I spent yesterday back at Conway Hall.  I'm trying to think of other things I've done there other than Interesting (which I helped Russell with for the first three years and which I then attended a couple of times?) There was The Story that Matt Locke did.  I feel like there must be other things but I can't remember them (or find them in any of my archives).  If I've been to or organised something else there with you, do remind me.

Anyway, yesterday was "The Fate of Britain", an Absurd Intelligence/Hard Art production.   It was a brave attempt to pull togther people who are up for alternatives to the so-called "Multifaceted Intersecting Shitshow".  I think it worked – lots of people met new people and made connections.  Some things seem to be clicking into place.  I was glad that I had no responsibility to do anything.  It let me do my quietly unassuming schtick while getting to chat gently with interesting folk, old and new.   It was a chance to get some focus on what's important to me and what sorts of things I can contribute.

It made me laugh that the Camerados' Public Living Room includes oversized underpants to put on to deflate egos somewhat.  I seem to have done something similar 18 years ago at Interesting 2007…

Scale-wise, inbetween the everyone-in-the-hall sessions and the corridor conversations I went to something on "Building an Intergenerational Movement" convened by Charles Landry.  Interesting parts for me are the need for third spaces to practice this stuff (tempered with the need to work the tensions  with homophily and propinquity), but also that there's a lot of bollocks talked (by people of all ages, and not necessarily those in the room) about generational differences and similarities and what to do about it.  I also felt the tension between those people who seem to have been rewarded with power in our world despite (or perhaps because of) their tendency to act childishly and those people (towards the lower end of the age range) who feel they're subject to enforced infantilism by economic circumstances that make it impossible to attain some of the markers of maturity like buying a house, or having a coherent career.

I was reminded by something in a conversation with Vanessa Chamberlin at lunchtime about this place being mine and being a place to write like there's nobody reading.  Part of that is about me not needing to explain everything in the above couple of paragraphs before I hit the Publish button.  It's frustrating, but there are a bazillion things I want to write about and if I try to write in the way that I think is required for publication (writing like somebody really clever and important reading),  I end up either with a long list of bullet points or a very long and boring exploration of one thing. I hold onto the hope that writing things and not explaining everything immediately is better than not writing at all (or writing in sekrit places that nobody will ever see).

I'm a bit shit sometimes – in particular when it comes to relying on other people to tell stories about me rather than me telling them for myself (by which I mean that I think I should be better at doing it myself instead of relying on others so much…)