Idea for August 2025: touching grass

Appropriately enough for the summer holidays, this phrase has just made it into the Cambridge Dictionary.

It means, of course, getting away from screens and tech and the indoors, and getting outdoors, into physical reality, reconnecting with nature.

I love these vivid, tangible words.

And it reminds me of Polaroid’s current campaign - ‘AI can’t generate sand between your toes’.

Obviously a good thing.

New words, but an old idea. As Octavia Hill, founder of the National Trust, said over a century ago, ‘We all want quiet. We all want beauty…we all need space … unless we have it we cannot reach that sense of quiet in which whispers of better things come to us.’