I put my pen in my pocket

As is my habit

But I left the lid off

Now my jeans sport a big black blob

And I don’t know how much ink I’ve lost

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous

On Sunday I took a stroll over from Stirchley where I was staying to Northfield.  I wrote this after a little wandering around.

I’m in Northfield.  Specifically, I’m in McDonalds.  It seems to be the only place open on a Sunday that you can sit and drink coffee.  My Grandma would have been appalled.  I’m pretty sure she’d be appalled by the idea of going out and paying just short of twenty-six shillings on a coffee served in a plastic cup, that you had to take to your own table.  A table that hadn’t been wiped down for what looks like the last four or five customers at least.  I doubt she’d like the music that’s screeching out of the loudspeakers, but if she was really here, I think she’d be most upset by the general state of the shops along the Bristol Road.  To her, this was always “the village” because when she moved here at the end of the nineteen-thirties, that’s just what it was.  I lived here from 1969 to 1975 but it still feels like home.  We kept coming here regularly at least unt‎il my Grandma died in 1991.  We think the 1970s were grim (I saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy this week and it evoked very well for me the dark, brown, smoky atmosphere of my childhood) but I can’t believe that this town centre area was nearly as depressing as this forty years ago.

When I was in Worthing last week I asked what was wrong that needed fixing.  It seemed obvious to Dan, who’s a native of the town and has lived there practically all his life.  Perhaps it’s the same for me and Northfield, perhaps you need a real connection to see it.  Or perhaps this bit of Birmingham really is more depressed than a seaside town in Sussex.  Perhaps it doesn’t matter, they both need help and neither of them are getting it from the existing mix of public and voluntary services or the private sector.

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous

I sat here and had my lunch today.  It’s the churchyard of St Laurence’s Church in Northfield.  It’s the church where I was christened 40 years ago this summer, it’s also the churchyard where my paternal grandparents are remembered.  I attended the CofE primary school next door, which has since been turned into houses, so it’s the church in which I first experienced harvest festivals, carol services, cub scout church parades, the joy of belonging and of community.

At school and in church I loved to hear the bible stories and I loved the idea that the church, this church, was God’s house and that he welcomed us in.  How cool, to be welcomed in by God!

I don’t know where it was along the way that I stopped thinking it was cool but by the time I was a teenager I know I was rebelliously sitting upright and eyes-open in school assemblies when we were supposed to pray.  The idea of God as it was presented just seemed more and more preposterous, a way to make people do what you wanted them to do and I became very attached to my identity as an atheist – it was a way to be different, to stand out, to upset other people who were very attached to their beliefs.

I don’t feel like that today.  I don’t attend any church, wouldn’t call myself a Christian… or Buddhist or Jew, Hindu or Jedi for that matter but I have a strong sense of universal spirit, of unity and a connection with all that is.  I don’t distinguish much between the terms God, Life and Love, they’re all the same thing to me.

I’ve been consciously working on my spiritual awakening since before I started blogging – it’s the inside job that I referred to recently  when I wrote about my uncivilized life, but I still find it ridiculously difficult to write about it here.  And yet I know that it’s a really important part of who I am and that my story is all the more difficult to understand when the spiritual aspects are left out.  I was asked yesterday whether my hobo-ings had a spiritual element and I replied that yes, without that it’s just another crazy social media adventure, but that doesn’t make it any easier to talk about.

I know that it needs to be talked about, written about, acknowledged, not least because it feels like a constraint on my writing (and being in general) to keep it hidden away.  The block to being more open is only fear – of the usual things: ridicule, rejection, anger, in general “what other people think of me” and I know that the way to deal with fear is to go through it and hit publish…  

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous

I’ve noticed these since I’ve been back through Birmingham a few times, the old cast iron street signs like this:

are being replaced (or at least augmented) with plastic copies like this:

I’m sure this will have been noticed elsewhere (oh yes).  I don’t like. I’d rather have the old one’s left as they are, the plastic replicas feel a bit too Disney to me.  Um… actually I don’t want them left like this though, a regular rub down and repaint would be good.

However, I don’t pay council tax here (as a #llobo I don’t pay it anywhere) and I’m not sure I’d want it to be top of the City Council’s priorities, but if I lived here, perhaps I’d want to be able to easily get permission to repair the street furniture or employ someone trustworthy to do it for our street.  

This occurred to me in London too the other day – I was walking over Wandsworth Bridge and the paintwork’s looking quite shoddy.  I’m sure one could quite easily crowdsource the money and local effort to pay for a community-based repainting party, but good luck sorting out permission from whoever’s responsible for its upkeep.

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous

I met Clare Hedin at #tuttle a couple of weeks ago.  She was talking about an event she wants to run called “The Big Connect” sounds like my kind of thing, so we spoke briefly but then she had to leave before the end.  Just as I was about to leave there myself I got a text from her asking if I’d time to meet for a cuppa that afternoon.  I did.  So we met.  In a Pret a Manger near Bank tube of all places.

We talked about lots of things but the thing that she mentioned that I really felt I needed to hear was what she called “Dynamic Emergence”  She said that she’d started calling it that because it was something that we all are aware of, but don’t have a good term for describing it.  It’s the principle that we behave differently with different people. That being with a particular person draws out particular aspects of our selves – these aspects (we) dynamically emerge dependent on the environmental context, the most important part of which is “other people”

This is why I think that open events with inclusive entry and a diverse memebership work so well in a a creative context – they give us the opportunity to experience different aspects of ourselves. There’s doubtless a whole book in just that.  But where it helps me most now is to recognise it’s role in the things I do.  The hobo stuff is me moving around experiencing different parts of me in reaction to my hosts, employers, collaborators etc.  But it also works the other way round – I’m being useful by providing a different field or context for people to work in, a field that often results in them doing things they’ve always wanted to do but had no excuse to do yet.   I’m increasingly being asked to do work that looks a bit like coaching but is actually about being with me and allowing the “client” to experience an unusual aspect of themselves.  It’s also relevant to the Tuttle Consulting model.  I have a scribble on the wall at #C4CC from a while back – “the answer is inside you, among your people, our presence helps draw it out”.

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous

At the beginning, I thought that by now I might be wanting to stop wandering and settle again.

Nope.

I’m not thinking of settling again just yet.

It’s working.  It’s working for me, it’s working for the people closest to me.  I don’t hear anyone saying “please, stay here and do this thing”.  There are plenty of people saying “please, stay here, we like having you around” but that’s not the same and it’s not what I’m doing.  I need to be keeping useful and it’s becoming clearer that the impulse to settle for a while is most likely to come from a longish-term project rather than anything else.

At least that’s what I think today.

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous

Firstly, I have to say that I continue to have a fantastic time.  I had thought that by mid-September, I’d have perhaps had enough of hobo-ing around but on the contrary, I’m looking forward to carrying on – I see no sign of settling for a while now.

The tweak I’d like to make is that I’d like to be doing more work-work – but the definition of work-work is a bit muddy for me, perhaps I need to explore that here.

So I have had lots of lovely rest time, time where I’ve just been able to be with people and take part in what they’re doing.  I got to get sun-tanned in Cornwall while busking every day.  

Then there have been the opportunities to help out with more than day-to-day chores and child care – painting a fence, clearing a garden of brambles, taming an overgrown budleia, shopping and cooking for my aunt who’s ill.

And I’ve done stuff like the album with Martyn et al, creative stuff that doesn’t have money attached but creates value in other ways.

I’ve also been employed to host a couple of conferences, do some creative consulting and help out some hyperlocal bloggers with improving their sites.  Next month I’ll be doing a performance of the show I developed about the American trip.

It’s this sort of thing that i’d like to do more of.  I suppose it’s really stuff that someone else has come up with or else something that I’ve done before.  But it’s also a bit bitty – much as I love facilitation one day at a time, I’d quite like to get my teeth into a project that’s a bit meatier.  It would be nice to do something over a longer period of time that has a bigger outcome or effect.

My costs are much reduced at the moment so I can afford to do things for lower fees in other parts of the country than i’ve been able to countenance before – I’m also up for stuff that includes staying and/or working with interesting people.

So have a think and give me a shout if someone goes “Hmmmm.. we could use a Lloyd for that”

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous

I just accidentally read an article in the Daily Mirror about George Osborne failing to pull off a funny at the GQ awards last night.  I was sitting in a cafe and it happened to be open next to me (that’s my excuse).

My first question was “how could he be awarded Politician of the Year?”

And then “why do I care about who gets the approval of a magazine?”

And then “why am I looking at the Daily Mirror?”

Politicians, glossy mags, tabloid newspapers – a whole ecosystem of irrelevance.

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous

Do you understand what I’m doing at the moment?  I mean, beyond the material thing that I’ve given up my flat and am on the road living and working with people as required, being useful and moving on.

No, neither do I.

Except it seems to have something to do with living differently, with experiencing other people’s lives and hearing their perspective on mine.  It seems that this is something important for me to do, it’s not a choice I came to lightly, it took me a long time sitting in a flat in Fulham wondering why things didn’t work well and hankering for a way to be doing more, having a variety of experiences and meet with more diverse groups of people.  It’s one of those things that I can’t say I chose to do, it feels much more like it chose me.

I woke up this morning with paranoia, the idea that everyone hates me and thinks I’m just being a dick, spongeing off the goodwill of my friends and occasionally writing pompous self-indulgent stuff on the internet.  I know that the cure for this is writing about it, talking about it, getting it out of my head, because that’s the place it comes from.  It isn’t based in any real evidence – I am making it up.  In fact, since I poked my head above the parapet and wrote something yesterday I’ve had several very friendly and loving messages enquiring into my well-being.  If anyone does think that stuff, they’re not letting me know.

What is different (I hesitate to say, “not working”) about this current journey is that I’m being challenged to involve others in my life.  If the people I visit don’t feel involved then it does become a bit like spongeing, it all feels one way, but I’m still not sure how to do it.  I’ve always found this involvement, openness, personal connection, difficult.  I’ve found it hard enough to identify in the first place – I thought I was doing it, I think I’m doing what’s required, and yet from time to time I find myself having a conversation that shows me that the other person doesn’t feel involved, they feel shut out and cut off.  I don’t really know what to do about this except talk it around some more and see what other people think.  It feels like it’s in my blind spot.  What does it look like?  How would I know that I was involving you more in my life?  If I’m always telling you what I’m up to, what I’m thinking, what I want to do, how does that differ from self-obsession?

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous

I wrote this sitting in an upstairs room in a pub in Bude, Cornwall.  I sat and reflected that I was watching a little part of the world slowly die.  I was at the Bude Jazz Festival which annually celebrates the music as it was being born just about a hundred years ago in and around New Orleans.  It’s not the music that’s dying.  That will carry on.  It is immortalised in thousands of recordings already and even though there may only now be a relatively small number of musicians interested in keeping it going we’ve learned that all sorts of genres are much more hardy than their original proponents.

No, what’s dying here in front of me is a generation of British people, the oldest of whom may just remember hearing Mr Chamberlain on the wireless telling the world that we were now at war with Germany.  The youngest of them didn’t see anything of the war except it’s aftermath, growing up with bomb sites, cities being rebuilt, rationing and parents who were tired, fed up but stoically carrying on despite living through a horribly violent patch of our history.  They are the lucky ones.  They have had perhaps the best of the welfare state and social progress and reform that happened here in the second half of the twentieth century. They sit in rows hearing renditions of the songs and tunes that they danced to as teenagers.  They’re alive, kept going by the National Health Service, most of them with small but bearable pensions.  Many of them are here as venerable couples, they’ve been together now for forty years (or more).  They’ve all amassed stuff, stuff and more stuff.  I doubt that many of them have an empty attic or garage.  They may have let their cars go as they became less able to keep driving but the majority will have made their way here with room for others on the back seat.  They’re all likely to have inherited something from their parents, property, or cash or just belongings but they’re less likely to leave anything behind for the next generation except funeral expenses.   If they hve wills they’ve probaly passed things on to their grandchildren rather than their own kids.

They remember a gentler time.  Do they long for it?  Do they wish things could just go back the way that they were?  What do they really think?  About anything.  They look like Daily Mail readers to me, but that probably says more about my prejudices than about them.  They won’t be here much longer.  Or perhaps they will.

Postscript 1: When I got up from scribbling in my notebook, the people sitting behind me said “You were writing a lot, what are you writing?” Gulp.  I said “I’m writing a lot about uncivilisation at the moment about how society is de-evolving” They didn’t ask any more questions. No I don’t understand where the words came from either.

Postscript 2: What if they’ve done their job, that generation?  They were part of a pattern that created the free thinking and doing of the sixties.  They helped create an antidote to capitalism and now they’re dying off, taking the remnants of the old system with them.  Some of them kept a counter-culture alive that had been around since the industrial revolution and made it a little more mainstream, a little easier for the rest of us to do something different.  I guess “thank you” is what I’m trying to say 🙂

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous