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I can't help but be moved by the plight of the 'abandoned soldiers' as highlighted in the BBC's Power to the People documentary tonight. A temporary monument  in London. It is difficult to comprehend why soldiers that have made sacrifices for the country in which we live - many suffering from limb-loss and mental issues - are not afforded a better quality of medical care and support.  It seems that the lessons of yesterday have still not been learnt. The lessons learnt when the likes of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen wrote of the horrors of trench warfare and the poor conditions for soldiers was brought into the public conciousness. I have no solution to offer for this situation as I don't know enough about it, but I do support the permenent erection of a bronze memorial in London to honour those soldiers who return alive and injured.  Something like this may help to raise further into the conciousness of British society the realities of ser

Offshore: In Search of an Island of My Own by Ben Fogle Islophile Ben Fogle’s second book, Offshore, builds neatly on Teatime Islands in terms of unlocking further the reasons behind his fascination with islands. This time he embarks upon a journey around the coast of the United Kingdom in order to find an island to calls his home. The book begins and ends with Fogle’s attempts to land on Rockall, a mere pebble of an island in the North Atlantic Ocean – an island that is technically British but whose sovereignty is disputed due to purported mineral and pescarian wealth in the area. Along the way there are plenty of small adventures involving the coastguard, storms, helicopters ditching and, amongst other things, a run in with an angry Viking. The main reasons for buying this book were: firstly the Teatime Islands seemed to appeal to my own sense of curiosity about islands and far-flung British imperial outposts; and secondly that Fogle writes in a very accessible style – really t