Once a month I gather up the best things I’ve stumbled across concerning fatherhood, adventure, analogue life and the weirdness of modern parenting. Please find enclosed the latest batch.

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This beautiful short film from Patagonia follows 9-year-old Oly Hickman as he roams around his parents’ property in British Columbia, poking at riverbanks, fishing and generally behaving like a kid who hasn’t yet been flattened by the algorithm.

It’s a lovely reminder of how much wonder children can find in the everyday natural world, even if their everyday natural world happens to be a remote fly fishing lodge in bear country, which does feel like cheating slightly!

Charlie and Jess are seasoned travellers and young parents who’ve turned their attention to the UK, mapping and documenting the best of what’s on our doorstep. They’ve packaged up 52 genuinely brilliant adventures that feel bloody exciting but, crucially, doable. As a returning expat Brit this is sweet nectar.

Harry is the world poetry slam champion with an uncanny ability to capture life’s highs and lows in a way that’s heartfelt, very funny and painfully relatable all at once. Decide for yourself whether this makes you laugh or cry or at the very least remember that life is a gift. Play it to your kids.

I’ve owned my ENO DoubleNest Hammock for knocking on 10 years now, strapping it up across beaches, parks, gardens and forests all over the world. At one point it very nearly completed a full 360 degree rotation with five kids inside it, much to the horror of the mums. Fewer purchases have brought me more joy in life than hammocks (I once slept in one for three months straight). There are probably cheaper ones out there, but this thing absolutely rips.

Whether this topic feels fascinating, confronting or completely cooked to you, it’s a genuinely thoughtful piece about self-awareness, inherited baggage and the strange business of trying not to pass our unresolved nonsense onto our kids. I highly recommend subscribing to Kevin’s Substack generally; The New Fatherhood is one of the more interesting corners of the internet for modern fatherhood.

“I’m bored!” is a phrase that pierces the ambience of most family road trips. For parents looking for a screen-free antidote, I stumbled across BoredGame: a deck of 50 conversation starters created by Fun Dad Dean, with challenges and mini-games designed for kids aged 4–12. This could easily earn a permanent place in the glovebox between the furry softmint and miscellaneous lug nut.