This year the Home Office moved to stop expert sheep shearers from Australia and New Zealand coming to shear British sheep. The people who keep the animals comfortable were declared surplus to requirements. For over a decade, around 75 of the best shearers on earth have flown in each spring on a simple visa concession. In a few brutal weeks they take the wool off up to two million sheep. A top shearer clears a ewe in two or three minutes. Hundreds a day. Calm hands, no panic in the animal. It is a global trade and a young body's game, and Britain has never grown enough of its own. The official line? Fourteen years to train Britons, so the door is closing. Here is what that tidy sentence ignores. A sheep must be shorn every year or she overheats, cannot move properly, and gets eaten alive by flies and maggots. Shearing on time is welfare, plain and simple, written into law and into the animal's own skin. So a government that lectures farmers without pause about welfare has quietly made the most basic welfare task harder to carry out. After the outcry they allowed one "final" year. Then the experts are gone for good. A sector already losing money on every fleece, already burning wool it cannot sell, now told it cannot even get the people in to take the wool off. You could be forgiven for thinking somebody wants the British sheep gone.

‘Nana Yaa’ 2026. Currently on show in CORNERS at Town House, 5 Fournier Street, Spitalfields, E1 6QE @thegentleauthor @ahistoryinart @DanBerthod

A little bit of argy-bargy to end the game…

#PostboxSaturday Ashington, Somerset. ⛪🚶‍♀️📮

After William Bowyer bought a cottage in Walberswick, a coastal village near Southwold in Suffolk, depicted in various impressionist paintings a century earlier, the beach became a popular subject for him. This is from 1994.

In 'Along the Shore,' (1914) Edward Southall has chosen to depict the elegance of a female only family outing to the seaside, in this case Southwold on the Suffolk coast. Each of the figures is beautifully studied, typical of Southall's refined draughtsmanship.

The Old Fox at Bricket Wood in Hertfordshire (inside the M25 but very much a county pub for walkers) has been shut for almost a decade - but has now finally had sensitive renovation and is open again. And it’s really well done. Lovely. More of this please

The sound of a 7 week old baby red squirrel eating. [📹 Dani Connor]

Wine glasses. Otto Prutscher. c.1908. Image: Crafoord.

Georges de la Tour, peintre de l’intériorité et de la lumière

The Sydney Opera House illuminated with Gustav Klimt's The Tree of Life.

Nigel’s poster is going viral

Lovely backdrop for this barn owl…

Hitler killed himself and Germany surrendered. Japan got nuked. Do they teach history in Ohio?

JD Vance: If you go back to WW2 or every major conflict in human history, they all ended with some kind of negotiation.

Hitler negotiated with a gun he fired into his own mouth. Mussolini negotiated with a submachine gun on the side of a road. The Japanese negotiated with not one, but two, nuclear bombs. JD Vance is an Ivy League graduate? Holy fucking hell, MAGA really does melt brains.

Two Suffolk farmers living next to a former bomber base used GPS to draw the shadow of a B-17 Flying Fortress onto one of their fields that lay under the base' former flight path, then ploughed it with a tractor to create this striking temporary artwork! 🙌 🚜 📸 Downed Warbirds

The above post was influenced by a headline in the @DailyMail. On the subject of defence, the sheer irony of it won't be wasted on a newspaper that appeased Hitler in the 1930s and sympathised with the Mosley's British Union of Fascists.

RT @RuthieGenie: Happy #postboxsaturday everyone! Two different Georges from Canterbury

Je me suis enfermé dans une belle maison en Normandie où je peux fumer et faire ce que je veux. Et c'est là que je vais rester . David Hockney