Dear Julia

I’m really pleased and excited to see how the #AmtrakLIVE experience works out for you over the next few days.

I’ve travelled to (and from) SXSWi twice now on Amtrak and loved every minute of it. I’m only sorry that I’m not doing it again this year.

In March 2010, Brian Condon, Heather Taylor and I flew from the UK to start our journey in Boston holding meetups there, in NYC, DC, Atlanta and New Orleans travelling by train all the way, but because of the schedule found we needed to drive (boo!) over to Austin from NOLA in order to be there for the best of the festival. After the usual mad few days I took the Texas Eagle/Sunset Limited over to LA doing the return journey of #AmtrakLIVE. It was a fantastic way to relax and reflect on the whole experience, get to know other passengers and make some video.

In March 2011 I travelled alone for a project I called “Please Look After This Englishman”. I started in San Francisco on March 1st with no firm plans about who to see other than to visit SXSWi and to get my plane back from JFK on March 31st. I used my blog, twitter and facebook to explore the edges of my social network to find people to go and visit and stay with along the way. I reckon I totalled just over 8,000 miles on your network using a 30-day, 12-segment pass – what a bargain! That year I got the Texas Eagle down from Chicago to get to Austin.

Of course I blogged and tweeted, took photos and video all the way on both trips (although the lack of T-mobile data connectivity while on the Empire Builder going through the more frozen parts of Montana & N Dakota meant I had a little off-line time!) I was surprised during both trips to find so many people who’d never been on a train, nor thought of travelling on one.

So I’m thrilled to see you giving the same opportunity to a bunch of people this year and to see all the talk of writers residencies. Well done!

I’m only sorry that you and your team weren’t around 3 or four year ago, we could have had some fun!

If my experience can help with your thinking around writers residencies or any other projects you have coming up, please do let me know. I’m currently working on pulling the material I have into some form of web experience or e-book, there’s just *so* much material! I’m based in London so I can’t hop on a train to see you, but we have the internet! 🙂

All the best for South By, I’m sure you’ll have a scream there and back again!

2010 Blog

2010 Photos

2011 Blog

2011 Photos

Tripline map made from Foursquare check-ins

I woke this morning to a tweet from Joanna Geary suggesting that I “might dispute your first status” – huh? It turns out Desi Velikova is starting an event next month called “London Social Media Cafe” and was tweeting to people: “We’re organising the first London Social Media Cafe and thought you might be interested” – the site refers to the Birmingham and Toronto SMCs as inspiration but makes no direct reference to our work.

Although I was initially riled, once I’d had a coffee and looked through it all again, I saw there was nothing to get hung-up about. As I said, nearly 5 years ago, “I own nothing here”.

Just to set the record straight so no-one has to dig through blogs and wikis or actually talk to someone to find out the answer – the thing that we now call Tuttle or the Tuttle Club started out as the London Social Media Cafe. I wrote about it first on 8th August 2007. In the early days we used a wiki at londonsocialmediacafe.pbworks.com Soon after people found that #tuttle was much less of a mouthful than #LondonSMC and we got on with the important business of talking to each other, building relationships and having a laugh rather than worrying about what we were called.

Good Luck with it, Desi!

I’ve been playing with the new, shiny, social, work-oriented, doo-dah at somewhere.com  and I really like it.

The good thing for me is that it accepts me the way I am.  It doesn’t try to put me in any pigeon-holes, there are no drop-down boxes or categories for me to fill in, I don’t have to make up a job description or deal with out-dated assumptions about how work works.

It’s a kind of microblog about my work.  I post (create “sparks” in the lingo) either to “Share Your Work” – which asks me “What are you working on right now?”  or else I can answer a seemingly endless stream of questions such as “How do you communicate with your team?” or “Where would you love to work?”.

A spark has a maximum of 250 characters and it *must* also contain an image (from your HD, flickr, instagram or FB).

You can follow people and “like” sparks.  You can include @users and #tags and hyperlinks in a spark if you’ve enough room.

It’s building up an interesting portfolio of the stuff I do and most importantly it helps me share my process as much as my products – which is great for those times when there’s a whole load of process going on, but seemingly no product.  That helps me remember that I am still working, and it keeps others aware of the things that go on in the background, things that I might not normally share because they’re not “ready” or “finished”.

So I commend it to you.  Have a look at my profile to see the sorts of things I’ve done with it.  I’m a big fan of Austin Kleon’s work too and he has a page here.  You’ll need to join in order to follow and like and post yourself, but it’s invite-only (I have some invite codes, so drop me a line if you can’t wait to jump in there).

I learned a new word today.

A cartomiser is a blend of “cartridge” and “atomiser”.

And each of these ones give you 200 puffs.

I have no idea how many puffs you need to feel like you’ve smoked a whole cigarette. If indeed that’s what people do.

Today I mark twelve years since I last had any alcohol.

To people who drink normally or excessively that sounds like an awfully long time and a great achievement. But it’s not, it doesn’t feel like that to me. I guess because I got to a point where I knew that what had formerly been an obsession, a compulsion for me, had lifted and that I would have to go out of my way to have a drink – that there’d need to be a really good reason for it, and I didn’t have any reasons left. It also doesn’t feel like *my* achievement, I did it together with some amazing, generous, funny, sometimes infuriating, but always loving friends.

I had my first drink at around 13 or 14. I had a traditionally blurry British teenhood and twenties but by my thirties it was becoming boring. My alcoholism wasn’t particularly spectacular or dramatic or obvious to everyone around me. Though I had my moments. It was more that I used it to deal with feeling uncomfortable in life, uncomfortable with people, uncomfortable being me. Also, I had a great physical capacity for drinking and thought that because I could drink right up till closing time, then I should. And when I tried to moderate it or stop completely on my own, I was horrified to find that I couldn’t. I had to find a way of living with and overcoming the discomfort rather than anaesthetising it with booze.

Early in 2002, I thought that being sober would make my life boring, but life actually got much bigger – most people reading this have only got to know me since that time. It would be nice to think that I was a pain in the neck to people when I was drinking but when I stopped that stopped too, but it hasn’t been quite that simple.

If you’re struggling with drinking too much or too often or you just don’t like the person you become when you drink, you might find that total abstinence is the best route for you too. I wasn’t able to do it alone. Living in London, it wasn’t hard to find help in the company of the fine men and women of Alcoholics Anonymous. I’ve seen the Twelve Steps work miracles for people who were otherwise hopeless, but there are lots of ways of achieving this, don’t let anyone tell you that there’s only one path to recovery.

Cheers!