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SIX MORE CABINS IN ENGLAND BoatShack, Cambridgeshire This 1945 oak-and-larch fishing trawler has been converted into a cosy kingsize bedroom with a porthole-style door – and there’s an adjoining shack housing a kitchen and a walk-in shower. The characterful cabin sits in a private 1.2-hectare (three-acre) forest on a smallholding in the Fens, near Ely. It’s an off-grid property, powered by solar panels and has a woodburner fashioned from the boat’s engine. Overlooking the countryside there is a deck made from reclaimed sleepers with table and chairs, a fire pit and a rolltop bath.• From £140 a night, sleeps two, hostunusual.com … [Read more...] about ‘I want to dance with joy’: a beach cabin escape on Kent’s Isle of Sheppey

Every week a Guardian Money reader submits a question, and it’s up to you to help him or her out – a selection of the best answers will appear in next Saturday’s paper. … [Read more...] about What was your best purchase during lockdown?

The Loop, which launches next month, is one of the most ambitious attempts yet to eliminate plastic waste from the weekly shop. It is backed by major consumer goods companies Unilever and PepsiCo, who have created eco-versions of popular brands including Tropicana, Persil and Hellmann’s, to sell via the website. … [Read more...] about The milkman gets an eco-makeover as refill service knocks on door

I stop for lunch in a field of winter wheat and watch flocks of pigeons leaving the woods. I wait, gulping down soup and bread. I wait for a peregrine while berating the egocentricity that leads me to believe they will appear for me because I am here to see them. What I see instead is a dog fox, bright in winter coat. He trots, flat-eared along the woodland edge and heads up the lane towards me. He is hunting, black socks and ears all a perk, for a mouse. He doesn’t know I am here and for a moment I am elated but then his acorn eyes lock into my binoculars and he pauses, as foxes fatally do, before turning tail and trotting back into cover. … [Read more...] about Essex rediscovered: ghosts and falcons on a rural ride

He sent a copy of The Peregrine to the film director Werner Herzog; Herzog read it and was astonished. He has since spoken often of the book, and it is now one of only three required texts for his Rogue Film School – along with Virgil’s Georgics and Hemingway’s story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”. Herzog describes The Peregrine as inducing “ecstasy” in the radical sense of the word: not just entranced or frenzied, but literally beside oneself. There are moments, he notes, “where you can tell that [Baker] has completely entered into the existence of a falcon. And this is what I do when I make a film: I step outside of myself into an ekstasis; in Greek, to step outside of your own body.” … [Read more...] about Violent spring: The nature book that predicted the future