the buckets which were buckled and no longer bucket-shaped. Madame Meneteau lent me some buckets and filled them for me. I thought how ironic it was that Terry and I had almost certainly earned, over the preceding years, more money than all the inhabitants of the hamlet had jointly earned in their lives, yet while they were all cosily comfortable in their houses, with their wood-burning stoves, I was quite literally freezing. During that first winter, the weather could be bright and sunny one day, and bitterly cold with thick ice the next. Two days later, it might pour with rain, and the following day, out would come the sun again. The horses were particularly perplexed – used to the monotony of cold wet English autumns and winters, they didn’t understand why the seasons changed here with such rapidity. Friends urged me to return to England. It was, of course, never an option even if I had wanted to, not with all the animals dependent upon me.

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Planet Killer (Star Kingdom #6) by Lindsay Buroker

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The classic book on systems thinking, with more than half a million copies sold worldwide!This is a fabulous book. This book opened my mind and reshaped the way I think about investing. ForbesPerfect for fans of Kate Raworth, Rutger Bregman and Daniel Kahneman!The co-author of the international best-selling book Limits to Growth, Donella Meadows is widely regarded as a pioneer in the environmental movement and one of the world's foremost systems analysts . Her posthumously published Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. This essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills critical for 21st-century life.Some of the biggest problems facing the world―war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation―are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous impact.While readers will learn the conceptual tools and methods of systems thinking, the heart of the book is grander than methodology. Donella Meadows reminds readers to pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, to stay humble, and to stay a learner.No matter what industry or career you’re in, Thinking In Systems will bring clarity to the complicated, crowded and interdependent networks that make up the world today. Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, the first step toward finding proactive and effective solutions.

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If you are looking for fun and lovely memoirs, you can’t go wrong with The Grape Series by Laura Bradbury. Whimiscal and throught provoking, you'll find yourself shaking your head at the situations that Laura finds herself in. In My Grape Year, Canadian teenager Laura participates in a study abroad program in France and finds the…

GCHQ is a top-secret intelligence and security agency which recruits some of the very brightest minds. Over the years, their codebreakers have helped keep Britain safe, from the Bletchley Park breakthroughs of WWII to the modern-day threat of cyberattack. So it comes as no surprise that, even in their time off, the staff at GCHQ love a good puzzle. Whether they're recruiting new staff or challenging each other to the toughest Christmas quizzes and treasure hunts imaginable, puzzles are at the heart of what GCHQ does. Here in this book they open up their archives to share decades' worth of codes, puzzles and challenges for everyone to try.

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