The Things Left
Margaret Humphreys
1986. Nottingham, England.
Margaret Humphreys is a social worker. She is not famous. She has no political connections, no private funding, and no reason to believe that a single letter from a stranger in Australia is about to change her life forever.
The letter is from a woman who says that at the age of 4, she was placed on a boat by the British government and shipped to a children’s home in Australia. She was told her parents were dead. She grew up an orphan on the other side of the world.
Now she is an adult. She wants to know if any of her family is still out there.
Humphreys agrees to investigate. She expects to spend a few weeks searching records and confirming what the woman already suspects — that her parents are gone.
Instead, she finds the woman’s mother. Alive. Living less than an hour from Nottingham.
The woman’s parents were never dead. They were never even told where their child had been sent.
The Secret That Had Been Hidden in Plain Sight.
Humphreys begins pulling on the thread. What unravels is one of the most shocking government programmes in British history.
For over 100 years – from the 1860s all the way to 1970 – the British government and a network of charities and religious organisations had been systematically removing children from care homes and shipping them to Australia, Canada, and other Commonwealth nations. The children were told they were orphans being given a better life.
Most of them were not orphans. They had living parents. They had siblings still in England.
They had families who had surrendered them temporarily during times of poverty or illness, fully expecting to be reunited.
Nobody told the parents where their children went. Nobody told the children their parents were alive.
More than 130,000 children were transported. The youngest were as young as 3 years old.
Here’s what makes it worse, many of the institutions receiving these children in Australia were run by religious orders who used the children as cheap labour. Boys worked farm fields from before sunrise. Girls cleaned and cooked for institutions that kept them entirely cut off from the outside world. Some were denied any education at all. Investigators would later describe what happened in those institutions as “widespread and systematic sexual abuse.”
The children were told they were the sons and daughters of whores. That they were worthless.
That nobody back in England loved them or wanted them back.
Many of them believed it for the rest of their lives.
1987. Humphreys’ Living Room, Nottingham.
After traveling to Australia and posting newspaper advertisements asking for former child migrants to come forward, Humphreys is overwhelmed by the response. At first it is a trickle.
Then it becomes thousands.
She establishes the Child Migrants Trust – initially from her own home, with her husband Mervyn as her closest support – and registers it as a charity in both Australia and Britain.
She has no government backing. No institutional support. The organisations responsible for the scheme – including powerful church bodies and charities – are not remotely pleased to see her digging.
She faces legal pressure. She faces institutional stonewalling. Files go missing. Doors are closed. She is one social worker from Nottingham going up against organisations that have decades of experience in making things disappear.
She does not stop.
The Work.
For the next 23 years, Humphreys travels constantly between Nottingham, Western Australia, and Victoria, combing through emigration records, church ledgers, government archives, and institutional files that were never designed to be found by people like her.
She reunites more than 1,000 individuals with their biological families in those first decades alone. Every reunion is its own extraordinary story. Elderly parents meet children they last saw as toddlers. Brothers and sisters discover each other after 40 or 50 years of believing the other was gone. Middle-aged adults finally learn their own real names.
Some of those parents are in their 80s and 90s by the time Humphreys reaches them. Some die before she can bring their children home.
In 1993, the Australian government awards her the Medal of the Order of Australia – one of the country’s highest civilian honours – for her services on behalf of the child migrants.
In 1994, she publishes her full account in a book called Empty Cradles. It causes a national outcry in Britain.
The Apologies.
It takes 23 years of campaigning to force a government to say sorry.
In 2009, the Australian government issues a formal national apology to all former child migrants for the suffering caused by the scheme.
In 2010, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown stands before Parliament and delivers an official apology on behalf of the United Kingdom. He acknowledges the “misguided” programme that unjustly broke up thousands of families and caused immeasurable harm to the children caught inside it.
A few years later, Humphreys is appointed CBE – Commander of the British Empire. The same empire that once shipped children across the world to serve it.
The film Oranges and Sunshine, released in 2010 and starring Emily Watson as Humphreys, brings the story to a global audience for the very first time.
What She Found When She Started Pulling That Thread.
Margaret Humphreys was not a detective. She was not a barrister or a politician or a crusading journalist. She was a social worker who opened a letter and decided that the person inside it deserved to know the truth.
She found over 130,000 reasons why that decision mattered.
The Trust she built from her living room is still operating today – still reuniting families, still supporting survivors, still running offices in England and Australia. Because the work is not finished. Some of those stolen children are still searching. Some are still waiting.
1 letter. 1 social worker. 1 decision to follow the truth wherever it led.
Share this with someone who believes that ordinary people can change the world – because Margaret Humphreys proves it, 1 family at a time.
English Is
Crystallized Honey
When Honey turns thick, grainy, or completely crystallized in the pantry, many people assume it has spoiled.
In reality, crystallization is usually a completely natural process — especially in raw or minimally processed honey.
Honey contains different natural sugars, mainly fructose and glucose. Over time, glucose tends to separate from the water inside the honey and form tiny crystals. Those crystals gradually spread through the jar, causing the honey to become cloudy, thick, or solid.
Tiny particles naturally present in raw honey — including pollen, air bubbles, wax fragments, and minerals — can act as starting points that help crystals form more easily.
This means crystallization often occurs faster in less processed honey.
However, the idea that all clear, runny honey is fake or mixed with corn syrup is an exaggeration.
Several factors affect crystallization speed, including:
flower source
glucose-to-fructose ratio
storage temperature
filtration level
moisture content
Some genuine honeys naturally stay liquid much longer than others.
Commercial processing and filtering can slow crystallization because removing particles reduces crystal formation sites, and gentle heating dissolves existing crystals. But that alone does not automatically mean the honey is artificial or low quality.
Importantly, crystallized honey is usually still perfectly safe to eat.
If someone prefers liquid honey again, placing the jar in warm water can slowly dissolve the crystals without damaging the honey significantly.
Food scientists generally view crystallization as a normal physical change rather than spoilage — one of the many natural behaviors of real honey over time.
Tomato Triage
Most early-season tomato problems aren’t caused by the soil. They’re caused by misreading what the plant is telling you.
A purple leaf gets treated with phosphorus. A yellow leaf gets treated with nitrogen. But in both cases, the plant is often reacting to temperature or its own growth pattern — not a deficiency. Reaching for fertilizer before diagnosing the cause can make things worse.
Three signals that fool people every spring:
– Purple undersides on young leaves — almost always a temperature response, not a soil deficiency. When the soil is still cool in early spring, the roots can’t absorb phosphorus efficiently even when it’s there. Adding more fertilizer doesn’t help. Warming the soil does — black plastic mulch or a few more weeks of spring sun solves it on its own.
– Yellow lower leaves with green veins — the plant is often moving stored nutrients from its oldest leaves to feed new growth at the top. This is normal internal redistribution, not a nitrogen shortage. Adding nitrogen at this point pushes leaf growth at the expense of fruit set.
– A stem that turns brown or yellow at the base while the whole plant wilts — this one is different. Soil-borne fungal diseases like fusarium and verticillium can’t be treated once symptoms show. Remove the plant, don’t compost it, and avoid planting tomatoes in that spot next year.
Before you reach for anything:
– Check soil temperature first. If it’s still cool, most early-season leaf discoloration resolves on its own as the ground warms.
– Wait a week before adding any amendment. Many early symptoms are the plant adjusting, not the plant failing.
– If the problem is at the base of the stem and spreading upward, that’s when to act fast — remove the plant to protect the rest of the bed.
The best early-season intervention is usually patience. The plant is adjusting, not dying.
Hugh Jackman – Fair Trade Coffee
He played Wolverine. But most people who drink his coffee don’t know he founded the company—or why.
2009.Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia.
Hugh Jackman landed at a small airstrip in the highlands of southern Ethiopia.
He was 40 years old. He was the most famous Australian actor in the world. He’d played Wolverine in four X-Men films. He’d won a Tony Award on Broadway. He’d hosted the Academy Awards a few months earlier.
He was in Ethiopia as an ambassador for World Vision.
He’d come to make a short documentary about a community development project.
He hadn’t come to meet anyone in particular.
The Land Rover drove him and his wife Deborra-Lee Furness six hours into the highlands, to the Yirgacheffe region.
Yirgacheffe is the birthplace of coffee.
The Land Rover stopped at a small farm. Two hectares. The house had dirt floors and no electricity.
The farmer was 27 years old.
His name was Dukale.
He had a wife named Adanech and five children. His oldest son was five years old.
His name was Elias.
Hugh asked if he could spend the day working with Dukale.
Dukale said yes.
They started at dawn.
They planted seedlings together. They worked the soil. Dukale showed Hugh how a coffee tree grows. He showed him the careful shade-growing technique he used. He showed him the small drying patio where he laid the beans out to dry in the sun.
Hugh listened.
Dukale told him about the price of coffee.
Coffee farmers in Ethiopia received 1 to 2 percent of the final retail price of the coffee they grew.
The other 98 percent went to middlemen, exporters, roasters, and grocery chains.
A farmer like Dukale could work 12 hours a day for a year and still not have enough money to send his children to school.
Dukale told Hugh he had a dream.
He wanted Elias to be educated.
He wanted all five of his children to be educated.
Before Hugh left that evening, he and Dukale planted two more trees together.
They named them after Hugh’s children.
Oscar. Ava.
Hugh promised Dukale he would come back. He promised he would do something.
He didn’t know yet what.
He flew back to New York.
He couldn’t stop thinking about Dukale.
A few months later, he gave a speech at UN Climate Week. He stood in front of presidents and prime ministers and made a pleading case for the world’s coffee farmers.
He said the words “fair trade“ twenty-five times.
He told them about Dukale.
He flew home from the UN.
He realized a speech wasn’t enough.
In 2011, Hugh Jackman opened a small coffee shop in Tribeca, New York.
He called it Laughing Man Coffee & Tea.
He had one rule.
100 percent of his personal profits from the company would go to the Laughing Man Foundation.
The foundation would fund education, water wells, and agricultural training in coffee-growing communities.
The first community it would fund was Dukale’s.
The cafe bought Dukale’s beans directly. It paid him a fair-trade price.
The most popular blend on the menu was called Dukale’s Dream.
It still is.
In 2015, Hugh signed a partnership with Keurig.
Dukale’s blend went into K-Cups.
The coffee Dukale grew on his 2-hectare farm in the Ethiopian highlands started being brewed in homes across America.
By 2024, Laughing Man Coffee had grown into a national brand.
Two cafes in Manhattan. Bagged products in over 6,000 grocery stores. A wholesale program serving hundreds of restaurants and offices.
Every cent of Hugh’s personal profits has continued to go to the foundation.
The foundation has now funded education and infrastructure programs in seven countries.
It has helped over 1,000 coffee-farming families lift themselves out of extreme poverty.
It has built schools.
The trees Hugh and Dukale planted together in 2009 are now 16 years old.
They’re bearing fruit.
The coffee beans from the Oscar tree and the Ava tree—named after Hugh’s children—are sold in the Tribeca cafe.
Dukale himself is now 43 years old.
He’s expanded his farm. He’s bought more land. He’s opened his own cafe in his own town.
He’s built a larger house for his family with a tin roof and electricity.
His son Elias is in college.
Elias is the first member of the Dukale family to attend college in five generations.
Hugh Jackman has continued, in the 16 years since that afternoon in Yirgacheffe, to act, sing, and tour.
He returned as Wolverine in “Deadpool & Wolverine“ in July 2024. The film grossed $1.3 billion worldwide.
He won his second Tony in 2022.
He hasn’t been back to Ethiopia since 2009.
He’s said in interviews, more than once, that he’s been waiting for his own children to be old enough to travel with him to meet Dukale.
Oscar and Ava are now 25 and 19.
He’s told a reporter that the trip is on the calendar.
There are now two Laughing Man cafes in Manhattan.
The walls of both of them are decorated with photographs of Dukale and his family.
There are no photographs of Hugh.
He designed it that way.
Most of the customers who come in for a flat white in the morning don’t know that the cafe was founded by the man who played Wolverine.
They don’t need to know.
The coffee is excellent. The price is fair. The beans were grown by a farmer in the Ethiopian highlands who’s now able to send his children to school.
That’s enough.
Sauerkraut Gut Repair
In 1991, U.S. wheat farmers began a practice called “preharvest desiccation”: spraying glyphosate (Roundup) on wheat fields 7-10 days before harvest to dry the crop uniformly and accelerate drying. By 2012, the practice was standard across North American wheat. Today, the average loaf of conventional American bread contains detectable glyphosate residue at levels that, while “within legal limits”, are administered to your gut tissue every single morning.
Glyphosate works by inhibiting the shikimate pathway — a biochemical pathway that plants and beneficial gut bacteria share. It does not directly kill human cells. It kills the Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium populations in your gut wall, and it disrupts the zonulin signaling that keeps the gut epithelium tightly sealed. The result is what functional medicine calls “leaky gut”: tiny gaps in the intestinal wall through which undigested food particles, bacterial fragments, and toxins enter the bloodstream and trigger systemic inflammation.
Western gastroenterology was slow to acknowledge intestinal permeability. The standard endoscopy cannot see tight junction damage at the molecular level — only gross structural lesions. Patients with bloating, joint aches, brain fog, and unexplained eczema in their thirties and forties were diagnosed with IBS and prescribed motility drugs that did nothing.
Big Pharma cannot patent a crock of cabbage and salt. So they did not.
But what microbiologists in Munich and Tübingen documented, by sampling the stool of patients before and after a 14-day protocol of traditional Bavarian-style raw sauerkraut, was remarkable: the Lactobacillus plantarum strain native to spontaneous cabbage fermentation produces specific peptides that signal the gut epithelium to upregulate tight junction proteins (occludin, claudin-1, ZO-1) and re-seal the leak. Within 14 days, intestinal permeability markers in 7 out of 10 subjects had returned to baseline.
A $90 commercial probiotic bottle contains roughly 50 billion CFU of 10-15 strains. Two tablespoons of raw sauerkraut contain approximately 1.5 trillion CFU of 50+ wild strains in their native fermentation matrix. The matrix matters: the brine, the enzymes, the cabbage fiber, and the organic acids together do what an isolated probiotic capsule cannot.
Activate gut barrier repair:
– Raw and Refrigerated Only: Pasteurized sauerkraut on a grocery shelf is dead. The medicine is in the live bacteria. Look for refrigerated, unpasteurized sauerkraut with only cabbage and salt on the label. The brine should be cloudy.
– The Two-Spoon Floor: Eat 2 tablespoons before lunch and dinner. The fermented acid prepares the stomach for protein digestion AND seeds the lower gut with live cultures.
– 14-Day Reset: Most people feel a meaningful difference in bloating and energy within 14 days. Full epithelial repair takes 60 days of consistent intake.
Nutrients. “Effects of fermented cabbage on intestinal barrier integrity”. 2021.
Frontiers in Microbiology. “Lactobacillus plantarum peptides and tight junction regulation”. 2022.
Inflammaging: Why Chronic Inflammation Is Aging You Faster Than Time
The term is exactly what it sounds like: inflammation + aging. Chronic, low-grade inflammation accelerating the aging of your cells, your tissues, and your body as a whole.
Inflammation drives aging. Aging drives inflammation. The loop feeds itself.
And it can be completely silent. The early signals — fatigue, stiffness, brain fog, skin losing its vitality — get waved away as normal.
But over time, that quiet fire does real damage. DNA accumulates harm it can’t repair. Tissues break down faster than they’re rebuilt. And the diseases we associate with old age — heart disease, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis — take root. Not because of time. Because of the inflammation those years carried with them.
There’s a useful reframe here. For decades, medicine has focused on cholesterol as the villain in heart disease. But cholesterol itself isn’t the problem. Your body makes it deliberately — it’s essential for hormones, cell membranes, and brain function.
The problem is what happens to cholesterol when it meets chronic inflammation. Inflammation oxidises it. And it’s the oxidised cholesterol that damages arteries and forms plaque.
Research shows that when inflammation is low, cholesterol levels matter far less. When inflammation is high, even “normal” cholesterol becomes dangerous.
We’ve been targeting the victim instead of the cause. That’s the whole story of inflammaging in a nutshell.
The encouraging part? Inflammatory markers like C-reactive protein and homocysteine can be measured with simple blood tests. When those markers come down — through diet, through lifestyle — the rate of cellular aging slows with them.
Finish reading: https://goodnesslover.com/blogs/health/inflammaging
f You’re Doing It for the Money by Harriet Schock
Sometimes I have to pinch myself and remind myself it isn’t Kansas anymore–or wherever I came from way, way back, when I formed the belief that everyone shot straight from the hip, or at least straight.
Last week, one of my Advanced Class students said something which has bothered me ever since. It’s not that I haven’t heard it before–in fact, I’ve heard it much too often–but usually from business executives, and jaded ones at that.
The whole thing started when I commented that a number of songs on the radio recently have sounded quite a lot like another song called, “Old Time Rock & Roll.” The student defended them with the statement that they were making money from these clones. I suggested that integrity might enter the picture somewhere (he was a new student, so I was more tactful than I might have been on his 4th week). To this he responded with the line in question, “Integrity doesn’t pay the bills.”
First of all, I can understand the attention a person might have on paying the bills, especially in this economy. But I feel it’s such an incredibly dangerous viewpoint for an artist to have, I wanted to address it–or undress it–publicly. The student who said it is talented and bright, and I don’t think he actually embraces this as a heartfelt philosophy. I think it was an offhanded remark. But since he said it, here goes.
Check out the definition of “integrity.” It’s not just honesty or incorruptibility. It’s also “wholeness,” “soundness.” It’s in the writer’s nature to put things together to form a whole–and that’s the main meaning of “integrate.” I’ve observed many writers–colleagues, mentors, students–some hugely successful, some total unknowns. But one thing I’ve noticed is that the ones who are doing it because they love it and have something to express are generally the ones being successful at it. The ones who got into it to make money usually never did. It’s sort of like a guy who takes a girl out just to go to bed with her and can’t figure out why he never gets to.
It’s not that you’re getting punished for being mercenary, or anything else so linearly Puritan. It’s simply that you’re coming from the wrong place and that’s where your attention will be–on the money, not on the music. You’ll make decisions based on that; your passion will be centered somewhere away from the song. It’s like trying to get turned on by the person you married for money. You’ve created your own prison.
Now somewhere, some songwriter is reading this who has made a lot of money with his/her art and he/you may be smiling. But think back to when you first started writing. Weren’t you doing it for the love of the process, the heat of the communication, the thrill of the music? And when your attention is on writing “something that will sell,“ do you like what you come up with as well as you do when you write because you really want to say something or get that musical idea on tape?
I have heard my producer, Nik Venet, say that even though McDonald’s may be the biggest restaurant chain, one would not ask to meet and compliment the chef there. Similarly, “Citizen Kane” never made its investment back, whereas “Love Story” made millions. But which one do we remember?
In my own experience, songs I wrote from that burning desire to communicate were always my most successful copyrights. And here I’m talking about songwriting–not assignment writing for films or records, because that’s a whole different subject. They are commissioned anyway. I’m referring to those songs that are an extension of who you are as an artist–that you would perform yourself, proudly, if you sing.
“Integrity doesn’t pay the bills“ may be true. But neither does chasing trends, writing at the radio, ripping off other songs, and focusing on writing something that will make a lot of money. To make a lot of money, it has to sell a lot or be played a lot or both. That means lots of people have to hear it and buy it. That means it has to move people when they hear it. Now, if you think you’re good enough to write something that’s going to move all those people, while you’ve got your attention and your passion over there on your bank statement, be my guest. Give it a try. But your craft had better be unbelievably good to pull that one off. And between the time you start and the time your craft is THAT good, there’s a lot of dues paying and songwriting you’ll have to do. So you might just as well do it for the love of it. Maybe you’ll even discover in the process that integrity has fewer bills to pay.
© 1995 Harriet Schock
Harriet Schock wrote the Grammy-nominated standard, “Ain’t No Way To Treat A Lady,” and co-wrote “First Time On A Ferris Wheel,” plus many other songs for records and films. She has seven solo CDs as an artist for which she wrote all the songs. She co-wrote all the songs for the “The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking” “The Secret Garden” and many other films and TV shows. Harriet teaches Songwriting Classes via Zoom and will return at some point to to teaching around her dining room table. She provides One-on-One Private Consultations, delivers her Online Songwriting Course as well as Song Critiques via e-mail, and teaches at selected Seminars and Workshops. She also showcases songwriters in L.A. as well as performing with her six-piece band. Currently a documentary about her called Hollywood Town – the Harriet Schock story is now available at Fawesome.tv. https://fawesome.tv/movies/10692250/hollywood-town-the-harriet-schock-story
Harriet’s book, Becoming Remarkable: For Songwriters and Those Who Love Songs, can be purchased on her Author page at her HarrietSchock.com.