Cookie Policy

What are cookies?

• Cookies are small text files that a website can store in your browser. They are widely used to make websites work, or to work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the site owner. Some functions on this site also rely on similar technologies provided by third parties.

Cookies we use

• Spam protection (Cloudflare Turnstile) — Our contact form uses Cloudflare Turnstile to tell humans and automated bots apart. To do this, Cloudflare may set a strictly necessary cookie in your browser. Without it the contact form cannot protect against spam and abuse. This cookie does not track you across other websites.
• Admin login (Lemon Counselling) — A secure, session-only cookie is used to keep the site administrator logged in when managing blog content. This cookie is only ever set after a successful login to the private admin area. It is never set for ordinary visitors.

Embedded content from other sites

• Video (YouTube) — Our introduction video is embedded using YouTube's privacy-enhanced mode (youtube-nocookie.com). YouTube does not set cookies for this video unless you choose to press play, at which point YouTube (Google) may set its own cookies under its own privacy and cookie policies.
• Fonts — Our website font is loaded from a third-party font service so the site displays as intended. This is used only to deliver the font and not to track you.

Cookies we do not use

• We do not use Google Analytics, or any analytics service that sets cookies or sends your browsing to a third party.
• We do not use advertising, marketing, or social media tracking cookies.
• We do not sell or share your browsing information with advertisers.
• We do not track you across other websites, and we do not build a profile of you.

Website statistics (no cookies)

We keep basic, anonymous statistics about how the site is used — which pages are viewed, how far down them people read, which links are clicked, and whether an enquiry was sent. This helps us see which pages are actually useful and whether people are able to get in touch easily.

This is our own software running on our own server. Nothing is sent to Google, Facebook, or any advertising company, and no cookies are involved. It does not identify you, and it cannot follow you to other websites.

Two details worth being clear about:

• A temporary visit identifier. So we can tell one visit apart from another, a random number is held in your browser's session storage for the length of your visit. It is not a cookie, it contains nothing about you, and your browser discards it the moment you close the tab.
• Your IP address is not stored. It is used only, and momentarily, to work out an approximate city — so we can see roughly where our visitors are — and is then discarded before anything is saved.

If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we collect no website statistics from your visit at all. If you then choose to send us a message using the contact form, we do record that an enquiry came in — that is part of handling your message, and it is described in our Privacy Policy — but we do not record the browsing that led up to it. You can also block the script (/js/telemetry.js) in your browser or with an ad blocker, and the site will work exactly as normal.

Managing cookies

• Because the cookies on this site are strictly necessary for it to function and to keep the contact form secure, we do not show a cookie consent banner. You can still control or delete cookies through your browser settings at any time — most browsers let you block or remove cookies under their privacy or security options. Please note that blocking strictly necessary cookies may stop parts of the site, such as the contact form, from working properly.

Questions

• If you have any questions about how we use cookies or your privacy, please email [email protected].