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/

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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.

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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.

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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”

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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.