First morning with the heating on (min temperatures overnight are around 7 or 8ºC).  It feels like magic.  I think it's the memory of when we first moved to a house with central heating (on November 5th 1975).  It felt like real luxury, not to wake up under blankets in a cold room, having to make the dash downstairs to the fire, but to be able to get out of bed and just walk around in your pyjamas.

I'm running again.  C25K W5R2 IYKYK.

Laura and I started a practice 5 years ago this week of telling each other 3 things that we're grateful for when we sit down to dinner – most days it's a good break for both of us from days of striving to achieve.  I think it also kind of marks when we started having dinner together more often than not, before that we'd just see to ourselves, but particularly because pandemic, it became easier for me to just cook for both of us.   We were in Aberdyfi and it was six months since lockdown had started, our first proper trip away from the South East in that time.  

I miss the West of this island.  My old school pal James is posting pics of Harlech and Portmeirion and it reminds me that even though we had a few days in Frinton, it's not the same – I want to see the sun setting (not rising) over the sea.  It's one of the regrets I have about not driving and not having a car – I have a fantasy that if I did, then I'd find it easier to just jump on the M4 and head over to the land of my fathers.

I spent yesterday back at Conway Hall.  I'm trying to think of other things I've done there other than Interesting (which I helped Russell with for the first three years and which I then attended a couple of times?) There was The Story that Matt Locke did.  I feel like there must be other things but I can't remember them (or find them in any of my archives).  If I've been to or organised something else there with you, do remind me.

Anyway, yesterday was "The Fate of Britain", an Absurd Intelligence/Hard Art production.   It was a brave attempt to pull togther people who are up for alternatives to the so-called "Multifaceted Intersecting Shitshow".  I think it worked – lots of people met new people and made connections.  Some things seem to be clicking into place.  I was glad that I had no responsibility to do anything.  It let me do my quietly unassuming schtick while getting to chat gently with interesting folk, old and new.   It was a chance to get some focus on what's important to me and what sorts of things I can contribute.

It made me laugh that the Camerados' Public Living Room includes oversized underpants to put on to deflate egos somewhat.  I seem to have done something similar 18 years ago at Interesting 2007…

Scale-wise, inbetween the everyone-in-the-hall sessions and the corridor conversations I went to something on "Building an Intergenerational Movement" convened by Charles Landry.  Interesting parts for me are the need for third spaces to practice this stuff (tempered with the need to work the tensions  with homophily and propinquity), but also that there's a lot of bollocks talked (by people of all ages, and not necessarily those in the room) about generational differences and similarities and what to do about it.  I also felt the tension between those people who seem to have been rewarded with power in our world despite (or perhaps because of) their tendency to act childishly and those people (towards the lower end of the age range) who feel they're subject to enforced infantilism by economic circumstances that make it impossible to attain some of the markers of maturity like buying a house, or having a coherent career.

I was reminded by something in a conversation with Vanessa Chamberlin at lunchtime about this place being mine and being a place to write like there's nobody reading.  Part of that is about me not needing to explain everything in the above couple of paragraphs before I hit the Publish button.  It's frustrating, but there are a bazillion things I want to write about and if I try to write in the way that I think is required for publication (writing like somebody really clever and important reading),  I end up either with a long list of bullet points or a very long and boring exploration of one thing. I hold onto the hope that writing things and not explaining everything immediately is better than not writing at all (or writing in sekrit places that nobody will ever see).

I'm a bit shit sometimes – in particular when it comes to relying on other people to tell stories about me rather than me telling them for myself (by which I mean that I think I should be better at doing it myself instead of relying on others so much…)

Today would have been my Dad’s 88th birthday (two fat ladies – 88!). He was 2 years old when WW2 started. When I was 2 (and three quarters) it was his 30th birthday and I recently found a recording of him and me “talking” on that day. If I can find it again easily (it’s digitised but not indexed!) I’ll post it. In it, he’s doing the most ridiculous (to me) BBC accent. That wasn’t how he spoke usually, except sometimes on the phone or when he knew he was being recorded. He told me once that he had auditioned to be a newsreader, but that John Edmunds had got the job. After he died, my mother told me that when she met him, he wanted three things – to have children, to play in a band and to programme computers. He did all three very well.

As we get settled into doing Living Culture Coffee Mornings regularly, I’m starting to think about ways that we can do things together that represent some sort of “capture” of the thinking and interactions between people in the room. I wrote (eighteen months ago?!?) about the kinds of problems I’ve encountered before with this and how the ‘metalabel’ platform might help. And I’m starting to see how doing that might also be a way into changing the relationship between such groups and the premises that they meet in.

One of the problems in that kind of relationship is that the rental model is dominant. If you have a space (especially in a big city like London) you’re “obliged” to make money out of people who book it for their own use. In the case of businesses who want to hire a meeting room or conference facilty, then that’s just an acceptable cost of doing business that you can either cover yourself or else you pass on to the people who come to your event. But if you have a space that you want to be available to a wide range of people and groups to do interesting and socially useful things, neither the organisers nor the participants necessarily have a great deal of cash to cover this and they aren’t usually thinking about how to generate revenue to pay for it because that’s just not the priority for these creative sorts of activities.

At early prototypes of Tuttle our hosts were (initially) happy with how much coffee we were buying and grateful for any extra that we could raise by passing the hat. But the more successful and popular we became, the more that the space owners saw an imbalance between what we werer getting from being there and what they were seeing in the cash register.

At C4CC we kind of got around that by having a long(er)-term relationship with the University and the Colleges but in the end it came to the same point from the hirer’s point of view – money goes in, but doesn’t really come out. Now in the case of a University, you’d hope that they might be used to the idea of investing in order to create value in the wider economy, but under the pressures of the London property market, the obsession with opportunity costs makes such relationships much more transactional and therefore vulnerable.

During my time at Guildford URC, we got around this by centralising all bookings in one person (fortunately not me!), supported by the trustees where necessary and having a flexible mix of standard rates and pay-what-you-can (even if that’s £0.00) while (mostly) resisting the temptation to take big sums from people who weren’t otherwise particularly aligned with the mission.

So now we’re doing coffee mornings monthly (and, I keep teasing, possibly weekly) and wondering whether there’s an opportunity to do things differently. Something to fill the gap between “you’ve got to pay for everything” (which excludes people without a business model) and “it’s all free!” (which risks being over-run with people who do have a business model, and you’re just reducing their costs) If you have a space that’s supposed to be about learning and spiritual growth and you have an event programme that reflects that, might there be a way to satisfy at least some of the need for rent *and* help build community between all of your “hirers” by also making and selling things for the mutual benefit of both the groups who make them and the space that hosts them?

See we really need better words than “hirers” and “space owners” – for this kind of thing the relationship needs to be about something other than the economic roles we’re playing.

If you’re interested in how this might work, then come along on Friday.

Oh the flags? I think the flags are just another instance of political trolling. Why are they doing it? I don’t think that the people putting up flags are reliable witnesses when it comes to asking what their motivations are. I think they believe what they’re saying, but the underlying motivation that gets erased is “to make snowflakes like you melt” – it’s the reaction to the action that feeds the whole thing. And I do think there are people who are coming at this as a way of stirring dissent. We encourage one group to do something that will really trigger another group. But I don’t think that the people putting up the flags and shouting about how it’s just patriotism are the ones that are benefiting most from all of us shouting at each other.

Now that most of our social media platforms are essentially corporatised 4chan we have to be even more vigilant about not feeding the trolls.

After breakfast, but before coffee, I went up the garden to see whether we have a couple of folding chairs in the kind of shed/cupboard thing that's on level 3.  

Our garden is cut into a steep hill.  If you count our downstairs as level 0 then my studio is on level 1 and it opens out onto some steps up to level 2 (which I also call the "first lawn" even though, embarrassingly, it's astroturf) then there's the "upper lawn" on level 3 which also has a plastic cupboardy thing in which I hoped there were some camping chairs.  Not totally relevant to this story, but for completeness, there's some controversy (in my mind, nobody else has ever given this any thought, ever) over whether the next two levels are 4 and 5 or 3.5 and 4.  The next one up from 3 is much shallower and just has the greenhouse on it and the base of the sturdy steps up to the decking which is the edge of our domain and where I was thinking of sitting this morning, at least for as long as the heat is bearable.  

God, I'm glad I've cleared that up, it's been bothering me for months that nobody else knows about the numbering system.  Yes, I have a wife and family and friends who have visited since we moved in, but none of them can be trusted with this kind of information the way you can.

Anyway.  The main plot point here takes place on level 2 (about which there is no controversy except whether the hyperbole of calling it the "upper lawn" is sufficiently obvious – you haven't seen it, but you can probably imagine me saying it, pompously.)

What I didn't know when I climbed the stairs from the back door to the astroturf was that there was a mahoooosive spiders web hanging between (I think) the Narnia lamp post (don't ask, we didn't put it there but we haven't got rid of it yet either) and one of the olive trees.  I think that's where it was but when I walked through it, my chatty brain kind of shut down to focus on the involuntary squawking and flapping that the rest of my body was doing.  The next thing that I thought was I hope nobody saw or heard that, while at the same time secretly hoping that everybody saw and heard me.  The second thing was poscessing that what's stuck to my glasses and my face is probably the guts of some insects that have been caught earlier and already nibbled on by the spider.  But I also kept moving and noticing more stuff in my hair and beard and then realise that my skin is super sensitive and I'm imagining that every tickle and twitch is actually some half-dead creature that I'd missed in my first round of slapping and wiping my head.  Has something gone down my t-shirt?  Did anything go up my nose?

It's only when I'm up the steps and finding that indeed we do not have any camping chairs in the cupboardy thing that I'm laughing at myself and realising how impossible it would be to recreate that scene authentically on stage or screen.  I mean I could have a go, and you'd all laugh too, but part of that laughter would be because of the tiny gap between my prowess as an actor and the reality of seeing a grown man squawking and flapping at the web that has just ensnared him.

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.