I’ve been reminded by Dougald in the comments of his latest newsletter that I did a bad thing. I posted some writing on Facebook that really should have been on the open web. I remember writing it, on 24 April 2019 – we were having new carpets fitted – but I don’t know why it went into that walled garden, it probably made sense at the time (actually seeing the tags of people’s names, I probably just wanted to alert them in an easier way than emailing them to say “Hey guys, pay attention to me!”). Of course a year later we were being trampled by the Elephant of global pandemic. And today’s news is of the possible collapse of Thames Water. They just keep coming!

That last but one paragraph that I’ve emboldened looks like it might be useful to dig into, eh?

I woke up with an “excessive-certainty” hangover – it comes from hanging out with people who seem absolutely sure of their rightness and are very reluctant to consider theories other than their own. The usual disclaimers about “people” apply – namely “no, not all people, obvs” and “yeah I’m a people too”. It can sometimes be difficult to spot, especially if you broadly agree on things, but there’s a vibe that I definitely notice the lack of, the morning after.

I get talking to people often about the parallels between recovery from addiction and the “state the world’s in right now”. It’s an interesting way to look at things – it’s hard to argue against the idea that we’re addicted to growth for example. But talking about it with people who’ve little direct experience of recovery is different from talking to those who’ve sat in the ruins of their life and had to have a good look at themselves. And yeah, I think there’s something more to write about the more complex dynamics of addictive behaviour in relation to how we think about climate crisis *and* think about our ways of helping each other deal with it. It’s a bit fuzzy at the moment, but I hope to get it more in focus.

There’s another something that’s taking shape in my mind around creative collaboration (and the late, lamented “Centre for…”), scenius, regrowing a living culture, empty shops, local democracy and resilience, finding different ways of looking after each other, y’know, the usual. And yeah, it’s as well-thought through as that.

I thought we had a power cut the other day. I thought that it was just coincidental that everything went off just as I was turning the oven on for dinner. So I waited and looked outside to see what was going on in the rest of the street (nothing) and looked on Twitter (nothing) and so looked on the UK Power (or whatever) website which said nothing had been reported in my postcode so please tell us what’s happened. And that got me muttering under my breath about useless infrastructure and privatised utilities and bastard Tories and all that. But hey, look at the first paragraph of this post – “excessive certainty” I was sure, because I’d seen other people elsewhere, earlier talking about having their power off, that this was just another slippery slide towards anarchy and chaos. My certainty extended even as far as me looking at the fuse board and being sure that nothing had tripped when the nice man from the infrastructure bastards called me back. But no, taking it slowly and going and turning everything off, resetting the trip switches and then turning things back on one by one meant that I now know that it was the oven and it was no coincidence – I was wrong.

I just posted the following on FB and remembered that I went looking because I was inspired by old blog posts and so really I ought to be making new blog posts out of such stuff rather than adding to the Zuckoverse (I left the FB identity links in tho).

Encouraged by Dean I went looking in the Wayback Machine for a project that Deborah and I made in early 2006. It has a splendid “This plugin is not supported” message instead of any video but it gives an insight into a world where it wasn’t at all clear whether YouTube was for people like us or whether it was going to stick around.

https://web.archive.org/web/20060410213157/http://www.perfectpath.co.uk/atab2/

I’ve spent most of this week being “Global IT Services Director” (this is a joke – I’m supposed to be a community worker, but I am the person who “understands computers”). New laptops, archaic mailservers, “free” software for non-profits have all dominated instead of “making cups of tea and being nice to people”. This is not a good thing.

Dave Briggs is also “daynoting” at https://da.vebrig.gs/ and doing it very enjoyably even though he’s still a youth. I had a lovely coffee and chat with Robert Brook yesterday and much of our conversation revolved around this thing of just making the thing that you make and doing so regularly (not even every day) without worrying about what’s going to happen to it next.

A tune came to me while brushing my teeth this morning – it’s a bluesy thing that goes with the drone of my electric toothbrush (at least the way it sounds inside my head when it’s… y’know inside my head). I recorded the melody but I’ll have to check back on the note for the drone because my toothbrush ran out of juice at the end of this morning’s brushing. For the time-being it’s called “Toothbrush Blues”

There’s a train strike today, but I’m going to attempt to go down to the coast to see my old ma. Who knows (or cares) how long it will take?

I forget how much of a put off it can be for me to write here, if I think I have to have a title to pull it all together. It’s one of the ways we ruined the blogosphere (with a lot of help from Google Reader imho) by making tools that insisted on having a title rather than just being today’s log of the web.

So here’s some of today’s stuff.

I worked yesterday afternoon on an idea about an “alternative oath” that came from Liz Slade Here in the UK, on Saturday we’ve a day of what, supposedly, “we do best” – pomp and pageantry in celebration of a new monarch and his missus. And part of that has been a suggestion that we all pledge an oath of allegiance to C3 (as he’s most efficiently, if not respectfully, called). Rather than kick back hard on that and try to get everyone to directly rebel, Liz suggested accepting that people are free to make the official oath to the King or to refuse to, but they might also like to make a pledge to being the best we can be in society and in relation to all life on this planet. She shared some words in a little group I’m in and as I was in the middle of writing a piece of music that didn’t have any words, I wondered what it would take to make the pledge also be a little song. You won’t be surprised to hear that it took more than I initially thought, that I had to record many many takes and change the words a *lot* before I had something I was happy with sharing with Liz and then even more changes once I’d shared it because that’s one of the points where, regardless of what they say in response, you realise the things that need to change. It’s one of my biggest beefs with being a creative human being – that first drafts are always shit, that fifty-seventh drafts can be as hard to write as the first one and show very little progress.

I’m helping to run an Intergenerational Music Making Hub as part of my community work at church. Today we did #3 of 4 in the current round of experiments with this format – it needs experiments and iteration for the same reasons and with some of the same feelings as expressed in the last sentence of my previous paragraph. It’s always good. Like all the interventions we make around the church building, you can’t go badly wrong as long as you stay human, with a touch of humilty and kindness. There are things we learn all the time, but in a delightfully meta way, that’s one of the things that I’m always learning, that the learning is never going to be finished.

I took my version of the oath/song to the hub and tried it out with people. Ugh. It’s bad enough sharing one of your brain-babies with a group of friends on a private internet forum, but actually playing and singing something new, with people who have *no idea* what you’re trying to do, is the kind of thing that only someone with the temperament of a “Lloyd Davis” would do. I can’t give up these little experiments in stretching people’s experience away from the “way we’ve always done things” along many many dimensions. That’s as much as I can say about it today – btw this was only about 10 minutes out of a ninety-minute session, I don’t want to blow it up as a big disaster that dominated the day – it’s more that I don’t think I know what I think about it yet.

One of the things I heard myself saying after the hub was “the challenge in this kind of work is that people come with some identity based in a group and/or a selfishness or expectation that their individual needs are going to be met and that works against us all doing the same thing together.” – and that feels like something interesting.

Well I had a lot more to say today, but that’s as much as you’re getting – it was a full day.

So first, here it is, the thing I was talking about yesterday:

But I feel I should say something more about it than “here it is”. Perhaps where it came from, how it came to be. And as usual where to start that story is hard to pin down.

In terms of writing the words, the first bit that I wrote was about 12 years ago when I wrote a limerick on a napkin in the Pret at Hyde Park Corner, shortly after the end of a sweet but doomed-by-long-distance relationship. And it’s still there as the first verse of “Keeping My Pictures of You”

Then it grew because at the time it was becoming a thing, in certain corners of the internet, for people to be sending intimate photographs of themselves to each other, because they could. And it seemed like there might be some fun in thinking about how that might play out in a light-hearted way (before the concept of revenge porn came and ruined some people’s lives) – the perils associated with the persistence of digital media.

The other three were all written in 2015/16 – Blockchain Blues after I went to some technical seminar on how Bitcoin works, which is why it has references to “merkle trees” that most people won’t understand. Enemy Within came days after the election of the 45th President of the USA. It was slightly different then, more repetitive (using “choose not to” over and over again) and was more inspired by the shock that someone could say all the things he’d said and still get elected. And at the same time, we were seeing the Brexit vote here and the same sorts of people involved. Finally The Ballad of Ned’s Head came about as part of a fundraiser songwriting challenge for some good cause or other. I think the prompt was simply a picture of a guy called Ned and it seemed like the quickest thing to do would be a nonsense song based around things that rhyme with Ned.

I had them all as demos with me singing to ukulele, as is my way. Ned’s Head and Blockchain Blues are a 12-bar and 16-bar blues respectively. Enemy Within is set to something like the traditional tune “Red River Valley” and Keeping My Pictures just came out like that, I don’t have enough music theory or history to know what it is. I just knew it was a waltz – are limericks particularly suitable to a 3/4 setting? I don’t know.

And then over the years I’ve performed them all live, which helped to refine the lyrics based on audience reactions – always much less outrage than I anticipate and oddly, more laughs than expected, so you work up the laughter – this particularly applied to performing Ned’s Head to see what kinds of picture you can paint and how the character of the storyteller emerged.

I’d never done any proper home-recording. I’ve been in proper recording studios with proper engineers doing things with tape, because I’m old, but never really got the hang of stuff like Garageband.

Then in October, I had Covid and had time to watch “Get Back” and seeing them in the studio sparked something in me. People always say that the Beatles were successful because they were ordinary and just like us and it reminded me too of the beginning of Mark Lewisohn’s book where he goes through their family trees and it struck me that not only were they “just like us”, their whole families were just like mine – the same characters, the same stories and so I was watching “Get Back” with them practicing and recording and evolving the material, with much less technology than I’ve got on my desktop and I thought “perhaps I could have a go at making something a bit more polished of the songs I’ve got” – Y’know, if they could do it…

So the short version is that I then downloaded Reaper (it’s great!) and found an online course in how to use it to record your own things at home and did that. Spent a couple of weeks coming out of Covid recording a version of Sweet Georgia Brown and once I’d done that, I set myself the 30-day challenge of making something every day with the four songs that are here. That’s all.

So do have a listen, you can stream for free (though I think there’s some limit, I can’t remember what) and if you like it, chuck us a fiver.

I’m doing something unusual for me tomorrow. I’m releasing some musical recordings that I’ve been working on since the beginning of November.

The main oddity in all of that is that I gave myself a release date ahead of time and have finished the work a couple of days ahead of it. My custom has been to make things quickly and just put things out there as soon as they’re done, because earlier on in life I found that deadlines would always be missed and then I had the awfulness of delivering late and often it felt like just not delivering at all would be preferable.

In reaction to that, I developed this style of producing material in the now – rough and ready, improvised, immediate – maybe you’ll like what I make today or maybe you won’t but don’t worry, there’ll be something new along tomorrow (or maybe the next day). It suits work that is performative, but what if I don’t have the capacity to put on a performance today? And for my writing, over time, if I (or anyone else) ever wanted to draw stuff together and make something new out of it, or develop ideas at length it’s been difficult and disjointed – it’s made to be read now(-ish), like you just bumped into me and we went for a coffee or like I left you a really long voicemail. That’s why I found my voice in blogging and podcasting and then Twitter. There’s polish, but it isn’t used to improve the individual items, it’s spent on the practice of being able to create rough and ready items that are just about good enough and which might, if you’re lucky, have some charm for showing some humanity in this world of slickly, machined “content”.

And there’s a defence in there too, that you’re being brave and putting stuff out there and of course if people don’t like it, you can hide behind the fact that you didn’t put much work into it anyway.

And yet. And yet I yearned to make something that had clearly taken some time and effort, something that wasn’t just the first or second take. The most recent breakthrough came at the end of October when I decided that I’d set myself a “30 days of making something” challenge – no project plan or milestones but a simple plan to do something towards a project every day in November and allow that to be enough. The first thing off the top of my head was to work on these songs, to make something more than a demo and to implement ideas I’ve had about making music ever since I saw someone making weird shit with a portastudio.

The practice became just letting myself do something towards it today, rather than trying to get it to a particular stage or be able to share the latest half-baked version. I had four songs. Some days I did something with all of them, some days I focused on the tiniest part of just one. But I kept going through November, just ticking off the days. About half-way through I thought perhaps it would all be ready for release at the beginning of December. That soon evaporated as a goal, but I was OK with it. I’d succeeded in the actual goal, which was to pay attention to something every day for thirty days. The day job got in the way at the beginning of December and then I had a viral wipeout over Christmas, so in the new year I edged towards the idea of fixing 1st Feb as release day. That gave me something to work towards, which was eminently do-able and suddenly it was last weekend and everything was pretty much done.

But also I’ve been working alone on this. I know that the songs are alright in themselves (they’ve all been out in the wilds of YouTube for some years and I’ve worked them out live, with audiences of varying sizes and levels of friendliness) but the only other person who’s heard them in this form is my wife and as she’s pretty much guaranteed to be positive about them, I’m now feeling the first-night nerves of unveiling something in public.

What I’m ignoring though is the fact that I’ve been working on this for a while now. And you can’t work on everything all the time, so you do a bit on one and then come back to it a few days later and that’s a collaboration between “past you” and “now you” – sometimes nothing has changed in you in relation to this thing, but most often you will hear something new or have another idea while doing something completely different that means you can come back to it fresh. So I’ve not been working alone after all, but it’s not just a collaboration between teenage me day-dreaming about multi-track recording on cassettes, with ten-years-ago me writing silly words on napkins in Pret a Manger and me sitting in my front bedroom in front of a microphone with my ukulele, it’s all the bits in between that have fed me and the material and continue to do so.