A year-end inventory around who I’m keeping, who I’m releasing, and why clarity is a kind form of courage. "Well that's not very " Happy New Year of you"... No, perhaps not. But we are only a fortnight from 2026, and our New Years resolutions - the biggest, most bombastic, annual re-set tale we tell oursleves. People talk a lot about New Year, New Me - but the truth is, these delusional decisions don't generally fall into the silo of "real change". Resolutions are more-than

Christmas...the great revealer of who people really are. There is something about the holidays where grinches and gaslighters find their normal camouflage difficult to don. Perhaps because the festive season is ostensibly about the core values of love, tradition and unadulterated joy, toxic personality types in particular, find themselves sorely lacking the opportunity to grab the kind of attention, admiration and entitlement they so desperately crave.

Soulstice Immersions are two-week, women-only experiences, designed to help us come home to ourselves - through courage, creativity and connection. The quiet clarity that emerges when life finally gives us space to breathe.

There’s a funny comedian who asked this of the audience “who here is a glass half empty person?” Half the audience raises their hands.  “Show of hands for the half full?” The rest go up. Now that everyone had defined and labeled themselves, he delivers the punchline.

Every year, I hear someone say "It just keeps getting earlier "... referencing the sudden appearance of Christmas in late September. Like it matters. For me, any season that is associated with joy, giving and connection to loved ones can start its shift as early as it damn well pleases. Many do not share my view here and I fully respect that. For some, the hoildays are strongly linked to sadness, stress, depression and anxiety, for which I am profoundly sorry. That must suck.

We all hear of superfoods - Goji berries, chia seeds… the list goes on and changes like the seasons. Fortunately, emotions don’t follow these trends, but as we head into the season of gratitude, let me highlight why it is your Superpower and why it’s the ingredient you’ll want in your morning mental smoothie.

"We have two ears and one mouth, so we can listen twice as much as we speak". - Eptictetus. - Family gatherings are an opportunity to connect, make new memories, and share old ones. They can also serve as a mirror for our spiritual growth. There is no better place for t

I know... some of you will not see relocating as an "art" . Perhaps viewing it more of an extremely daunting prospect, a discomfort to be avoided, or just something that other people do. Particularly, of course if it involves not a mere change of post code, but a move that crosses time zones and international date lines. We benefit from a built-in bias around the beauty of staying put. Home is where our friends are, or the kids live, or the climate suits. It's where we "belon

Why is it, when we see the ruins of a great castle, the knarl of an ancient olive tree or the oldest grave in the cemetery, we become so awestruck and admiring? We are so absolutely enchanted by the sheer age of things. We respect them. We willingly keep off the grass of history. We admire the flaws and crumbling imperfections. We feel a loving and protective instinct, despite no sense of personal ownership. It runs deep in us and we feel proud to be a product of our creative

In France, where "bread is life", what happens when the bakery closes? Few countries keep such extensive data around bakeries as France does. According to a 2017 government report, 73% of the French population lived within half a mile of a Boulangerie. Of course, in a country where 8-out-of 10 people live in largely urban areas, it is plainly not a city-dwellers problem. It is in rural France where the loss of the village bakery strikes like a family bereavement. For the purp

The French have a verb for a very specific pastime. The dictionary has it as - Flâner… (v) to wander about with no particular purpose. Pronounced - flan - as in pan and ay - as in hay.  She  (or indeed he  - Le Flâneur ) was an individual who elegantly ambled the streets and squares with no desire to get anywhere specific, but simply to be there.  To observe. To absorb. To walk with no agenda other than the call of curiosity.

It is all well and good to throw buzz-words around, but one that often comes up in casual conversation these days, is ‘frequency’. Like most expressions, it can mean different things to different people and yet actually, is very rooted in science. Not in a “my frequency is like..so off today” as though you‘re just having a bad hair day, but involving physics…a real exchange of energy with the environment and people - total friends or total strangers. We’ve all been in a room

This month, rather than a focus on food and what makes our table groan, we feel a bit caught up in remebrance. Of course that in itself is quite fitting for November. It is a month roomy with retrospection, governed for most of us through the memorial of the 11th hour of the 11th day, to the waste they called "Great War".

Every nation tends to make a contribution to the great theatre of style. England gave us understatement, Italy provided road rage and France — with predictable irony — gave us austerity disguised as art. The word silhouette began not as a term of beauty, but of mockery. Étienne de Silhouette, was the well intentioned but disastrously unpopular 1759 French finance minister. He tried very hard tried to balance the Nations chequebook after yet another costly skirmish with the E

There are so many questions when one moves to France. Will it be hard to learn the language? How should I dress? And, most urgently, how will I not “wear” all those pastries and calories, never having been raised on French cuisine? I can’t be the first one to obsess over these things, right?

Let’s start with the obvious: the French eat. With butter, with wine, with joy. Meanwhile, across the channel or indeed the big pond, we seem to eat with an undercurrent of apology. We talk about “being good” when we skip dessert, or “cheating” when we don’t — as if a pastry were a moral failing. Somewhere between the calorie counter and the confession booth, food stopped being nourishment and became a referendum on self-control, by which we often judge ourselves unkindly...

The word sabotage is a genuine “drama picture”. It can conjure machines grinding noisily to a halt, partisans blowing up railway lines, or each of us inexplicably wrecking our own best chances.. It feels shivering, cinematic and rebellious. But sabotage has much humbler roots, in the clatter of a wooden shoe…

Platform 13 CEO Vanessa Grant sits down with the a local artisan who shares her story of creativity and community. In a sun-washed workshop on Rue Notre-Dame, in the beautiful bastide village of Monpazier, jewellery designer and maker Claire Lamouroux shapes stories from natural materials. Her boutique, Semilla (“seed” in Spanish), is shared with her partner Jean-Luc Pigeat — together they create wonderful, original jewelley pieces that feel both ancient and utterly present.

Our Brave Seeds "Women of Note" posts were originally conceived around a focus on the women who shape our regional community - social and entrepeneurial movers and shakers, whose gifts of giving back are, well... noteworthy.

I love almost everything that is old. Old books, old times, old manners. One of the few enviable advantages of being British lies not only in how we have managed to preserve old things, but in how we continue to delight in them. We don’t simply store the past; we keep it in circulation, like a favourite chair, endlessly sat in.