These heatwaves are hard.

This one is not quite as bad as the last one, at least so far. I’m very drawn to Jay’s suggestion that we start naming heatwaves in a similar way to how we name storms. It’s tempting, if possibly counter-productive, to say that we should restrict the name pool to outspoken climate-deniers. I leave you to come up with your own suggestions. Anyway, the problem with the previous one was that it woke us up (sic) to the concept of “tropical nights”, which sounds like a spicy Harold Robbins paperback but is actually horrible when experienced in the reality of a British house built from heat-retaining brick, more than 100 years ago.

A “tropical night” (the scare quotes will continue until morale improves!) is one where the temperature overnight doesn’t go below 20ºC – turns out they also use the term “equatorial nights” to refer to those where the temp remains at 25ºC or above, but please, don’t encourage them (the Met Office? who comes up with these things?)

And then along with the childhood reminiscences of 1976 in the horrible bits of the media there’s the claim that the cold still kills far more people in the UK than the heat, which I’m sure is reassuring to people who’ve just lost a loved one to Heatwave Murgatroyd.

I probably wouldn’t have been moaning as much if we didn’t have a little one to look after. He was born in December and so his whole life we’ve been making sure that he’s warm enough and then suddenly we had to switch him to just a nappy at all times, with a vest on standby for if we’re lucky enough to *not* have a “tropical night”.

I got too agitated about it all on bsky one morning after no sleep and too much time spent reading North Americans saying “Let them eat A/C!”

Well that wasn’t a night I want to repeat… [looks at weather forecast… flushes head in toilet]

— Lloyd Davis (@lloyddavis.eurosky.social) 2026-06-25T06:27:01.097Z

It’s currently too hot to work out a better way of embedding the whole thread, as if anyone’s interested…

I also spent far too much time watching the weather radar on windy.com as storm after storm just missed Godalming. A couple of nights I saw lightning on the horizon, but we didn’t get any real rain for days and still haven’t had a good downpour.

Now that we’re into Heatwave Norman I don’t even have that luxury/idiocy – there’s no rain to be seen on the forecast at all. We’ve settled into our minor adaptations of blackout blinds in the bedroom and a rota of opening and closing windows according to the time of day, staying hydrated and getting sleep when we can. Bigger adaptations are going to be needed. I just don’t know what, when and how.

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Anyway.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking/writing about what I want to do next in what I can only call my “public life”, in the light of both getting older and having a new small person. It’s taking shape. One of the insights has been that my theory of change is quite different from many of the people I spend time with and that rather than picking holes in what they believe, I need to articulate and refine better what I think. So I’m doing that. But it’s not ready to splurge about yet.

But this morning I updated the invitation to Living Culture Coffee Mornings with some of that in mind. It now reads:

​I believe that we’re called to help build a more equal, loving, tolerant, peaceful society – one that can melt away selfishness, hate and conflict.

​I also believe that this only really happens when people talk through and work on things together as peers.

​And my experience has been that, while there are some amazing and heart-burstingly joyous examples of this happening, in general people (yes I am people too!) still need lots of practice to talk or work together well.

These conversations are one contribution to an idea that’s gaining favour around here. Dougald and Anna have called it “regrowing a living culture” and I thought that was peachy, so here we are.

​You don’t have to come knowing what a living culture is or have any idea how to start regrowing one. That’s exactly what we’ll be talking about, with the hope that by doing so together, we’re getting started on a simple path of regrowth.

​You can also breathe a sigh of relief that I won’t be lecturing you on the subject! You may not be surprised to find that many of the conversations we have take a spiritual (but not necessarily religious) tone.

Everyone is welcome, but you do need to sign up. There is no homework and no qualification for attendance except an interest in chatting about this stuff.

You don’t have to be there for the whole thing if it’s inconvenient for you this time – “arriving late” or “leaving early” have no meaning here. There will be time to share announcements at 11am (remind me!)

So yeah, that feels better. Next one is online on Friday 10th. Subscribe to the calendar to get invitations as they come out.

I’ve realised that I’ve been holding back loads of stuff here, personal stuff, worky stuff, just general life stuff, certainly political stuff. On the one hand I feel the same risk that I hear from other people that stops them blogging at all and keeps them in walled gardens. On the other, I’m not even posting very much to the walled gardens. I’m hiding everything, because of the perceived need to hide something(s). And I’m not trying to tell anyone else what to do, but for me, I know that the risk of not sharing is greater than the risk of over-sharing. And while I’m kind of OK with insta and bluesky, I’m not posting much at all to FB and nothing to Substack – so it’s not even consistent (which might be ok?) and it all tends towards stuff staying on my hard drive or other places that only I can see.

So, if we met up for a coffee and you wanted to hear all my news, and all you’d got was my blogging and social media “output” then there’d be a lot of me talking and you probably being surprised. Because that’s the other effect of walled-garden-itis – the tendency to just share the good, shiny, positive stuff. And it’s not that I’ve got loads of bad, dull, negative stuff, just that life is life, y’know?

So what is there?

We’re living in Godalming now, did you know that? Yeah. Lovely. Very green and leafy. Our road only has houses on one side, the other side of the road is the back gardens of another street and the back gardens are all very long, and we’re higher up the hill than that other street and so our view consists of people’s garages, back hedges and then the trees that line the main road in the distance. At this time of year it’s gorgeous, so many greens. Even in the winter it’s heartwarming to look out over a bit of valley.

We have a baby. Yeah. Lovely. We had expected to do this earlier, like when we got married 11 years ago, but things didn’t work out until now. So I was thinking I’d be a dad again in my early fifties, rather than my early sixties, but it still works. in utero we called him Baby Nugget and we’re going to continue to do that online until he can express some other view. At home, he’s Nuggy, Nuggy-noo, Nugs, Nugmeister, Prince Nugbert, etc. And that’s how it will be here and everywhere else online. So if you have inside knowledge, please keep it to yourself and revel in being an insider. He is totally adorable, the best baby in town, smiley, and friendly all the time (except when he isn’t). He’s here in my office right now, in the moses basket, listening to Chopin Nocturnes while I write.

I’m finding that there’s a lot of muscle memory in child-rearing. If you didn’t know, the last time I did this was in the early nineties. There are some things that have changed, in terms of the advice that professionals give you, but there are also the hundreds of thousands of years of evolution that have changed much more slowly. Writing in June 2026, we’re getting ready to give him a first taste of solid foods. Back in the day, that meant a lot of puree-ing and/or buying ready-made gloop. Now we are to give them (within reason) what we’re eating, just in smaller non-chokeable pieces.

One of the choices we’ve made is for us to attempt equal responsibility in child care. One of my favourite bits is taking him to church every week (we alternate between the URC in Guildford and the Unitarians in Godalming. Both congregations are lovely and he’s a big hit with everyone.

Laura is being paid her full salary to do her bit. My paternity leave is less formal and less well paid (not paid). But I’ve had a great six months to not only spend time with him, but get my head better around the sort of work that I want to be doing in this next phase, work that can allow me to spend more time with him and Laura than I did in the olden days when I was commuting to London every day and beating my head against brick walls at the Audit Commission.

And then there’s where I am with the old ADHD. I’ve been diagnosed for five years now and I feel like I’m getting the hang of it. Although there’s still a lot of undoing to face up to – and as with any process of learning and unlearning, there are always new things lurking behind the last thing you feel you’ve conquered. Forty years of either holding my nose, sucking it up and battling on or else wondering why work just didn’t work for me, why there was so much promise and so little delivery. There’s also a lot of crossover with my addiction recovery, with me realising which bits of my inventory aren’t actually character defects but traits of a differently working brain. The end result is the same – letting go of trying to fix them by myself – but it’s good to let go of some of the judgement, that was only reinforcing the judgement I was getting from people who didn’t get what was going on either. The key phrase from my Upper Sixth year head’s report is “he frustrates us all, and in the end himself, by burying his talents”. And that was 43 years ago, I didn’t get much less frustrated in the meantime and I know it drove lots of other people mad too.

I’ve written about 1000 words here and I haven’t even got close to talking here about paid work and I think I’ll leave it until there are actual things to announce, but I think it’s enough to say that I’m not retired (!) and whatever I do needs to fit into the context of all the previous paragraphs.

Two weeks later, what’s going on?

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Well, it’s hot again. And we’ve got a six-month-old baby. And time is feeling weird, here in my early sixties. I have an intention to write here every day, and I’m doing lots of writing in private, just not quite ready to lift its head out of the water or peek out from behind a curtain, or whatever.

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How about some logs of my web reading this morning?

Cory makes the distinction between the atrocious activities of point-haired bosses and the rest of us tinkering away with vibe-coding just the latest iteration of homebrew computing.

In there he also points to Wreccer which he describes as:

“a system to help you find small groups of people with taste similar to your own, in order to facilitate media recommendations within that group – a kind of personal, relationship-driven alternative to massive, centralized, monolithic algorithmic recommendation systems.”

which sounds interesting in a “dark forest” kind of a way. Depends on your definition of “small” in “small groups”, I suppose. Cory points to the github readme which is… brief and the site is invite-only, but somehow it grabbed my attention enough to write about it, so…

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Doug Belshaw points to folk.zone as an IndieWeb “collection of free, open-source internet services, federated social media, a writing platform, a git forge, a wiki, IRC, and more.”

I’m writing something about the human and technological building blocks of social infrastructure and I think this is what I hand-wavingly call “lightweight social tech”. It’s all NOT the big guys, and I think I’m OK defining things simply in terms of what horrible thing they’re not, right now.

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Hamish Campbell is pressing on in a similar vein, but not as hand-wavy as I am.

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Jay Springett is picking up on the subject of taste again. Taste, interfaces and discernment. It’s all very chewy.

like: “If taste is a relation between objects, people, histories, scenes and timing, then discernment is the one part of that relation the feed cannot perform on your behalf. It can supply the cultural objects, but it can’t do the telling-apart for you, no matter how hard it tries.”

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I hope that, given the current situation, this linkblogging might be a way into me writing more consistently – back to the links and the thinks. I read some links and do some thinks pretty much every day, but it takes a little bit more effort to write them down, slap a random featured image on them and press publish.

We’ll see. We’ll see.

We’ll be doing the next in-person Living Culture Coffee Morning at Essex Hall this Friday, 5th from 10am. You should come if you’re around.

I just realised when I sat down that yesterday’s post wasn’t published. There’s an extra publishing step that I’m somehow tricking myself into thinking doesn’t exist (is a way of saying it’s my fault, not WordPress, but I do think actually that it’s WordPress’s fault). Maybe I need to go back to Wordland.

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I’ve liked the idea of being a sysadmin since I sat next to a bloke looking after an AS/400 for a large FMCG company in 1992. Looking over his shoulder, it looked pretty easy. He took longer lunchbreaks than the rest of us and I heard he was on a higher day rate too.

Today though, 40 mins of setting up a new VPS has already made me more weary than I can say.

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Dave pointed to Doug Belshaw’s Substrate which does look fiendishly interesting. It’s got that “made by AI” look (because it was) and that will make some people scream. But perhaps it’s better to be honest than to try to make something like look more it’s more organic.

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I think I may have just accidentally deleted a draft post that I wrote last week, thinking that it had already been published. Oh well, we’ll never know now!

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I’m working with an ADHD coach at the moment and it’s really helping.

One great insight of the last week or so is that the same actions I’ve learned to take to remedy the depletion of executive function (dysregulation) can also be used to reduce the chances of dysregulation in advance. And of course, prevention is better than cure, right? Because tired Lloyd is miserable *and* incapable Lloyd. So although it’s great that I’ve found gentle music (Chopin’s Nocturnes and my ‘Baroque Adagios’ playlist) to be calming and restorative at the end of the day, I can also start my day this way and give myself a better chance of making it through.

Another side of this is that looking at the shadow side of the characteristics of regulation give hints to what I might see as red flags warning of impending doom. So for example, in a regulated state, I find it easy to access compassion, but when/if i can spot myself sliding into rescuing, martyrdom or enabling then I’m getting a heads up not only that I’m doing things that I don’t want to do routinely, but also that I’m doing things that are likely to deplete my executive function.

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I’m also thinking a lot about how scenes get formed out of small groups and individuals. And what you can do to nurture and nourish such scenes and thereby increase the chances of some ‘scenius‘ emerging.

If you know me, you’ll know that I tend towards laissez-faire approaches to getting people together and helping them form relationships and networks and do useful stuff. But there are times when you have to do something more active or interventionist and remind people that you do know what you’re talking about. Another aspect of this is what Brian used to say at C4CC. When someone would describe us as ‘catalysts’ he would point out that catalysts remain unchanged once the reaction that they’ve helped get started is complete. It goes for the work we did at C4CC as a whole, but as I write, I think perhaps that at the time it was mostly about how we branded Tuttle Consulting.

Anyway, Dave Snowden has written a brilliant post that reminded me of all this, (and reassured me of my own preferences) as a continuation of his series on ‘trialectics’. If you’re allergic to theological explanations, then skip to the bit headed “Three Positions in Ordinary Language”.

I’ve fallen into the trap before of seeing these three positions as a ladder to be climbed, that I’m taking a more advanced stance by believing in innate capacity than those facilitators who think it’s their only job to fix some assumed deficit in the group or individuals. (Mutually) Transformative encounters can be very exciting (and/or disturbing) but they’re not a one-size-fits-all approach or the ultimate goal either. I’ve experienced the best work coming from taking what Dave calls an ‘aporetic’ stance (what a great word that is!) and being open to what’s really going on (and therefore which approach is needed) in the room. But this gives me a mental framework for it that makes much sense. The theological/historical background is the cherry on the top and fits well with conversations I’m having in Unitarian circles.

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Amazon tried to push some Peppa Pig at me this morning. Foolish algorithm that conflates “new parent” with “millennial cultural tastes”. My child will be fed Bill & Ben, Noggin The Nog and Bagpuss – they never did me any harm!

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Never a bad time (especially the week after a full moon) to revisit Rushkoff’s stuff here from Present Shock.

I’m getting back to work, but for that to be really true, I really need to be blogging regularly. So here we go.

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Someone asked me the other day, what I’d do differently if we got to have a Centre for Creative Collaboration again. The question’s been rolling round in me ever since.

My simple/simplistic answer is that I’d bring an Open Space frame to the new space that we found ourselves in – I’d want to start every day with a circle and check-in and keep a wall with the current issues pinned up all the time. We (whoever was there) would take that time to reconnect to whatever we’d done the previous day and decide together what we were going to do. We talked a lot in 2010 about C4CC being an ongoing unconference, but that was more of an organising metaphor than a set of practices that we used every day.

Speaking of which, here’s David Wilcox’s clip with me at UKGovCamp in January 2010 soon after my appointment had been announced.

I remember that feeling of liberation that came from not just using the term Social Artist to describe myself, but to have it as a “job title” conferred by someone else (thanks Brian!)

I’ve got used now to summing it up for people as “making beautiful things out of people (pause for chuckle)” but back then we were still working out what it meant and how to talk about it.

It’s also good to remember that it’s a convenient shorthand now to say that I helped run the Centre, but I was doing something slightly different from the rest of the team and if someone wanted a new Centre, I would want to be there in a similar role. Or put another way, I might talk about wanting to recreate C4CC, but actually what I’m after is another long-term residency, working closely with a leadership team.

And as with any other Open Space, the big work up front is in crafting an invitation and working out how to get it under the noses of people who might turn out to be the right people.

To be clear, nobody is actually asking this right now, I’m just getting clear on what I think so that when the time comes (how could it not?) I’m more ready and able to talk fairly coherently rather than looking startled and burbling.

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The online versions of Living Culture Coffee Mornings are going great. It’s a really useful beat in the week for me. It would be lovely to see you in a small Zoom window on my computer this Friday!

Last week we did it face to face and the conversations are growing nicely, the snacks are always varied and quite fancy (it’s London innit) and new people often read the invitation fully and bring stuff along that they feel make the space more convivial – Catriona brought bunting… with tassels!

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I got to hang out briefly with some people from eurosky on Monday – they’re a project coming out of the thing that started life as Free our Feeds. I’m still not sure what I think about the fractured mess of feeds that all say they’re not competing (ATProto/ActivityPub/RSS I guess) but who do kinda seem to want to win. I think RSS is easy to see as being a building block of the web, I can publish RSS, I can read it and I don’t need an account or a special server to do so – in contrast with the others that have more of a one-way feel and are really clunky to switch between. See this is why I need to write more, because my thinking is really fuzzy.

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But because I’ve been poking into ATProto stuff a bit more I came across Leaflet which, as Richard MacManus says, feels refreshingly like a 2003-era blogging community.

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I have a big backlog of links that I’ve saved to raindrop.io – I feel like I should be linkblogging these immediately rather than putting them in a big bag for chewing on later (but I don’t know whether I want to do that here necessarily). I do still have a tumblr, I suppose…

Two insights into how agent-assisted work feels in my feeds this week:

Matt Jones writing in the frame of how the new technology is affecting our relationship to time (as new tech always seems to have done). I don’t know whether I’m rationalising this after the fact (probably) but I did feel a little unease while reading this, which I think I put down at the time to envy of anyone who can pull multiple ideas and sources together into a longish piece like this. The Colophon at the end was something of a relief, knowing that perhaps I’d heard a familiar voice mixed in with Matt’s, the voice of Claude. But it’s a weird mixture – not entirely Jones (I’ve been reading him for 20 years or more) but also not entirely chat-bot.

and then Jay Springett on his current process:

The work now is to mostly select from the surplus, exercise ones taste, and decide what can be left out. It’s in this sense that writing becomes a process of reduction. To use a metaphor from the kitchen, it’s like making a roux or vegetable stock.

Both seem to me to be pointing to a way of working that’s like having an indefatigable, bright research assistant who gets your way of thinking and expressing yourself, providing a much better first draft than you might expect. And as with taking on a real-life assistant like that, your work shifts to being able to express your intentions clearly, point the kid in the right directions and then polish up/reduce down what they come back to you with.