Category Archives: What I think

What I think

August 28th 2024 – Morning Notes

#wewillgather team breakfast with @artistsmakers and @sophontrack
So many breakfasts, so little time

The quiet early hours, from 5 to 7 in the morning, have always been my most fertile time for ideas. However, there’s a catch: when I sit down to type, I lose the flow of thoughts because I’m still processing them while trying to write.

So, this morning, as I sat with my half-drunk coffee and a half-completed Sudoku, my thinking drifted, yet again to the challenge of producing consistent work and/or producing work consistently. In my personal technology-free fantasy world—definitely sometime before I was actually born—I would have a secretary to transcribe my handwritten notes or dictation, an editor to review my drafts, and a publisher ready to turn it all into paper material to be distributed to places where people who might like my work might pick it up and pay some cash for it.

But inspired by Jay Springett’s recent words about his “Menagerie of Models” I’m now playing with tools that can serve as my own digital secretary and editor. They’re still my words, but I’m getting help from the machines when it comes to capturing and organising my ideas so that I can distribute them more effectively. And here we are, writing not only to people who happen to be in a bookshop or newsagent or are lucky enough to be my personal correspondents, but to just about anyone with a computer.

The 1960s are the only decade in my life (so far) which I didn’t use computers. I had a bit of a dip in such activity in the eighties (at college *nobody* thought of using a computer for anything!) But despite that long relationship, I’ve always had a nagging unease about letting machines do all the hard work that I thought I had an obligation to do myself. But if I really believed that, where would I draw the line? Is using a word-processor too lazy? Should I be hand-coding my html pages? I don’t think so, so why am I squeamish about using ChatGPT with due intelligence and discernment?

That’s the question. Where’s the line between what’s authentic and what’s too artificial? I recently saw a personalised video response, for example, which addressed the recipient by name. And it made me uncomfortable in a way that personalised text does not now, but might have done when I first saw it (just to remind you that I’ve been mail-merging since before you were born!) And that leaves me wondering about future generations who are being born into this kind of digital intimacy or weird (to me) interactions. Will they find it perfectly normal? Or will there always be an inherent strangeness that they learn to ignore? It makes me think of my relationship to photographs – 200 years ago people might have wondered about what effect it has on me that I have so many photos of myself, my family and my breakfasts.

Anyway, I’m not (yet) making video mail-merges but if I did, I wonder how long it would take you to realise?

What I think, What I've Been Doing

The Climate Crisis Will Be Televised Trivially

A screenshot of me sitting in church on local news on the evening of 8th March 2023. Caption reads “Lloyd Davis, Community Worker, Guildford United Reformed Church”

We got a call just after 10:30am on Wednesday from ITN saying that they had a film crew in Guildford reporting on the overnight snow and wondering whether they could come and film at our Warm Hub.

In the late summer, you know when we had a change of monarch and several prime ministers and for all the reasons it was becoming clear that fuel prices were about to go up very quickly and probably stay there, we decided to open our doors every weekday morning during the winter (very loosely November to March) for anyone who might need warmth either physical or metaphorical. Lots of people were talking about it at the time and that got crystallised into the #WarmWelcome movement and Surrey County Council put some funding towards supporting “Warm Hubs”. We didn’t care much about the branding, though it was nice to have the funding. As it’s turned out, for many reasons, most of which we can only speculate about, few people came for help (here and in other hubs around the county) but those who have done have really appreciated it.

Anyway, that’s not today’s story, that’s just something you need to know because I’ve been naughty and not writing here as much as I should have. If I were the natural-born blogger that sometimes people say I am, you’d be sick of hearing about this by now.

So I said yes of course (just say yes!) but couldn’t guarantee whether anyone would still be there when the crew turned up. There were a few people in the foyer and we were doing our dementia-friendly Sunflower Café in the sanctuary. They did come quite soon afterwards (two women carrying all the kind of kit that you’d expect for proper grown-up TV, not like those social media amateurs you get these days!) and we chatted and gave them tea and then I did a little interview and the camera operator got some B-roll and then they also interviewed some of the people at the café about how they were dealing with the cold weather. Everyone was very polite, as Guildford people are, and answered the questions without revealing what’s really going on.

Because really, who wants to go on TV and say “oh it’s miserable, I’m having a terrible time, can’t afford to keep warm, can’t afford to eat, and my life-partner, who I’ve loved to bits for fifty years, has dementia and needs constant attention… but it’s great that I can come here and have a free cup of tea and some biscuits and maybe some advice on how to save energy.”

It was easier for me because a) I’m not in the same predicament; b) I have a job title to hide behind; c) I’ve always got lots to say when asked; d) we had a similar media request before Christmas and I prepped some talking points then.

All the same I did end up rambling a bit about how “isolation” means something different for rich people in Surrey versus poor people in inner cities, but the bit that made it to broadcast was me saying “It’s just been grey and it’s felt like the sun’s not gonna come back and that just has a massive effect on everybody’s mental health, both in terms of feeling a bit down but also just feeling tired.”

My mug, used as an illustration for the “hot tea” served at church.
It has the slogan “Keep Calm And Play The Ukulele”

After another cup of tea and stocking up on custard creams, they left us to visit the gritting depot.

I was left feeling really sorry for them, dashing around town in the cold, trying to tell a story out of all of this, for an early evening TV audience who probably get up after the main news to put the kettle on. And what’s the story? It snowed and it was cold but people, being people, just got on with their days – those that can, had fun; those that have jobs to do, did their jobs. My suspicion/prejudice is that the demographic that watches ITV local news mostly couldn’t have fun in the snow and probably don’t have jobs.

This link might break soon, I don’t know how long they keep this sort of thing up for, but looking at the resulting 2m18s of film made me think of the mirror-image, the news items we get in the summer, the ones that go “oh blimey, isn’t it hot?!” and show a bunch of pink English people in the park and someone trying to deal with molten tarmac before cutting to a warning to be careful near water. At what point do we stop doing this? I mean, stop treating these weirder weather patterns as comic/tragic filler between the “real” news and the early evening soaps. No it’s not unheard of for us to have snow in early March, but what I said about it feeling that the sun isn’t coming back is unusual and it comes on the back of earlier winter months when it felt like it was never going to stop raining and then the summer last year when it felt like it was never going to rain again. That’s the description of climate change that feels closest to my direct experience.

It leaves me thinking about what media we *could* be making about what’s really going on, so I guess that’s why I seem to be blogging again.

What I think

Opening Space – Invitations

The crafting of an Open Space invitation will be iterative.

I like to have an overarching single question as the title of the event. How broad it is does depend on the subject and also how big the gathering is – invitations stumble when their scope is too wide or abstract or else too narrowly defined.

And then it’s nice to have some personal observations or explanations from people who are already committed to being there. But you can start with these personal stories first and draw out what the question is from there if that’s what works better.

Sometimes, there’s an idea or question that is nagging at you and so that’s where you can start, by just writing the question out and perhaps sharing it with others. I am drawn to asking questions that start “What are we going to do about…?” I think this is because of the way that I think about Open Space primarily as a way to work out the “what we’re going to actually do” bit. This probably arises because I find detailed top-down planning really hard and so gathering others feels like a good way to surrender the whole thing. But when what we are going to do “about” something is already well-understood, it can be better to go for “What are we going to do in order to….?” which gets under the skin of the kinds of outcomes we want. The most important thing is to get something out and then toss it around with others – the initial reactions to the question among your closest collaborators will help you tease out a more detailed explanation of why you want to talk about this and what sorts of people you think ought to come.

Other times, none of that will come out though. You’ll just have a kind of soup of ideas that it feels like it would be good to work on, but what’s the thing that holds them all together? I find this out by just writing them all down, like the advice we give people learning how to draft an essay “Just write everything you already know about the subject” and see what comes out.

What I think, words

What even *is* an idea?

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David Lynch talks about ideas as fish. He says if you sit still and wait and are open to catching one, they’ll just pop into your consciousness, so you right them down and then others come and join it and you write them down too and then you can express them in whatever way seems right – a film, a poem, a piece of wood, whatever. For a long time I was stuck in wondering what this meant in my experience, “is *this* thought an idea?… or this one?” – that’s a sticky place to be and it stuck me good. From the perspective of today it’s easy to say, well that’s the mind getting tangled up in asking stupid questions instead of just doing what you’re supposed to do. It’s hard to admit that one’s mind has been so stubbornly in control – especially when you’re supposed to be thinking up ideas! I’ve been meditating for years. Have I been doing it all wrong all that time?

But I had an experience a couple of weeks ago that shifted my understanding. And funnily enough, it happened down by the river. I didn’t go fishing, I went for a run and I ended up at the river just down the lane from us. It was one of those going-to-be-hot days but it also felt like there was more moisture in the air than had been, and I’d gone out later than I’d intended. So I was hot, sweaty and worried about being late, but I had also run enough to shut the chatterbox up a bit. So I’m walking towards the path up to the main road and I see a guy whistling for his dog. He’s holding a lead but I can’t see the dog. He’s not agitated or doing anything wildly physical, just standing there and whistling and calling for the (invisible to me) dog to come out of the water. And I made up a little story, which I won’t spill out onto here, but “making up a little story” is something that I feel like I’m always doing, but this time I recognised it as and idea, as the kind of idea we were talking about when I started writing this post, the fish kind. And as I let it swim around in me, it did indeed attract more ideas and ways in which the story could expand and make sense and then by the time I was home and had stretched and showered, I could sit down and write the whole thing out and yes even more fishy little ideas came swimming along, to help me make sense of this weird story. And suddenly I’m sitting there with a notebook full of words and I feel like I’ve just sat by the riverbank and filled my nets, it’s so satisfying.

And it reminded me of some blurb I wrote for myself a few years ago when I performed some of my own songs, “that writing songs could mean just typing out those strange and silly words in his head, in a kind of sensible order, while strumming his ukulele”.

I’m thinking and writing about this now because there’s an idea kicking around that has some similar dimensions to the fish/idea I wrote down in August 2007 which then became all that stuff that happened since then (if you know, you know – if you don’t then just re-read the last 15 years of this blog and follow any links that work). But my mind is fighting writing it down and I recognise that that’s because I don’t have all the answers ready yet. But that’s not how it works, you don’t have the idea and immediately get all the other ideas and know how to implement it, how this particular set of ideas need to be expressed in the world, you just sit still with it, write it down, write down the other things that come along to join it and before you know it, it will have taken some physical form and you’ll need a few more hands to make a home for it.

health, What I think

Simple body maintenance things

One of the things they tried to instill in us at drama school was the idea that if you’re going to be someone who creates through performance or just your presence in the world, some exercise first thing is really good for you. This was too hard a pill for me to swallow even when I was training, let alone when I got out into the “real world”, but I’ve found it to be true for me and it’s one of those simple things that slips into my blind spot, especially when I get busy, and then I wonder why I’m not at my best. I went for a run this morning and bingo-bongo, I’m writing already.

I guess hearing “your body is your instrument and that’s why you have to look after it and warm it up every morning” was just too wanky for 19-year-old me, but also I know that not looking after myself, despite knowing what’s good for me, is a long-term pattern.

Drink more water! That’s another one. Since I started my ADHD medication, and was strongly advised to minimise caffeine intake with them, the only alternative I could face was decaf coffee. So I have one “proper” coffee first thing and then I’m onto the decaf. I try to get good stuff, not too chemical-ish, but really it’s just flavoured water, so why not just go with water? I generally work at church in the morning, come home and have some lunch and then do some writing and talk to folk in the afternoon. But when I sit down here after lunch, my brain tells me I need a big pot of coffee, so I get a big pot of (decaf) coffee and invariably feel worse by the end of it and forget that I really just need simple hydration. Big pot of water next time please, brain.

What I think, What I'm doing

“Why can’t you just… be a better person?”

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This was an old joke between my first wife and me, when a discussion or argument that had reached the point where one person wanted to shout “Why can’t you just do what I’m telling you to do?” – the other would pull out this line and defuse the situation (obviously not foolproof as you may infer from my use of the phrase ‘first wife’).

But it’s a good question, why can’t you just be a better person? Why is personal growth so hard?

Why do we have to grow at all? Can’t we just carry on where we are? Well, no it appears not. Even the most stagnant relationships and work situations don’t last forever. We end up having to change in one way or another and we can either do it consciously or unconsciously. No scrap that, it’s not either/or, it’s a matter of degree of consciousness – my experience has been that for every epiphany as a result of conscious work on myself there are a hundred little growth spurts that I don’t recognise as such until much later on.

So what is this conscious work? It’s a kind of growing up, it’s a way of building good character, it’s dealing with the unconscious triggers that result in disturbance (/me being a dick). Most spiritual traditions and teachers have a way of doing this and for me it boils down to a few steps:

    • Admit that the disturbance is in me. Not that the outside world is perfect and I’m wrong, but that the thing causing me the most pain is not outside of me, it’s within.
    • Accepting the thing I’m doing is part of me and likely has been around for a while (ie it’s not just a product of this situation). This is tough. Who wants to admit that they’re habitually self-centred, self-righteous or dishonest?
    • Remembering that just because it’s a (perhaps quite old) habit doesn’t mean that it’s the ultimate truth about me. I am fundamentally honest and I’m mostly capable of enacting that but there are times, when I feel under pressure, that I say things that aren’t true.
    • Forgiving myself for doing it one more time and forgiving those that I’d associated with my disturbance.
    • Doing something to express that forgiveness to anyone I’ve harmed through the disturbance – this requires a couple of careful steps, one is assessing who has been harmed (it might only be me!) and the other is how to do something about it without compounding the original harm.  Finding someone else who can help you see the right path through this bit is invaluable.
    • Get on with doing something helpful and useful for someone else.
    • Rinse and repeat as required.

I’m not done, by the way, I have no illusion of my own perfection, but it helps, it really does.

What I think, What I've Been Doing, words

Women’s work #IWD2016

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I don’t work for free, that’s a firm rule.  But when Helen asked me to help with making a series of podcasts with women in tech for International Women’s Day, I said yes without hesitation.

I’m proud of the work we did today, all of us, in collaboration.  I know that you’ll get great value out of listening to the stories of the women we met and worked with.

But whatever the financial value, whatever I might have been paid ordinarily for a day like today can only represent a tiny, tiny fraction of the value of unpaid physical and emotional labour as well as financial support given to me by the women whose homes and lives I’ve shared over the years, support which continues to today.

Thank you, all of you, mother and sister, grandmothers and aunts, girlfriends and wives, I love you all.

What I think, words

How do you find a smell?

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Often, if I’m out in town, I will catch a whiff of something nice.  Some cologne or perfume or something that transports me to a happy warm childhood place or an image of someone or something or just a feeling of rightness, a rightness that isn’t there all the time.  And I think wouldn’t it be nice to smell that more often.

But how do you find a smell?  Even if it’s a mass-produced thing that you can find behind the counter in Debenhams, how would you start?  How does this happen?  I’ve never done it.  I can remember buying after-shave perhaps once or twice in my life and then it was always pretty random.  Oh yes, that one will do.

I know there’s a vocabulary, “lemony”, “sharp”, “tweedy”, “high notes”, “musky” etc. but I’m not sure what they really mean – they can only be subjective can’t they? There’s one that reminds me of a playgroup I went to more than forty years ago – how do I communicate what that is?  I know it when I smell it but I can’t conjure it up in the same way as I can say, the smell of cut grass.  It’s just out of reach.  When I come across something I like, I want to say to someone, “what’s that smell?  How would you describe it?  Do you know what brand it is?” but that wouldn’t go down well on the Waterloo & City Line at 08.51 on a crisp Thursday in February.

 

theatre, What I think, words

Theatre Blogging: it’s not what it could be

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I heard recently about a director having the nasty experience of inviting a journalist into rehearsals and then having an unhelpful (I haven’t read it, it’s paywalled) preview article published just before the show opens.

Yuk.

Reading about it sent me back to look at what I wrote nearly eleven years ago (!) about using blogging in theatre.  I was surprised to see what emphasis I put on buzz and PR (that was how the original question had been framed).  And it’s that angle that all the marketing people picked up. I went to see John Berry at ENO because (see the comments on the post) they were doing something like this a couple of years later.  And a year after this first post, I did a little site about the opening of Avenue Q.  It had to be done, and I’m glad I did it, but I don’t read any of the West End theatre blogs or the mainstream journalism that has taken on our blogging form but sticks to traditional writing styles of reporting and criticism.

But I was thinking about more than marketing.

What I was thinking was of a kind of collaborative production journal, where everyone contributes…  think “The Making of…” fly-on-the-wall documentary style, only on the web, and released in chunks as they happen, day by day rather than being stitched together after the show has closed.

I think this points to something much more interesting to do – about using these tools as part of the production, as part of the artistic process, to log progress and reflect on thinking and how things are emerging, for the benefit of the team themselves much more than prospective audience members and to create something bigger and longer-lasting and more networked than traditional documentation or archiving.  It’s “sources going direct”, cutting out the dependence on news organisations (and their sodding paywalls) and making our own media.

 

Podcasts, What I think, words

Audioblog 160223 – Walking by the canal thinking about @solobasssteve

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Download .mp3 (7.9MB)

Walked by the canal this morning, nice and slow and easy. Reflective, as canals are and encourage us to be. Not much to do except dodge buggies, joggers and duck poo. And think about something Steve Lawson wrote on Facebook this morning.

6m 11s I pass by a jackhammer, mind your ears.
It made me realise how long I’d been talking for, so I finished.