Cookies

Under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 you must be asked before anything is stored on your device, unless it is strictly necessary to provide the service you asked for.

We set two strictly necessary cookies without asking, because the site cannot work without them. We set one analytics cookie, and only if you accept the banner asking first. Reject it, or don't answer, and it is never set.

• Session cookie: set when you sign in, so the site knows it is you on the next page. Without it you would be signed out on every click. It is marked Secure and HttpOnly, which means it travels only over an encrypted connection and cannot be read by scripts in the page. It lasts for your session or until you sign out.
• Security cookies: a cross-site request forgery token and a sign-in callback cookie, both used by the sign-in process to stop somebody submitting a form on your behalf. Short lived.

We set nothing at all until you sign in. A visitor who only browses is not given a cookie by us.

• Analytics: Matomo, hosted on our own infrastructure rather than a third party's. It tells us which pages get read and roughly how many people visited; it does not build an advertising profile of you, and nothing it collects is sold or shared. It only loads after you accept the cookie banner, and it is not present on the page at all until then.

Two browser-local values control this, stored on your device rather than sent to us: td_cookie_consent (your accept/reject choice) and td_age_confirmed (that you have already been through the 18+ check, so it doesn't ask again). Neither is a tracker; both just remember a choice you already made.

• No advertising or retargeting pixels, from any network.
• No social media tracking buttons.
• No fingerprinting.
• No sale or sharing of browsing behaviour to anybody, with or without consent.

Adverts shown on the site are served from our own pages and are marked as advertisements. They do not track you across other websites.

Our servers keep normal access logs containing your IP address, browser and the pages requested. That is not a cookie and is not stored on your device. We keep it for 90 days for security and troubleshooting, and it is covered in the privacy policy.

Reject or ignore the banner and analytics is never set, full stop. Every browser also lets you see, block and delete cookies yourself, usually under Settings, then Privacy. Blocking the session cookie will stop you signing in, because that is how being signed in works. Nothing else on the site depends on one.

Ask [email protected]. We are happy to list exactly what is set on your device and why.