Individuals

  To devote yourself to the community is an extraordinary thing. How does it happen? For Simon Hare it started with his family motto: “be curious, try everything and learn everything you can”. In Simon’s family people were just human animals and animals were people too: their menagerie of a donkey, chickens, cats, guinea pigs, geese and two black Labradors in …

Walk down any pretty tree-lined street in Blackheath and I guarantee more than a third of the cottages will be occupied by a person living alone. Mostly they’re older people who are on their own either by choice or through life circumstances. After all, our village has long been considered a perfect place for retirement, and many come to live …

Jim Crowther, watchmaker, beekeeper, maker and fixer of objects large and small, picks up a screw with a pair of fine tweezers and holds it in my direction. “That’s not the smallest of them,” he says. It’s tiny. A speck so minuscule that, even looking closely at it, even knowing it for what it is, there’s no resolution beyond that …