I need to blog more.  I need to write more, but I also need to release more and this is the best place I have for doing that.  I caught myself giving someone feedback on their work which was really an expression of my frustration with not feeling productive myself.  It's not enough to apologise to that person, I need to change my behaviour too – and that just means typing more often into a text box.

I've got a lot of London this week.  I went to Hard Art today, I'm going to a thing in Hackney tomorrow evening and staying over because I'm opening space for a client on Thursday morning.  I'm getting used now to remembering that I don't live there.  I can't just get a bus home from the West End.  In an ideal world I'd have a club where we could stay over when needed, but I don't think I'm there yet.  I like being able to get out of town at the end of the day and walk up the hill from the station.

I've started walking early in the morning instead of running.  It's better for my hips and knees, but also easier to do every day.  A forty minute stroll around the town gets me a solid 5,000 steps before breakfast.

At Hard Art we worked with Katy Rubin on Legislative Theatre.  As someone who started out as an actor, worked in public service for ten years trying to make things better for citizens and now makes things with people, for people, out of people, it was a lovely way to pull everything together.  There was a lot to take in, but we sprinted through it with just enough depth to get how powerful a process it can be.  

There I feel better about today now, having written about it just a little bit.

We did it again on Friday morning.  Sorry if you wanted to come but didn’t see a reminder.

It seems (to me) to be working, whatever it is and whatever it’s supposed to be for. I realised today for the first time explicitly that what I’m doing with the Friday “Living Culture Coffee Mornings” is most like calling an open space session to talk about “What are we doing to regrow a living culture?” And that my personal position is one of curiosity about that question and a willingness to engage in conversation about it, while doing it, rather than me thinking I have all the answers or that anyone else can come with all the answers. That’s always been true, and may have been obvious to everyone other than me, it’s just that I haven’t formulated it as explicitly as that before.

The things I remember talking about were secrets (in the sense of secret handshakes etc), wanting people to know that you exist but also wanting some level of exclusivity to avoid the bland, surface-level interaction of some open groups; the desire to be be part of a gang but not wanting to be part of any gang that would have me as a member; we touched on what happened recently when the Metropolitan Police broke into a Central London Quaker Meeting House and how outrage was felt and expressed by people who wouldn’t normally have any interest in places of worship; and how to do all of this in the context of a world where we’re all (potentially) connected online but recognise that connection online has its limits and that coming up against those limits is frustrating.

But there were six other people there, who will have different perspectives.

Related: a facebook post in the Open Space Technology group suggesting that this description of the making of “Another Green World” implies that Eno works in Open Space.

All this to say: it’s working, I’m finding out what I’m trying to do, we’ll do it again on Friday 6th June.

I’m on the train to London and trying out Wordland on my iPad.  All seems good.  The editor box is left-aligned rather than centred, but I can live with that – maybe it’s an update that I haven’t noticed because I haven’t logged out on my desktop machine yet 🙂

I’m doing another round of the Living Culture Coffee Mornings aka “Tuttle Soup for the Soul” this morning.  It’s good practice in noticing and putting aside my feelings about it, remembering that I have no idea who’s going to be there and what is going to happen.  I do know that the appeal ruling from the Walney 16 is being delivered at 10am over the road at the RCOJ and that means there’ll probably be some different people around who might or might not want to sit and chat.  But otherwise it’s basically “Tuttle as usual” – it could be 20 people, it could be 2.

At least the sun’s shining.  I’ve come out without a coat for the first time so far this year.

Ugh, the end of last week and the weekend were wiped out by norovirus.  No more details necessary.

I think there’s a long-running series that will emerge here called “I’m not retired but…” because although I’m still doing lots of interesting work, I also have started taking my Audit Commission pension which doesn’t even pay all the bills, but takes some of the pressure off.   Yesterday’s nice bonus was that I got to take a four-hour lunch with some old college pals. Much hugging and chortling in between the stories of “the things my agent put me up for, love!”

Before I started feeling queasy last week, I worked on a quick demo of “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee” (Irving Berlin). There’s a political statement in there somewhere… Apart from anything else, I do think it’s ridiculous that the song is still not out of copyright (in the US or the UK) despite being published in 1932.

The two historical references in the lyric are to John D. Rockefeller and Herbert Hoover. Hoover was president at the time of the Wall Street Crash and in 1932 trying and failing to create economic recovery, particularly by scapegoating and deporting Mexicans. Rockefeller was in the last few years of his life, but the equivalent at least in wealth terms of Musk today. He owned 1.5% of US GDP, a benchmark that stood until Musk surpassed at the end of last year. Still, a fun song to play around with.

And suddenly, we’re almost at another Living Culture Coffee Morning. Come and have a natter on Friday if you’re in London.  I think the talk, as everywhere else will end up being about the current situations and circumstances in which we find ourselves [gestures at… all… that…] 

When I was a kid, you'd see people who lived with paralysis or muscle-weakness as a result of contracting polio.  The vaccine was first introduced in the UK in the mid-fifties and by the time I was born, at the end of 1964, we were all getting it on sugar cubes.  So when I asked my mom what was wrong with that man's legs, she could explain and be reassuring that such a thing couldn't happen to me and my siblings.

I did get measles, though, and mumps.  Both were very unpleasant, but, for me, not disabling.  And by the time my kids were born there were vaccines for these and much else.  The most serious thing I remember them having was chicken pox.

This is what I thought progress looked like.  I didn't get polio, my kids didn't get measles.  But now that certainty seems to be fading.

What I like about Wordland

I think the most striking thing for me is that it's a tool for writing on the internet, but it makes few assumptions about how you're going to write or how you will structure your writing.  

When blogging software was finding its feet, I think many people accepted too quickly the idea that it was a form of citizen journalism.  It's great for citizen journalism, some of my best blogging friends are citizen journalists. but that's not the only thing that a blog can be.  And so the editing tools and the kinds of metadata they encourage seem to have focused on supporting people who were writing "articles" assuming that an article would look a lot like the kind of thing you saw in newspapers and magazines.

I wasn't that interested in being a journalist or particularly bothered about how the whole thing looked.  I just wanted to write stuff on the web, be able to point other people to it and be able to find it again some time later when I'd forgotten what I'd said.

It's similar to the thing that's happened to podcasting, which converged to the mean – to interviews and thought pieces and (again, that word) journalism – that is, to formats that already existed in talk-radio.

And to me, twitter was just a place to play with what you could do in 140 characters – of course you couldn't do anything serious with that constraint.  Yes I got frustrated by that format, and seduced into thinking that it ought to be serious or that it could replace my other writing, but I was more irritated by the way that following people became an industry in itself and how people would then tell me I was doing it wrong (if I wanted the results that they wanted but hadn't bothered wondering whether I wanted them too).

Anyway.

The WordPress writing interface is full of stuff that's supposed to be useful, but is actually distracting to me.  It may be useful if you want certain results, but if the results you want are to write stuff on the web so that other people can see it and you can link to it from anywhere else, then I can do without categories and themes and fancy block-types and automatic sharing on social and stats and search engine optimization (if that is still even a thing) and focus on what I want to say and how to say it.

I should say what this Wordland thing is that I'm talking about.  It's a very simple browser-based editor that can post to any wordpress.com site or "self-hosted sites that have the Jetpack plugin installed with the JSON API module setting true (the default)."  You log in with your WordPress credentials and start writing.  The way I've used it so far is to start with some notes in a daily post, which I publish when I feel OK about it and update if and when I need to.   But you can just write a piece with (or without) a title or however you want to do it. 

The documentation is here.

From the first few days of using it, the only enhancements that I'd like to have are ways of making easier things that I like to be able to do:

• to be able to add a podcast (audio file) to a post with the same ease as adding a picture.  Something that asks me for a file, puts it in the media library and gives me back a link that will show up as a player on my site.

• a way of adding anchors to certain parts of the post.  I've done this manually today with the heading of the previous section, but I'd like a button that just inserts the code for "this is a part of the post that I want to be able to point to"

I can continue to do these things manually with no worry.  And given what I said in the previous section about feature-creep assuming that all users want the same thing, if they're just me being weird and others don't need them, then I can live without them.

Another day, another new app.  Today I saw that Flashes is available in the iOS app store.  It is supposed to be to Bluesky what Insta is to Threads, kind of.  But it doesn't have a separate timeline – so if I post a picture with the app using my main bsky account all of my existing followers will see it, but it will also show up in the app's firehose timelines.

I tried setting up a new account just for pics, which is what they recommend, but I need to get my head around what I really want from this.  There are a few "first day in the app store" things that need fixing.  It feels much better for where I am now with it to sign in with my main and post from there – but just for completists my alt is here

I found it satisfying to write my blog with Wordland yesterday and here I am again today.

Watching films in a cinema is different from anything else. you’re not forced to stay, but you’ve made a commitment. You can’t press pause but I also don’t find myself wanting to. And the screen is huge and dominating. The sound cuts out most other noises too. It draws you in completely, when it works.  I do not have this experience with streaming movies on TV – I can’t imagine sitting for two hours solid watching the same thing at home.

I've been three times so far this year.  The Bob Dylan thing, the new Mike Leigh and the latest Captain America.  I heard myself at the end of last year complaining that we "only have an Odeon and that's in Guildford" but realised I was just being snobbish and needed to lower my expectations.  Turns out even the Odeon shows stuff I like and most of the time it's nice and quiet (not at half-term when they're showing Bridget Jones though).