Cookies

Cookies

Cookies pages have a reputation for being unreadable. We’ve written this one to actually be useful. If you want to know what’s being stored on your device when you visit, this is the place to find out – and if you’d rather it wasn’t, we’ll tell you exactly how to stop it.

What a Cookie Is

A cookie is just a small text file. When you visit a website, it can save one of these files to your device – phone, laptop, tablet, whatever you’re on. The file can’t run anything and it can’t read other content on your device. What it does is pass certain information back to the site or to a third-party tool – things like whether you’ve visited before, what your preferences are, or basic data about how you used the page. Some cookies are genuinely there to make things work. Others are more about building a picture of your browsing habits. We only use the first kind.

What We Actually Use

This site uses two types of cookies, and we want to be upfront about both of them.

Functional cookies are the ones that keep the site behaving properly. The main thing they do here is store your cookie preferences so we’re not asking you about them on every visit. They don’t collect anything personal and they don’t follow you around other websites. If you block these, some parts of the site may not display correctly.

Analytics cookies let us see how the site is being used – which pages get read, how people move through the site, roughly where traffic is coming from. We can’t see who any individual visitor is. What we get is anonymised, aggregated data that helps us work out what’s useful and what isn’t. It shapes editorial decisions, nothing else. If you’d prefer your visit not to be counted at all, you can opt out through your browser settings or via the opt-out tool provided by the analytics company.

That’s it. We don’t use advertising cookies. We don’t have tracking pixels sitting on this site building profiles of visitors. We don’t sell any of this data to anyone.

Third-Party Cookies

The analytics software we use is run by a third party. When you land on this site, that company may place one of their own cookies on your device to collect the anonymised usage data mentioned above. They operate under their own policies, but we have a formal data processing agreement with them that limits what they’re allowed to do with data collected through us. They can’t use it for their own marketing or pass it to others.

We don’t run any other third-party services that would bring in extra cookies – no ad networks, no social media buttons, no affiliate pixels.

Managing Your Cookie Preferences

You’re in control of what gets stored on your device. The simplest way to manage cookies is through your browser – most have a dedicated privacy section where you can clear existing cookies, stop new ones from being set, or draw a line between first-party and third-party cookies specifically. It takes a couple of minutes to set up and you only have to do it once.

If you’d rather not adjust browser settings, many analytics providers also offer a direct opt-out. That lets you stop your visits from being counted without affecting anything else on the site.

One thing worth knowing: turning off functional cookies may affect how parts of this site display. Turning off analytics cookies has no visible effect at all – you just won’t appear in our traffic figures, which is a perfectly reasonable choice.

If This Changes

If we start using different cookies or change how the current ones work, we’ll update this page. The date below is when we last looked at it. Any questions, the contact form on the site is the right place.