You might remember a little piece I shared a few weeks ago about the idea of Black Elephants. Well, part of my re-ignited interest was in watching how some folk had taken the idea and the name and made a thing out of it.

And now I’m going to work for them!

First off, I should explain that we’re not creating any new Black Elephants (of the type I originally formulated…) it’s much more about creating communities where we can live better in a world that recognises Black Elephants abound.

So it’s not a straightforward thing to describe (which, as you can imagine, ws a big draw for me!) but it’s a kind of mix of social network and social movement. And the movement bit is the most important – I say that because I see so many people jumping on the “make a movement” bandwagon these days. And I’ve learned quite a lot about making them over the years and it makes be cross when I see people kind of “movement-washing” their essentially extractive and exploitative business. I’m glad to say that Black Elephant (the network/movement) is *not* like that. When they talk about the vision to embrace and encourage *true* diversity as well as to create spaces where people can be themselves and authentically (and safely!) use acts of vulnerability to help build real connection, I believe them – because that’s what I’ve experienced in their meetings.

Over the last year, I’ve been to a few of the meetings (called “parades”) which are gatherings of half-a-dozen or so people (mostly online, but sometimes off-) with a couple of questions set for each parade as the basic structure of the conversation. Turns are taken by passing a virtual baton to each other and there’s no feedback or discussion of what you say, just a place to reflect on something among different folk and hear other points of view. The most noticeable feature to me is that you really do get to meet people you wouldn’t in most other settings. It’s not just for worthy white-folks in Northern Europe or the USA! This piece from Rhyd Wildermuth is a really good summary of what’s going on – I’m not going to try to rewrite it, go and read the whole thing.

And so that’s why I’m going to work on this for a bit. Because I’m up for making spaces like this and I think we can do it well together, while also building something sustainable – a business-like movement, rather than a movement-like business.

So wipe down your RSS reader and look out for heavier elephant-related bloggage as I think aloud a bit more about what I’m doing with them. It isn’t all high-falutin. strategic hand-waving, there’ll be stuff about the practicalities and difficulties of building a new network like this, and scaling globally, without breaking the concept or the people involved. But I can already tell it’s going to be fun and very worthwhile.

It’s two weeks now since I finished my job as Community Worker at the local United Reformed Church and I’ve had some time to think through what I think about the last three and a half years of practicing community in an explicitly spiritual context – that’s how, when I started, I set my own intention for learning, it was the main thing that seemed different to me about the work that I’d done before. There is, I think by (at least my own) definition, something spiritual about social art of any kind, just because it’s always made of people and the thing that connects people, in my view without any idea of religion or faith or science or anything else) is the thing that I would describe as spirit. I finished on my fifty-eight-and-a-halfth birthday, a couple of days after the solstice, a good time to review and think about what’s left of this year.

There are some things that I’ve learned about myself and how I work.

During this time, I grew in my realisation that the thing that had always been different about me in school and the workplace, my relationship with time and other structure, my need for variety, my difficulty maintaining attention and capacity in certain situations was still a thing, no matter how hard I tried to avoid it or improve myself. And that led me to get a diagnosis of ADHD and some understanding of how I need to work differently and ask for allowances to be made even though I’m horribly embarrassed to do so. For example, I was contracted to work 18 hours a week. I tried many different configurations of hours across the week but all of them left me either exhausted or confused or over-compensating to meet my perception of other people’s expectations. And empirically, even given the pandemic and this time of getting used to working with my ADHD, I wasn’t able to do much other work outside of the 18 hours I was committed to – and this was the deal I’d done with myself when taking a relatively low-paid, local job with a regular commitment: that I would be able to balance it with higher-paid freelance work, but that just didn’t happen. That’s not only been financially difficult (although the regularity of knowing I’d be paid a salary every month has been lovely) it’s meant that I’ve really felt like I’ve fallen behind with my community and my practice. The one area that I’ve been able to make some progress in has been my music – I guess because a) it’s a thing that I’ve been able to incorporate easily into the church community work; b) it’s a much easier thing to pick up and do half an hour of (and it’s a good balm for ADHD overwhelm) and c) because I know that it’s really my core practice and always has been.

And then there are things that I’ve learned about community building. These might arise from pathologies of mine, or of this church, but I think they’re more general than that.

I’ve become (even) more aware of the importance of varying tempo. I came a cropper during the pandemic when I was tempted to do everything every week. A weekly rhythm is good for some things (dementia café, community lunch) but monthly is better for others (a cooked lunch for older people, book club, a bigger intergenerational music group) and six monthly or annually works too, but only if you can take a break from the things that happen weekly for the biggies. Christmas and Easter are, predictably, busy for everyone in church. I think, if I were starting again, I’d go more gently with fewer things rather than trying to crack every nut at once.

A related issue is scale – there’s a temptation (that word again!) to just try to get everything as big as possible, serving as many people as possible and while it’s true that in this situation, one of the problems in doing this was the difficulty of growing our capacity to serve bigger groups, I think, on reflection, I’d like to have introduced some nuance into what scale is appropriate to which kind of activity. I had some really valuable (mutually so) interactions with people when there were fewer people around than we’d expected. And there are things that I wish I’d allowed to grow more by experimenting with letting them be less personal and intimate.

I repeatedly experienced the clash between supporting community and generating revenue – this isn’t new and it’s not just about this church or churches generally. It was a good space though in which to consider how to use space, how to share space, what limits you need to put on people using the space and how the organisation’s relationship with people who use the building is affected by money being involved. We had a few opportunities to look at whether we wanted to keep doing something for the money that might be getting in the way of helping people.

I think there’s a much bigger thing about what church is for now, where the line lies between church as a group of people and church as a building, how to know when to let an institution die or transform and when to put all your energy into keeping it alive and growing. And if a church (building or community) needs to die, how to give it a good end. There’s also something about the use of places of worship in the wider community – these buildings that are no-go areas for lots of people, for various reasons, but which could be doing much more to provide what people really need.

Overall, the idea of this job was to help reduce loneliness and social isolation in the town. I feel like I did some of that, but there’s so much more to do and I think it needs something more focused on personal and interpersonal development as well as changes in the social institutions we have. That’s where I find myself now, thinking about that.

Anyone reading my blog for the first time, please know that this isn’t meant to be a polished essay, it’s a learning in progress and I may have left something out or over-emphasised something. It helps me to be saying something and I’m interested in what other people think.

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.