Category Archives: What I’ve Been Doing

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've Been Doing

At Work In The Ruins, Dougald Hine, 2023

1 Comment
ruins-os-status
“How do we give Spiritual Health the same status as Physical Health?” a session called at an Open Space on Infrastructures of Care, in response to “At Work In The Ruins”.
London, 8th February, 2023

This week, I’ve finished reading Dougald’s excellent book. (also on Audible, read by the author). I don’t really do book reviews – this is more some initial notes after reading.

The book’s subtitle is “Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics and All the Other Emergencies” so yeah, “all the *other* emergencies”.

I’ve tried talking about this as the “global polycrisis” in my day job at church – lol. It’s clear to me that we need better ways to make sense of this because we think we’re good in a crisis, that it brings out the best in us, but what we’re seeing now is a seemingly never-ending series of crises and while it *does* bring out good, it doesn’t feel like anyone can keep it up much longer.

It’s a hard word for people to get their heads round, polycrisis, and my explanation (that it’s all the things that we see stacking up in the news every day, while recognising that they’re all interconnected and that the complexity that therefore arises is only going to make for more surprising and potentially horrible events that we keep perceiving as individual crises <breathe!>) doesn’t always help.

Dougald’s book is a wander through many more of the things that are hard for people to get their heads around. It looks at some explanations for how we got here, some critiques of the current ways of looking at the problems we face and some ideas for how to move forward without minimising or continuing to deny the trouble we’re in.

The first two of these cover the period/era/machine/ideology that he refers to as ‘modernity’. So you get to dive into what (or who!) modernity is and how it’s affected the way we think and behave. It is the impending ruins after the end of modernity that the title refers to.

It’s still working it’s way through me, even though I’ve been lucky enough , through my friendship with Dougald, to have been immersed in many of the concepts in the book while he was forming them and writing about them.

I want to lay out here some of the core things that I noticed as I made my way through the book. Lots of reviewers have noted that it’s a poetic piece as well as being a well-crafted argument so some motifs do pop up throughout as the narrative builds and this helped me both to consolidate what I was learning, but also to see how my thinking was being changed.

Predicaments – this was a biggie for me. It refers to John Michael Greer‘s idea of the difference between a predicament and a problem (that a problem has a solution whereas a predicament is something you have to live with and hopefully find better ways of doing so) – it came up many times to remind me that the “problems” that so many of us are trying to “solve” are actually unsolvable predicaments and that all of these are facets of modernity.

“the price others have been paying all along” – one of the rearrangements in my brain that needs to be reinforced is to shake off the idea that “we” (ie people like me) are the only ones who matter. I mean of course, right? But it’s embedded in so much thinking and it also echoes Vinay’s line that “collapse means us having the same standard of living as the people who grow our coffee.” This was a good reminder that whatever we have to go through, much of our comfort still comes at the expense of other people in other parts of the world.

“people who work in places like that” – this generally means people who work in government or public policy. It’s the people who produce policies and statements and thought leadership and other bullshit that claims to improve the world and be “part of the solution” but in reality keeps working against all of our interests. It’s the people who work in places that support the propping up of modernity. I’ve been one of those people and saw myself in the phrase “Those involved in policymaking now thought of themselves as pragmatic technocrats”. It’s a bit of my work (from the nineties) that I need to revisit and think through in the light of where we find ourselves now.

“no left turn” – this helped me reframe my view of my own political activism and how I’ve thought about the world since I was first shaken by exposure to Marxist analysis. There’s a nagging part of me that wants the answer to this whole thing to be socialist revolution but especially since 2015/16 I’ve been as uncomfortable with the certainties of my friends on the left as with those of the people we stand against. This is not to say that we shouldn’t oppose vehemently the policies of the current UK government but we also can’t continue to pick our enemies or bedfellows solely on where they sit on the traditional left/right axis.

Small path(s) – in contrast to the “big path” which is the road we’re on when we imagine that large-scale efforts (even if organised at a small- or even individual-scale) will create a sustainable version of the world which can continue as it has been all along. Often using technologies that haven’t actually been invented yet. It’s the “business as usual, but sustainable at any cost” mindset. I felt reassured that the work I’ve been doing in the last five years, at a local level, building community capacity and the sorts of relationships that ought to be more resilient no matter how poorly the big path solutions serve us. It’s helping me to let go of the fear that in coming here and working in a small-town church I was doing the equivalent of (in Dougald’s words) moving to Devon and retraining as an acupuncturist.

So yeah.

The image above comes from an Open Space that I organised with Liz Slade at Unitarian HQ to welcome Dougald back to London at the beginning of his UK launch tour in February. It was just one of many conversations inspired by the ideas in the book on the day, but there are many, many more to come. I’m looking forward to opening more space to talk about them.

What I've Been Doing, words, work

Singing For The Mind

IMAG0868[6732]

I wrote this, and my manager Graham kindly read it, for the service last Sunday about the music work we do with people living with dementia and their carers.

“Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” Twenty voices in unison releasing for a few minutes the individual identities we brought into the room. On Wednesday mornings at Singing For The Mind we put aside whatever descriptions we arrived with: “person living with dementia”, “carer”, “community worker” and lift our hearts in song together, joining in an act of communal music-making.

It may sound obvious, but singing together is different from talking together. On alternate weeks, we do talk informally together over games and crafts, coffee and biscuits and those conversations are important to help people remember who they are and get to know each other better. It is good to talk. But we try to balance that with the opportunity to all do the same thing at the same time, to transcend the separation that comes with this illness and lose ourselves in the one-ness of group singing. It is not only a rare opportunity for physical expression of the spirit but also an affirmation of our community.

Half of the people in the room may struggle to remember what they did yesterday. The other half deal with the challenges that this condition presents, some of them with loved ones that they’ve known for half a century.

Together, we not only create a bigger sound, but we also create a space in which the strongest can carry those who are feeling physically or mentally weaker. Working with familiar words, melodies and rhythms awakens parts of us all that we might ordinarily allow to doze off.

There isn’t any hard work to be done, the music is simple and the sounds we make are not always sophisticated but when we join in song we join in spirit whether that’s singing along to a rousing gospel choir’s “Amazing Grace” or just joining in with the “clap, clap” in “Glad All Over” by the Dave Clark Five!

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

Women’s work #IWD2016

2 Comments

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.

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

Audioblog 160220 – Why So Serious?

2 Comments

Download 5.7MB

I recorded this on Waterloo Station shortly after the Devoted & Disgruntled Vaults Festival Open Space on Saturday. The space was opened to discuss “Let’s stop romanticising depression and marginalising other mental illness” and I called a session called “Why So Serious?” about the issue of taking oneself too seriously, dealing with other people’s expectations, the link between adopting a serious persona and depression or burn-out.

I reported like this mainly because I’d called a session at the previous week’s space but had then spent the whole week not being able to write a report.   It’s reminded me how much I like making this format.  Expect more…

events, What I've Been Doing, words

First #neweconomics event with @johnmcdonnellmp

4 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, John McDonnell MP, the shadow chancellor, announced that he’d be organising a series of events on New Economics to “broaden the debate around economics in Britain.”

I booked up for the first four in London straight away. The first lecture was last night at the Royal Institution. It was good, I heartily recommend you getting along to others in the series if you can. I had a few reactions to it that might be expected by regular readers here.

  1. I’m not very good at lectures. Mariana Mazzucato was a great speaker in that unstoppable Italian-American way. And I stuck it to the end, but it was a hard exercise in concentration for me. That aside, I’m left wondering if it was worth it – one person talking for an hour, even jumping around her slides, is something I can watch on YouTube and I get to pause it to have a cup of tea and a think half way through.

  2. I’m not very good at Economics. I spent a good deal of my second year at University rebelling against having to do Economics 101 and I’m very glad to say that last night had no mention of inelastic pricing, but I was on my guard for long explanations of this model versus that model. I’m glad I got to hear what she had to say (big takeaway: don’t forget that all of Silicon Valley’s invention is built on the foundations from large publicly-funded programmes [DARPA, NASA, CERN etc]) but I had to work hard for it (probably a good thing).

  3. I’m really not good at post-lecture Q&A. There may be some people who enjoy it, who get to hear things they didn’t hear before, but I don’t think that justifies the mic-hogging and mansplaining and all of us having to sit through another half (if we’re lucky) hour of one person speaking at a time.

I came away really wanting to know who else was in the room (other than Jeremy Corbyn) and what they thought. And what all of this was doing to “broaden the debate”. I may just be being impatient. Let’s see what the next one (on Tech & the Future of Work) is like. I’d much rather have some Open Space/Unconference events where people really get to talk about this stuff and we all have an experience we couldn’t have had through a screen.

Which ties in conveniently with two evening events I’m doing in February at WeWork on the Southbank! After the Future of Work spaces we did before Christmas, I wanted to continue the conversation but with a more practical angle. So rather than talking broadly about new technologies, I’m asking “What are we actually going to do?”

You can book on Eventbrite:

Future of Work: What are we going to do about Artificial Intelligence?

and

Future of Work: What are we going to do about The Internet of Things?

See you there if not before!

 

What I've Been Doing, words

Ten years of online video

3 Comments

Last night, someone commented on an old video of mine on YouTube. It was from some work I did in 2006 making content for a site supporting a consultation around education for the creative industries. That’s as much as I remember really. Mostly it was talking to “grown-ups” about what “skills are needed by industry” but I also got to go down to Peckham and interview a bunch of young people about their experience of Theatre Peckham (then known as New Peckham Varieties).

The commenter had said “Omg is that John boyega 😭 so happy for him” And so I had a look and yes, about one minute in, there’s a fourteen-year-old future Finn looking surprised to hear that not only had Sir Ian McKellen worked in the West End, but also that he was in the (then) new X-Men movie.

Go on, watch the whole thing. He pops up later too. If you spent any time around theatre when you were young, you’ll recognise yourself and your peers in there somewhere.

It made me realise that I’ve been on YouTube for nearly ten years. 2006 was the year it all got going. At the start of the year it was some experiment that guys at PayPal were doing, I joined in the March (but didn’t fully commit to only posting video there till much later – hence the broken video links in some of my posts!) and by the end of the year it had been bought by Google. And still people were saying video on the web was just a fad 🙂

It might be time for a retrospective!

What I've Been Doing

Hitched

3 Comments

Oh My!  I imagine that most of the people who read here will have seen the news last weekend or known anyway, but I got married to Laura Musgrave on 5th September.  And I’m chuffed to bits.

I first got married in 1990 just before I turned 26. I thought it was all about us – which means that primarily I thought the day was about me, but then I suppose that at the time I thought my life was all about me anyway.

Life has changed me.  Nearly 25 years later, I’ve done it again.  I’m privileged to come at it this time with that experience of what marriage is really about and what life is really for.  I’m very grateful for the first time round, and in particular, the two beautiful children that came from it – two young people of whom I’m immensely proud today.

Nick Holder was my best man and we went on a walk in the woods a few weeks ago as part of my “stag”.  He asked me while we walked, why I was getting married.  I said that I liked it, as a state of being.  I prefer it, as an idea, to living together without a public declaration and ritual and even all the legal stuff.  I like us being a unit – two and one.  I like introducing “my wife”.

It’s taken me ten years to come back to this position.  When I first moved out in 2005, I was quite sure that I’d spend the rest of my life alone, or in long-term relationships that didn’t involve public commitment and children.  But that has changed very very slowly, over the years.

I’ve done a lot of growing up since then and so a couple of years ago, after Laura and I had been together for a year or so, and despite me being on the road at the time, I felt ready to say that, although I didn’t know how it might work out, I would very much like to spend the rest of my life with her and have another family.

A year later I asked her formally, in the Starbucks in the King’s Road which was the place she claimed she first took a shine to me.  And now here we are, sitting in San Francisco on the first day of our honeymoon.

Lots was said at the wedding about love and marriage, what it means  to us and to all the people who were there.  Expect more details in the in-between blogging time I get while I’m away, but my wife has just arrived in the coffee shop!

And thank you, and much love to all those who helped me get here.

events, london, What I've Been Doing

04/07/14 – Today at #tuttle

1 Comment

Some notes I made from today’s conversations which included @tonyhall @freecloud & @tibocut with a fortunate postscript one-to-one for me with @mistergough

The RFH was being used today for a graduation ceremony.  That chimed with my recognition that some people have “graduated” from Tuttle and that’s worth celebrating.

On the other side of the glass #tuttle
“MayDay Rooms is a safe haven for historical material linked to social movements, experimental culture and the radical expression of marginalised figures and groups. It offers communal spaces to activate archives’ potential in relation to current struggles and informal research, challenging the widespread assault on collective memory and historical continuity. MDR is located in Fleet Street, Central London, but is informally linked in inspiration, collaboration and practice with an international network of common and concurrent initiatives.”

Thinking about archives as a way of seeing oneself through media but also recontextualising yourself – which I take to mean seeing what different things in you are reflected by your contact with archive materials.

Personal stories are much more interesting than the facts, which can be discovered for oneself – if you’re telling me a story about a stone that you picked up on a beach, the geology of the stone is the least interesting part (unless within that there is some personal connection).

There are always lots of little social things going on that no-one knows about.

What alternatives are there in the space between mesh networks and the “legacy” Internet?

Instagram and Twitter as a treasure hunt.  We leave trails of where we’ve been, what we’ve seen, what we’re doing for others to pick up and enjoy and follow the path.

What’s this #tuttle reboot all about? What is it that needs to be revived, what’s it for, what’s it supposed to do, has it done it already?

Watson at IBM – looks amazing, looks like magic – do those explaining how it works really understand it themselves?  What is the complexity under the surface?  How much do you get to know once you’ve “signed on the line that is dotted”?

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

Some Hows of Timelapse

5 Comments

I made a little timelapse this week and put it in my flickr stream because I found, to my chagrin, that it made instagram video barf.

Robert spotted it (see? he *is* looking, watching, lurking quietly after all) and kindly mentioned it in his newsletter this morning. He asked “How did he do that?”

Well here are a few ways of answering that:

  • I shot it on my phone. It’s an “HTC One”, which accounts for the wide screen. There’s a free (with Pro version available) app called Droid Timelapse. The only real setting I use is to adjust the Frame Capture Rate – each frame here is a second apart. I did no other processing after shooting, just uploaded it.
  • I’d just tried out the new cafe in the newly extended Sainsbury’s in Garratt Lane, opposite the Southside Centre. It is nothing special, but for £1.95 I got a large mug of reasonable coffee that I enjoyed more than the sort they serve over the road in Caffe Nero for example. I came to the exit and realised it was raining (again) and saw in front of me a big window out onto the street. So I went and stood by it, propping my phone up against the glass, firing up Droid Timelapse, holding very still and pressing the button to make it start. Then I waited for the counter to reach 10 (I don’t know how long that took, I’d have to do some arithmetic with frame rates… but that makes 10 seconds of video) and I pressed the button again to make it stop. Then I went and bought some sausages in Sainsbury’s and went home.
  • While it was shooting, I was nervous. I expected at every moment to hear one of the security guards behind me say “I’m sorry sir, you can’t do that here” I couldn’t move because I was holding the camera still. I imagine that if anyone had actually paid any attention, they’d have thought I looked like I was waiting to take a picture for a very long time. While I was standing there a young (I dunno, late teens I guess) woman and a slightly older man came and stood nearby. They had a trolley full of groceries but I assumed they were either waiting for the rain to calm down or waiting for someone else to turn up. They were having that kind of conversation where you don’t get too deeply into anything because you know that you’re going to be interrupted at any moment by a change in the weather or the arrival of your friend. I zoned in and out of their conversation while wondering how the movie was going to turn out – would it be too fast? what would it look like when the traffic slowed down or stopped for the traffic lights? how many buses had gone past now? – the only thing I remember her saying was “I’ve been told by many people that they’ve had visions of me dying young.” When I turned around all I really clocked of her was that she had long hair and was wearing a light-coloured (creamy) woolen garment – I couldn’t say whether it was a cardigan or a pullover. It might have been Aran.

Does that help? Anything else you want to know?

Footnote: While I drafted this post (and the previous one) in Fargo, it’s still easier to embed media (especially moving pictures) using the wordpress.com interface. Boo! (actually that’s not true, I made it up before actually trying it out – the flickr code is just a line of text which would fit nicely on a line in Fargo. I’ll try that next time)