The Realisation Festival is much to do with perspective and gaining fresh takes on current issues. That widening of horizons is greatly aided by combining ideas with music, insights with improvisation. Laughing with others is liberating, too.

Mark Vernon talks with Pippa Evans and Christopher Ash from The Realisation Players. They explore how and why music and improvisation are so key to the gathering, linking body and soul, traditions past with the present, and also lending soul-freshing levity to gravity.

For more on Chris - https://about.me/christopherash

For more on Pippa - http://www.pippaevans.com/

A new paradigm is beginning to emerge in biology, though for some biologists, the new is, in fact, the old. The reductive treatment of living organisms, as if the gene were all, is giving way to the realisation that intelligence, even agency, operates at all levels of biological systems, from the proteins up.

There is no-one better to talk to about this development and what it implies than Professor Pauline Rudd, a regular at the Realisation Festival and leading glycobiologist, recognised most recently by being awarded the Torbern Bergman Medal 2025.

In this conversation with Mark Vernon, she explains what it is like to befriend biochemical molecules, to understand how they see the world around them, and thereby to form the science of their activity.

Pauline also explores how this integrates with her wider sense of the living world and its manifold intelligences.

For more on Pauline's professional work see https://kemisamfundet.se/torbern-bergman-medal-2025-to-pauline-rudd-university-college-dublin/

Oak trees lend themselves to proverbs and expressions of wisdom. The poet, George Herbert, is said to have written about these mighty trees sinking deeper roots, as a metaphor for resilience and preparedness for the future.

In this conversation, Mark Vernon speaks with Benedict Pollard, founder of the nursery Mighty Fine Oaks, conservationist, and Fellow of The Linnean Society.

Benedict also looks after the trees of St Giles House, Dorset, where the Realisation Festival takes place. He has invited attendees to plant new trees and also to attend to the beetles in the shrubs and on the land, which is another source of fascination for him.

In this conversation, Benedict describes his deep relationship with trees, oaks in particular, as his intelligence meets theirs.

For more on Benedict and his nursery, Mighty Fine Oaks, see https://www.mightyfineoaks.com/our-mission