Buns in my Oven.

My partner and I have a running joke with a friend. Every time he goes on holiday we increase the quantity of beans in his flat.

The first time we bought ~30 cans of kidney beans and hid them around the house like some Easter egg hunt thing but with beans.

The Second time we bought ~6kg dried white beans and hid those in various places. Nearly every receptacle that could safely hold beans became the home of beans. My personal favourite was emptying an oat milk carton, very carefully washing and drying it, filling it with beans and then just putting it back among several other cartons.

He went on holiday again a couple of weeks ago. Obviously there is an expectation of bean-based shenanigans. And obviously we have to beat our previous efforts.

Our friend has (had) a mosaic on his wall of the famous Marilyn Monroe Pop-Art by Andy Warhol. He made the mosaic himself. Over the last couple of weeks we have spent hours and hours assembling a frame, drawing up a pattern and gridding out a 70 x 70 frame and gluing an untold amount of beans to it. I have spent over 21 hours gluing beans to a frames.

For the last couple of days I ended up going to bed at 5:00 am because I lost track of time whilst experimenting with which types of glue works best with different beans (I now have *opinions* on this, y’all). The day of our friend’s return we spent the morning and afternoon grouting the piece and wiping it down and wiping it down again and wiping it down again because grout is just like that. In the evening we went to install the mosaic, just a few hours before his return. Here’s a comparison between the original and our clearly superior replication, and the new piece installed in its rightful place.

i studied journalism not just because i liked writing, but because i cared about how information moves through society; who controls it, who filters it, who gets silenced, and who gets amplified. the more i learned about media systems, ownership structures, propaganda models, and political pressure, the more i realised that press freedom is not a stable, untouchable principle. it’s something that has to be protected constantly, and it’s more fragile than we like to think.

it’s easy to picture censorship as something that happens only in dictatorships, where journalists are imprisoned, surveilled, or forced into exile for reporting on corruption or human rights abuses. that absolutely still happens, and it’s horrifying. but what unsettles me just as much is how press freedom can be limited in quieter, subtler ways in modern democracies.

when political leaders publicly undermine the credibility of journalists, repeatedly frame the press as "the enemy," or selectively ban certain outlets from access, it doesn’t just create headlines. it changes the climate. it signals that access can be conditional, that criticism might come with consequences, and that power would prefer loyalty over scrutiny. even without formal censorship laws, that kind of environment pressures journalists and shapes public trust in ways that are hard to undo.

press freedom isn’t just about whether something can technically be published. it’s about whether journalists can ask uncomfortable questions without intimidation, whether access is granted fairly, and whether those in power can be held accountable without retaliation. when those conditions start to erode, even slightly, the entire democratic system becomes more fragile.

i care about this deeply, and i think everyone should. world press freedom day isn’t just a symbolic date on a calendar to me; it’s a reminder that the right to report freely is ongoing, contested, and never something we should assume will always be there.