My book The Unnatural Trade came out late last year. It shows how evidence provided by naturalists was crucial to the way British abolitionists were able to cast the slave trade as unnatural, a "dread perversion of nature". Find out more and look inside - brycchancarey.com/bookshop/u…

I was very excited to learn that I’d won the competition for a brand new electric car and other great prizes. It turns out that I’d won only one of the other great prizes: a pair of matching tea towels. They are indeed great, but arguably slightly less great than a brand new car.

This is what’s left of the Lipman Building today at Northumbria University. The tangled mess of girders and concrete next to the yellow portacabin was my office for a decade. The building was definitely at the end of its life and had to go, but it’s still a sad moment.

I’ve been in Tywyn today, birthplace of Rev. Griffith Hughes, author of the 1750 Natural History of Barbados, He was baptised in St. Cadfan’s, home to the Cadfan Stone, the oldest piece of Welsh writing - ironic as Hughes was the last Welsh-speaking minister in North America.

For those who missed it, here’s the two pages of the @BSECS conference programme for 1988: no parallel sessions and a field trip to Kenwood House. This and four boxes of other documents I am transferring from my shed to a new BSECS archive at the Voltaire Foundation in Oxford.

The car is in the garage for a week so we’ve been rediscovering walks around Alnwick we can do from the house. This evening, a walk along the River Aln where we saw grey wagtails, herons, dippers, and a kingfisher.

We’re having work done and the stone is from Hutton Stone in Berwickshire. This puts me in mind of the geologist James Hutton whose description of the age of the earth could also describe maintaining a listed building: “no vestige of a beginning - no prospect of an end”.

Good news! More than £20million has been raised to buy the Rothbury Estate and create one of England’s largest areas for nature and wildlife. Bad news - £9.3 million more is needed by the end of September. Please donate now at: wildlifetrusts.org/appeals/r…. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c171…

Well, there is definitely an #eclipse in #Northumberland.

I’m in #York today, 10 August, where at 5.30pm I’ll be talking about my book The Unnatural Trade as part of the York Georgian Festival at the Mansion House. Tickets are available on the door. More information and the rest of today’s excellent programme at mansionhouseyork.com/york-ge…

Last night, the moon was bright over Mount’s Bay in Penzance. This morning, St Michael’s Mount is concealed by murky but welcome drizzle.

I spent the day tracking down the elusive Cornish chough along the coast between Cape Cornwall and Land’s End. There were none until suddenly there were many, bouncing around the coastguard lookout at Sennen Cove.

How did eighteenth-century British abolitionists come to view the slave trade as a "dread perversion" of nature? To find out, come and hear me talking about my book The Unnatural Trade at the York Georgian Festival, 5.30pm, Monday 10 August. mansionhouse.tygit.com/shop/…

I’ve had a lazy day at Portscatho in Cornwall, wandering around cliffs and art galleries, enjoying the palm trees, and lingering over a stupendous Sunday roast.

I’m spending a few days in Cornwall, my childhood home. This is St. Mawes Castle in the foreground with Pendennis Castle behind, both constructed by Henry VIII to guard over the Carrick Roads and Falmouth Harbour.

For the first time in 40 years, I walked out to Lihou Island, a tidal island on the west coast of Guernsey connected by a narrow causeway from L’Erée and its brutalist Nazi tower. Lihou used to be famous for its seaweed-eating sheep, now gone, but the ruined priory remains.

Some memorials in Guernsey for those who fled the Nazis in 1940 and for those who were deported and murdered by them. My grandmother and her children escaped by crossing the Channel on a small boat; neither the first nor the last to escape oppression by that route.

I’m in Guernsey seeing my dad and catching up with cousins. It’s lovely to be back.

Today I’ve been in Blandford Forum in Dorset. This “charming Georgian town” is so because it was entirely burnt to the ground in 1731 and rebuilt. This “dire disaster” is remembered in a monument raised in 1760 by John Bastard, “a considerable Sharer in the general Calamity”.