Perfect Path: Recent Episodes

Lloyd Davis

A distributed voicemail, just me, talking to you.

I’m going to do an experiment in pop-up, temporary, newslettering.

I’m having radiotherapy treatment for prostate cancer over the next couple of weeks and I’m going to be writing about the experience in an email newsletter (subscription page).

I intend to write most days, but the main expected side-effect of the treatment is fatigue, and I’m already 7-months sleep-deprived from new fatherhood, so some days it will be short or just not happen.

In part it’s a way for me to let people know what’s happening without having to think too hard about who to add to a WhatsApp group or something.

I still need to write a “story so far” kind of intro, but as usual, I’m juggling the need to get something set up with the need to have some writing to share. I’m also working out how intimate and truthful it can be without being a gross-fest – I expect to be working on that throughout… but one of the problems with this kind of cancer is that many people with prostates don’t talk about their bodies and feelings the way that many people with breasts and ovaries tend to – and that includes me, so patience please.

It’s not a substack, please don’t call it a substack. For a start, it’s free – I have no interest in charging you for the privilege of reading more emails, especially emails that are all about me and my insides.

I’m also not tracking your “engagement” or capturing and selling your data and when this is all over I’ll be deleting whatever data gets collected.

Public comments won’t be enabled, but if you want to say “Hi!” then a one-line email reply would be lovely. Just because I’m not sure yet how much I’ll be able to process other than one-liners.

I have doubtless forgotten something vitally important in setting it up, I beg your indulgence… again…

Subscribe to “Zap! A Radiotherapy Diary”

PS the first unexpectedly difficult thing is finding images to use that aren’t either tear-jerky or just jerky or “woah dude! TMI!” – so have a path in the woods where you can’t quite see what’s round the corner… ?

Personal Health News – Content Warning: references to prostate cancer and cancer treatments.

So another thing you might not know…

In the late summer of 2018, my GP recommended that I start having Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) blood tests. I was 53 and so obviously this was just a helpful thing to do to keep an eye on my health, given that my father had recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Obviously I didn’t have prostate cancer, I was in my early fifties and not experiencing any dramatic symptoms. Well, sod “obviously”, because after getting a relatively (but not scarily) high PSA reading, I had an MRI and a biopsy and the diagnosis was confirmed in the October.

I was fine. I’m still fine.

I went on to “active surveillance” which meant regular PSA tests (it’s moved up and down between 4 and 9 in that time), an MRI every other year and if there hadn’t been an NHS-busting pandemic, I’d have had another biopsy earlier than I did last year. I stayed in touch with the local Urology department (who are amazing, of course) and we continued to have conversations about the right treatment and the right timing.

The diagnosis came when we were at a point in our “fertility journey” where losing my ability to produce the required genetic material would have been annoying. And we didn’t know then that it would take until 2025 to produce our bundle of joy. So I probably stretched the qualification criteria for remaining on active surveillance – ie if we hadn’t been doing IVF, I would have had treatment sooner, but all the tests showed no cause for alarm and, as the urology nurse said when we told her Laura was pregnant, “the gamble paid off”.

I’m not necessarily recommending following my path here, but I want you to know that it wasn’t a standard path and remind you that its worth exploring all options. But that’s only possible if you keep talking sensibly to the professionals. If we already had Nuggy and I got the same diagnosis today that I got in 2018, I would be having treatment as soon as I could.

I only had one tricky conversation about the timeline, when I was allotted an antipodean surgical registrar for one of my catch-up appointments. He clearly thought I was being overly complacent and delivered the classic line “You’ve got cancer, mate!”, a phrase that I’ve adapted for my own use ever since when Laura was asking me about anything I wanted to get out of.

So later today I’m having a planning session at the RSCH Cancer Centre to prepare for radiotherapy (SABR) – I’ll share details as I feel appropriate here, but do get in touch if, as they say, you were affected by anything in this blogpost.

The preparation video they sent me is a hoot, with helpful diagrams of the human male urogenital system and how to pee in a urinal. I’ve never self-administered an enema before, so don’t say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

Oh and please put me in the “not a battle” category and refrain from military/conflict metaphors with me, I’m grateful for your encouragement (and prayers, prayers are OK!) if you want to share. And I know it’s hard because it’s still the mainstream way of thinking about cancer particularly, but I haven’t found it helpful for me.

My attitude has always been that I have a disease, science knows what to do, thank God for science.

People who have a prostate! Have a look at the current guidelines from the NHS. If you’re as old as I was when diagnosed and have a history of this stuff in your family – get tested and get help when you need it, please.

These heatwaves are hard.

This one is not quite as bad as the last one, at least so far. I’m very drawn to Jay’s suggestion that we start naming heatwaves in a similar way to how we name storms. It’s tempting, if possibly counter-productive, to say that we should restrict the name pool to outspoken climate-deniers. I leave you to come up with your own suggestions. Anyway, the problem with the previous one was that it woke us up (sic) to the concept of “tropical nights”, which sounds like a spicy Harold Robbins paperback but is actually horrible when experienced in the reality of a British house built from heat-retaining brick, more than 100 years ago.

A “tropical night” (the scare quotes will continue until morale improves!) is one where the temperature overnight doesn’t go below 20ºC – turns out they also use the term “equatorial nights” to refer to those where the temp remains at 25ºC or above, but please, don’t encourage them (the Met Office? who comes up with these things?)

And then along with the childhood reminiscences of 1976 in the horrible bits of the media there’s the claim that the cold still kills far more people in the UK than the heat, which I’m sure is reassuring to people who’ve just lost a loved one to Heatwave Murgatroyd.

I probably wouldn’t have been moaning as much if we didn’t have a little one to look after. He was born in December and so his whole life we’ve been making sure that he’s warm enough and then suddenly we had to switch him to just a nappy at all times, with a vest on standby for if we’re lucky enough to not have a “tropical night”.

I got too agitated about it all on bsky one morning after no sleep and too much time spent reading North Americans saying “Let them eat A/C!”

Well that wasn’t a night I want to repeat… [looks at weather forecast… flushes head in toilet]

— Lloyd Davis (@lloyddavis.eurosky.social) 2026-06-25T06:27:01.097Z

It’s currently too hot to work out a better way of embedding the whole thread, as if anyone’s interested…

I also spent far too much time watching the weather radar on windy.com as storm after storm just missed Godalming. A couple of nights I saw lightning on the horizon, but we didn’t get any real rain for days and still haven’t had a good downpour.

Now that we’re into Heatwave Norman I don’t even have that luxury/idiocy – there’s no rain to be seen on the forecast at all. We’ve settled into our minor adaptations of blackout blinds in the bedroom and a rota of opening and closing windows according to the time of day, staying hydrated and getting sleep when we can. Bigger adaptations are going to be needed. I just don’t know what, when and how.

Anyway.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking/writing about what I want to do next in what I can only call my “public life”, in the light of both getting older and having a new small person. It’s taking shape. One of the insights has been that my theory of change is quite different from many of the people I spend time with and that rather than picking holes in what they believe, I need to articulate and refine better what I think. So I’m doing that. But it’s not ready to splurge about yet.

But this morning I updated the invitation to Living Culture Coffee Mornings with some of that in mind. It now reads:

I believe that we’re called to help build a more equal, loving, tolerant, peaceful society – one that can melt away selfishness, hate and conflict.

I also believe that this only really happens when people talk through and work on things together as peers.

And my experience has been that, while there are some amazing and heart-burstingly joyous examples of this happening, in general people (yes I am people too!) still need lots of practice to talk or work together well.

These conversations are one contribution to an idea that’s gaining favour around here. Dougald and Anna have called it “regrowing a living culture” and I thought that was peachy, so here we are.

You don’t have to come knowing what a living culture is or have any idea how to start regrowing one. That’s exactly what we’ll be talking about, with the hope that by doing so together, we’re getting started on a simple path of regrowth.

You can also breathe a sigh of relief that I won’t be lecturing you on the subject! You may not be surprised to find that many of the conversations we have take a spiritual (but not necessarily religious) tone.

Everyone is welcome, but you do need to sign up. There is no homework and no qualification for attendance except an interest in chatting about this stuff.

You don’t have to be there for the whole thing if it’s inconvenient for you this time – “arriving late” or “leaving early” have no meaning here. There will be time to share announcements at 11am (remind me!)

So yeah, that feels better. Next one is online on Friday 10th. Subscribe to the calendar to get invitations as they come out.

I’ve realised that I’ve been holding back loads of stuff here, personal stuff, worky stuff, just general life stuff, certainly political stuff. On the one hand I feel the same risk that I hear from other people that stops them blogging at all and keeps them in walled gardens. On the other, I’m not even posting very much to the walled gardens. I’m hiding everything, because of the perceived need to hide something(s). And I’m not trying to tell anyone else what to do, but for me, I know that the risk of not sharing is greater than the risk of over-sharing. And while I’m kind of OK with insta and bluesky, I’m not posting much at all to FB and nothing to Substack – so it’s not even consistent (which might be ok?) and it all tends towards stuff staying on my hard drive or other places that only I can see.

So, if we met up for a coffee and you wanted to hear all my news, and all you’d got was my blogging and social media “output” then there’d be a lot of me talking and you probably being surprised. Because that’s the other effect of walled-garden-itis – the tendency to just share the good, shiny, positive stuff. And it’s not that I’ve got loads of bad, dull, negative stuff, just that life is life, y’know?

So what is there?

We’re living in Godalming now, did you know that? Yeah. Lovely. Very green and leafy. Our road only has houses on one side, the other side of the road is the back gardens of another street and the back gardens are all very long, and we’re higher up the hill than that other street and so our view consists of people’s garages, back hedges and then the trees that line the main road in the distance. At this time of year it’s gorgeous, so many greens. Even in the winter it’s heartwarming to look out over a bit of valley.

We have a baby. Yeah. Lovely. We had expected to do this earlier, like when we got married 11 years ago, but things didn’t work out until now. So I was thinking I’d be a dad again in my early fifties, rather than my early sixties, but it still works. in utero we called him Baby Nugget and we’re going to continue to do that online until he can express some other view. At home, he’s Nuggy, Nuggy-noo, Nugs, Nugmeister, Prince Nugbert, etc. And that’s how it will be here and everywhere else online. So if you have inside knowledge, please keep it to yourself and revel in being an insider. He is totally adorable, the best baby in town, smiley, and friendly all the time (except when he isn’t). He’s here in my office right now, in the moses basket, listening to Chopin Nocturnes while I write.

I’m finding that there’s a lot of muscle memory in child-rearing. If you didn’t know, the last time I did this was in the early nineties. There are some things that have changed, in terms of the advice that professionals give you, but there are also the hundreds of thousands of years of evolution that have changed much more slowly. Writing in June 2026, we’re getting ready to give him a first taste of solid foods. Back in the day, that meant a lot of puree-ing and/or buying ready-made gloop. Now we are to give them (within reason) what we’re eating, just in smaller non-chokeable pieces.

One of the choices we’ve made is for us to attempt equal responsibility in child care. One of my favourite bits is taking him to church every week (we alternate between the URC in Guildford and the Unitarians in Godalming. Both congregations are lovely and he’s a big hit with everyone.

Laura is being paid her full salary to do her bit. My paternity leave is less formal and less well paid (not paid). But I’ve had a great six months to not only spend time with him, but get my head better around the sort of work that I want to be doing in this next phase, work that can allow me to spend more time with him and Laura than I did in the olden days when I was commuting to London every day and beating my head against brick walls at the Audit Commission.

And then there’s where I am with the old ADHD. I’ve been diagnosed for five years now and I feel like I’m getting the hang of it. Although there’s still a lot of undoing to face up to – and as with any process of learning and unlearning, there are always new things lurking behind the last thing you feel you’ve conquered. Forty years of either holding my nose, sucking it up and battling on or else wondering why work just didn’t work for me, why there was so much promise and so little delivery. There’s also a lot of crossover with my addiction recovery, with me realising which bits of my inventory aren’t actually character defects but traits of a differently working brain. The end result is the same – letting go of trying to fix them by myself – but it’s good to let go of some of the judgement, that was only reinforcing the judgement I was getting from people who didn’t get what was going on either. The key phrase from my Upper Sixth year head’s report is “he frustrates us all, and in the end himself, by burying his talents”. And that was 43 years ago, I didn’t get much less frustrated in the meantime and I know it drove lots of other people mad too.

I’ve written about 1000 words here and I haven’t even got close to talking here about paid work and I think I’ll leave it until there are actual things to announce, but I think it’s enough to say that I’m not retired (!) and whatever I do needs to fit into the context of all the previous paragraphs.

Two weeks later, what’s going on?

Well, it’s hot again. And we’ve got a six-month-old baby. And time is feeling weird, here in my early sixties. I have an intention to write here every day, and I’m doing lots of writing in private, just not quite ready to lift its head out of the water or peek out from behind a curtain, or whatever.

How about some logs of my web reading this morning?

Cory makes the distinction between the atrocious activities of point-haired bosses and the rest of us tinkering away with vibe-coding just the latest iteration of homebrew computing.

In there he also points to Wreccer which he describes as:

“a system to help you find small groups of people with taste similar to your own, in order to facilitate media recommendations within that group – a kind of personal, relationship-driven alternative to massive, centralized, monolithic algorithmic recommendation systems.”

which sounds interesting in a “dark forest” kind of a way. Depends on your definition of “small” in “small groups”, I suppose. Cory points to the github readme which is… brief and the site is invite-only, but somehow it grabbed my attention enough to write about it, so…

Doug Belshaw points to folk.zone as an IndieWeb “collection of free, open-source internet services, federated social media, a writing platform, a git forge, a wiki, IRC, and more.”

I’m writing something about the human and technological building blocks of social infrastructure and I think this is what I hand-wavingly call “lightweight social tech”. It’s all NOT the big guys, and I think I’m OK defining things simply in terms of what horrible thing they’re not, right now.

Hamish Campbell is pressing on in a similar vein, but not as hand-wavy as I am.

Jay Springett is picking up on the subject of taste again. Taste, interfaces and discernment. It’s all very chewy.

like: “If taste is a relation between objects, people, histories, scenes and timing, then discernment is the one part of that relation the feed cannot perform on your behalf. It can supply the cultural objects, but it can’t do the telling-apart for you, no matter how hard it tries.”

I hope that, given the current situation, this linkblogging might be a way into me writing more consistently – back to the links and the thinks. I read some links and do some thinks pretty much every day, but it takes a little bit more effort to write them down, slap a random featured image on them and press publish.

We’ll see. We’ll see.

We’ll be doing the next in-person Living Culture Coffee Morning at Essex Hall this Friday, 5th from 10am. You should come if you’re around.

I just realised when I sat down that yesterday’s post wasn’t published. There’s an extra publishing step that I’m somehow tricking myself into thinking doesn’t exist (is a way of saying it’s my fault, not WordPress, but I do think actually that it’s WordPress’s fault). Maybe I need to go back to Wordland.

I’ve liked the idea of being a sysadmin since I sat next to a bloke looking after an AS/400 for a large FMCG company in 1992. Looking over his shoulder, it looked pretty easy. He took longer lunchbreaks than the rest of us and I heard he was on a higher day rate too.

Today though, 40 mins of setting up a new VPS has already made me more weary than I can say.

Dave pointed to Doug Belshaw’s Substrate which does look fiendishly interesting. It’s got that “made by AI” look (because it was) and that will make some people scream. But perhaps it’s better to be honest than to try to make something like look more it’s more organic.

I think I may have just accidentally deleted a draft post that I wrote last week, thinking that it had already been published. Oh well, we’ll never know now!

I’m working with an ADHD coach at the moment and it’s really helping.

One great insight of the last week or so is that the same actions I’ve learned to take to remedy the depletion of executive function (dysregulation) can also be used to reduce the chances of dysregulation in advance. And of course, prevention is better than cure, right? Because tired Lloyd is miserable and incapable Lloyd. So although it’s great that I’ve found gentle music (Chopin’s Nocturnes and my ‘Baroque Adagios’ playlist) to be calming and restorative at the end of the day, I can also start my day this way and give myself a better chance of making it through.

Another side of this is that looking at the shadow side of the characteristics of regulation give hints to what I might see as red flags warning of impending doom. So for example, in a regulated state, I find it easy to access compassion, but when/if i can spot myself sliding into rescuing, martyrdom or enabling then I’m getting a heads up not only that I’m doing things that I don’t want to do routinely, but also that I’m doing things that are likely to deplete my executive function.

I’m also thinking a lot about how scenes get formed out of small groups and individuals. And what you can do to nurture and nourish such scenes and thereby increase the chances of some ‘scenius‘ emerging.

If you know me, you’ll know that I tend towards laissez-faire approaches to getting people together and helping them form relationships and networks and do useful stuff. But there are times when you have to do something more active or interventionist and remind people that you do know what you’re talking about. Another aspect of this is what Brian used to say at C4CC. When someone would describe us as ‘catalysts’ he would point out that catalysts remain unchanged once the reaction that they’ve helped get started is complete. It goes for the work we did at C4CC as a whole, but as I write, I think perhaps that at the time it was mostly about how we branded Tuttle Consulting.

Anyway, Dave Snowden has written a brilliant post that reminded me of all this, (and reassured me of my own preferences) as a continuation of his series on ‘trialectics’. If you’re allergic to theological explanations, then skip to the bit headed “Three Positions in Ordinary Language”.

I’ve fallen into the trap before of seeing these three positions as a ladder to be climbed, that I’m taking a more advanced stance by believing in innate capacity than those facilitators who think it’s their only job to fix some assumed deficit in the group or individuals. (Mutually) Transformative encounters can be very exciting (and/or disturbing) but they’re not a one-size-fits-all approach or the ultimate goal either. I’ve experienced the best work coming from taking what Dave calls an ‘aporetic’ stance (what a great word that is!) and being open to what’s really going on (and therefore which approach is needed) in the room. But this gives me a mental framework for it that makes much sense. The theological/historical background is the cherry on the top and fits well with conversations I’m having in Unitarian circles.

Amazon tried to push some Peppa Pig at me this morning. Foolish algorithm that conflates “new parent” with “millennial cultural tastes”. My child will be fed Bill & Ben, Noggin The Nog and Bagpuss – they never did me any harm!

Never a bad time (especially the week after a full moon) to revisit Rushkoff’s stuff here from Present Shock.

I went to a day conference on Saturday, called “Resisting Big Tech Empires” run by Global Justice Now at the London South Bank University. I came away remembering that there are an awful lot of people who want to tell other people what to think, what to do and what they’re allowed to say. That was the exhausting bit. It was also lovely to just hang out in a thinky space and see some friends from the distant and not so distant past. There was a time when I’d have been interviewing people and taking a lot more photographs, possibly also live-blogging. Phew!

I felt that much of the discussion ended up centring around whether AI is evil or not and what we should do about it, whereas I’m also interested in all the other evil that tech bros are bringing us these days. I found myself feeling much as I do around people who don’t eat meat or use any animal products. I know that they’re right, I know that I should at least eat less, both for my own health and for y’know, the planet. But it’s more than I’ve been able to do so far. I also felt a bit like I was at a CND meeting in 1981 – the rhetoric, campaigning style and general view of activism just felt a bit old-fashioned.

Still, it was stimulating and fun to have a day out.

I’m getting back to work, but for that to be really true, I really need to be blogging regularly. So here we go.

Someone asked me the other day, what I’d do differently if we got to have a Centre for Creative Collaboration again. The question’s been rolling round in me ever since.

My simple/simplistic answer is that I’d bring an Open Space frame to the new space that we found ourselves in – I’d want to start every day with a circle and check-in and keep a wall with the current issues pinned up all the time. We (whoever was there) would take that time to reconnect to whatever we’d done the previous day and decide together what we were going to do. We talked a lot in 2010 about C4CC being an ongoing unconference, but that was more of an organising metaphor than a set of practices that we used every day.

Speaking of which, here’s David Wilcox’s clip with me at UKGovCamp in January 2010 soon after my appointment had been announced.

I remember that feeling of liberation that came from not just using the term Social Artist to describe myself, but to have it as a “job title” conferred by someone else (thanks Brian!)

I’ve got used now to summing it up for people as “making beautiful things out of people (pause for chuckle)” but back then we were still working out what it meant and how to talk about it.

It’s also good to remember that it’s a convenient shorthand now to say that I helped run the Centre, but I was doing something slightly different from the rest of the team and if someone wanted a new Centre, I would want to be there in a similar role. Or put another way, I might talk about wanting to recreate C4CC, but actually what I’m after is another long-term residency, working closely with a leadership team.

And as with any other Open Space, the big work up front is in crafting an invitation and working out how to get it under the noses of people who might turn out to be the right people.

To be clear, nobody is actually asking this right now, I’m just getting clear on what I think so that when the time comes (how could it not?) I’m more ready and able to talk fairly coherently rather than looking startled and burbling.

The online versions of Living Culture Coffee Mornings are going great. It’s a really useful beat in the week for me. It would be lovely to see you in a small Zoom window on my computer this Friday!

Last week we did it face to face and the conversations are growing nicely, the snacks are always varied and quite fancy (it’s London innit) and new people often read the invitation fully and bring stuff along that they feel make the space more convivial – Catriona brought bunting… with tassels!

I got to hang out briefly with some people from eurosky on Monday – they’re a project coming out of the thing that started life as Free our Feeds. I’m still not sure what I think about the fractured mess of feeds that all say they’re not competing (ATProto/ActivityPub/RSS I guess) but who do kinda seem to want to win. I think RSS is easy to see as being a building block of the web, I can publish RSS, I can read it and I don’t need an account or a special server to do so – in contrast with the others that have more of a one-way feel and are really clunky to switch between. See this is why I need to write more, because my thinking is really fuzzy.

But because I’ve been poking into ATProto stuff a bit more I came across Leaflet which, as Richard MacManus says, feels refreshingly like a 2003-era blogging community.

I have a big backlog of links that I’ve saved to raindrop.io – I feel like I should be linkblogging these immediately rather than putting them in a big bag for chewing on later (but I don’t know whether I want to do that here necessarily). I do still have a tumblr, I suppose…

An old-fashioned podcast in the “voicemail while walking to the station” tradition.

For those not aware, young people, on their Easter holidays from school, have been getting together in an unorganised way, that is to say, not for any reason that is legible to people over about 25 (unless those people do a tiny bit of work to summon up what life was really like when they were 15).

What are we going to do about the aged and befuddled who’ve lost touch with their memories of youth? By an aged and befuddled person. PS. Because we live in the future, this post was brought to you by an old git on his iPhone, so it might not all work as intended. But I marvel at the speed with which I can make this shit and press publish by the time the train is stopping at Woking!

Two insights into how agent-assisted work feels in my feeds this week:

Matt Jones writing in the frame of how the new technology is affecting our relationship to time (as new tech always seems to have done). I don’t know whether I’m rationalising this after the fact (probably) but I did feel a little unease while reading this, which I think I put down at the time to envy of anyone who can pull multiple ideas and sources together into a longish piece like this. The Colophon at the end was something of a relief, knowing that perhaps I’d heard a familiar voice mixed in with Matt’s, the voice of Claude. But it’s a weird mixture – not entirely Jones (I’ve been reading him for 20 years or more) but also not entirely chat-bot.

and then Jay Springett on his current process:

The work now is to mostly select from the surplus, exercise ones taste, and decide what can be left out. It’s in this sense that writing becomes a process of reduction. To use a metaphor from the kitchen, it’s like making a roux or vegetable stock.

Both seem to me to be pointing to a way of working that’s like having an indefatigable, bright research assistant who gets your way of thinking and expressing yourself, providing a much better first draft than you might expect. And as with taking on a real-life assistant like that, your work shifts to being able to express your intentions clearly, point the kid in the right directions and then polish up/reduce down what they come back to you with.

We’ve been having coffee (and often cake and biscuits) on the first Friday of every month at Essex Hall under the heading of “Living Culture Coffee Mornings” for just over a year now. It works brilliantly for some people, not so well for others. And, of course, there are people born every day who haven’t even heard of it.

We’re going to keep doing them in person on the first Friday, but I will also open up some space for the conversation online so that we can include people who can’t necessarily make it to London (specifically WC2) for a couple of hours.

The online version will be on Zoom at the same time – 10am till midday on all the other Fridays except the first… maybe. There won’t be a hybrid one on First Fridays – hybrid just doesn’t work for this kind of conversation – but if we find there are people who come every week online, and there’s someone who can hold the space then that can go on at the same time as the in-person one.

The main differentiator between this and all the other bazillion coffee mornings I’ve tried to use as a tool for transforming ourselves and society at large is that we start by reading some questions that Dougald wrote for his online course about Regrowing A Living Culture.

What does it mean to speak about a living culture?

What does doing this say about the ways of living that most of us grew up taking for granted around here lately?

What are the first moves of regrowing? The simple practices that we can start with in the places we find ourselves in now?

What are the daring moves that might be called for? The places it might just be possible to intervene within the big systems of the world, as we have known it, to help create the conditions of possibility for presently unimaginable futures?

How do we find each other and stay sane and face the depth of the trouble the world is in without letting that just paralyze us?

They’re meant to set the scene, you don’t have to come with specific answers to these pacific questions. There is no homework.

There are announcements at 11am (unless I forget)

So this isn’t exactly the freewheelin’ online Tuttle that we did during lockdown. Or maybe it is and I don’t know shit. I want it to be different though. The in-person mornings have been different. I think they all probably need a bit of you in the mix. Sign up on Luma to get the Zoom details.

A wordpress.com notification that the site I made 16 years ago has finally made 100 views.

Actually that’s not quite accurate, this is the wordpress.com version of the site that I made to house the posterous archive after that went kaput.

So this is a) newer than 16 years; and b) not really a site that I’d expect anyone to look at, certainly not a measure of how interesting the project was or y’know, my value as a human being.

Made me go “unf!” all the same though.

We’ve had the Gregorian version, the Lunar version, the meteorological first day of spring and in a couple of weeks we’ll have the astrological reboot at the equinox. But I haven’t written here (or very much anywhere else) since December 3rd 2025. That’s not a particularly long hiatus as this blog goes, but I feel in a very different space, a different world, a different me (or at least a rebooted me).

I’m a dad. I don’t just mean that in the sense that I’ve recently acquired a new offspring, although that’s true. What the last three months have helped me see is how the role is integral to my sense of self. I feel much more me now we’ve got a baby. Weird. More to say about this, I’m sure. But also, regarding the FAQs – he’s lovely, very chilled except when he isn’t, yes we’re knackered, but it’s getting better and we’re lucky that neither of us are obliged to jump back into “work” immediately – the fourth trimester is a thing and I’m hugely grateful to have been able to make up my own rules about paternity leave.

I’m not a fan of war. At all. Being a dad again hasn’t changed that. I’m especially not a fan of wars that trample on the 80-year-old UN Charter. And I think it’s despicable to attack any country when the majority of it’s population are observing a religious festival. I’m aware that neither of these are unique to the present ugliness. Just ugh!

The cliché worry is “what are we doing bringing a child into a world like this?” Well, my first time around, the Soviet Union was collapsing and the IRA was regularly bombing mainland Britain. I was born the year after the Cuban missile crisis. My parents were born either side of World War II. My grandparents were babies and children during World War I. So I guess the answer is “What are we supposed to do? Wait until it all gets better?”

In the meantime I’m enjoying Russell’s current video output. It’s very varied and equally good when he’s chatting with others as well as when talking to camera. Something to aspire to.

I especially liked (re)hearing this story about missions and goals.

Which reminds me, Interesting 2026 is on May 20th at Conway Hall (natch) – I don’t think I’ll be able to go, evenings out aren’t really a thing at the moment. But you should.

I’ve got something to tell you. It’ll probably be a surprise, but I think it’s a good surprise…

That’s pretty much the line I used when I broke the news to the rest of my family, a few months ago, that I’m going to be a dad again.

Yeah.

So anyway, we’re now into week 38 and so that means the answer to the most frequently asked question is: “any day now, but next Friday, 12th at the latest”.

I know.

I’ve found it quite difficult to know when to make an announcement here. I put it on Facebook to friends only a couple of weeks ago. But last time I did this was 1993 so I’m not really up to date with the etiquette. And now I just want to avoid turning up here at Christmas saying “so this thing happened”!

We’re very happy and excited. I’d get a strong wife punch if I said it had been plain-sailing from the start, but all is going really well.

Excuse me, while I put this crib together…

Write the date at the top of the page and then get on with the day.

Because I’m playing with feed readers, I subscribed to the Flickr feed for photos tagged with my name. I thought I’d just subscribed to my photos, but I think I was also subscribed to new tags already. Anyway. A weird thing happens where I periodically get notifications of a few newly tagged photos, and sometimes I’m surprised to see that they’ve only just been tagged, because they are in a set with others that are all tagged too. And I don’t think I have a way of checking whether it’s real (ie someone is actually paying attention to other people’s photos enough to be tagging me – which seems unlikely) or a “feature” of how Flickr construct the feed.

Here’s an example:

(“putting the camp into GovCamp since 2012”)

PS I know I’m not the only Lloyd Davis in the world… as evidenced by my gmail.

It’s hard work being me, you know.

Blogging on the train like it’s 2008.

One of my favourite AA sayings is something like “people don’t fail at this programme because they’re too stupid, but some do fail because they’re too clever!”

I find this “game of life” to be like that, whatever you’re playing at right now and whether it feels like it’s finite or one of those infinite ones. I think that lately, I mistook one particular infinite game I’ve been playing as finite. But then I’ve been drawn to say that there are no finite games, but you don’t learn that until one game you thought was finite comes to an end and here you are starting another one whether you like it or not.

I’m on my way in for another Coffee Morning. Whoever comes are the right people… etc. Last month we heard at the beginning that they’d appointed Sarah Mullally to be Archbishop of Canterbury. This week Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral election in NYC. So a pattern is kind of emerging

In his newsletter Dave points to Duncan Brown talking about bookings as an example of what he calls “design by cliché”. It’s an interesting idea, but in the case of bookings, I don’t think that being a ‘cliché’ is the problem.

It’s more that the reason all these things are called bookings is that once upon a time, the record of the thing it’s describing went into a book, an actual book – it might have been called a ledger or a diary or something, but it’s a description of a technology being used rather than the thing itself. And that’s why trying to treat all bookings as if they were the same is as meaningless now as saying “I need to make a computering”. If anyone needs an old man shouting at clouds, I’m available.

There’s a lot of cruft in that link to Dave’s newsletter above, which may or may not be tracking you or me in some way, but I didn’t have the patience to work out which bits I could cut out.

My dear departed pal from New Orleans, Ray Nichols, did an interesting thing when he retired. He would describe his voluntary work as ‘interning’. So basically he’d appoint himself as intern with an organisation or collective (it didn’t matter what) as a kind of joke, but also pointing to the fact that he wanted to keep on learning and stay slightly humble. I’m not retiring, but I’m attracted to being a self-appointed intern in a number of contexts, making tea, helping out, observing and learning, but also sharing stuff that I know but that you wouldn’t necessarily fully employ me for. As Ray would have undoubtedly remarked, “Just Sayin’!”

I also think of LLM chatbots as fast, eager-to-please interns that you can mercilessly exploit without the usual consequences, but who might also make catastrophic errors if you give them too much agency.

Poor old interns.

I heard someone on a call the other day saying “I’ve just heard of this thing called Personal Knowledge Management or PKM” which reminded me that:

“Every day somebody’s born who’s never seen the Flintstones“

But seriously, it got me digging into when I first mentioned PKM on this blog. And of course it was the very first post in September 2004 and then a couple of months later I went over to Amsterdam for KM Europe and took part in a PKM workshop hosted by Knowledge Board (so Ed Mitchell?) in a kind of open space form where I called a session on “trust vs suspicion, faith vs fear…aaaagh the feelings…” which definitely sounds like the sort of thing I would still do.

Ton Zijlstra was also there and he’s been one of my anchors for PKM thinking ever since, as well as being one of the stalwart bloggers who’ve kept my RSS reader alight through the quiet years (Thanks Ton!) and his post from the end of last year explaining how PKM is personal along three dimensions will form the basis of my response to my friends on that call, who are just embarking on the journey.

I don’t think I mentioned it here, but last week I completed the Couch to 5K programme again. The goal is to be able to run for 30 mins or 5k three times a week and that’s what I did (30 mins but not quite 5k – I’ve never managed a 30 min 5k yet). My plan from here is to keep building on that to get back to feeling comfortable running 5k again, no matter how slowly. Today I did 3.6k and I’ll do that another two times in the next 7 days and then see whether I can stretch up to 4k.

It feels great to have re-established this rhythm. When I first did it 7 years ago, it was straightforward for me to run every other day. With the passing of time (and some accumulation of mass, especially on my waistline) just having one rest day between runs is pushing it. Having two is ideal, I think, but three runs too much of a risk that I’ll fall out of the habit – three days off followed by a cold winter morning with torrential rain would too easily stretch to four and then…

I was encouraged though when I looked up how average pace declines with age, it’s not just that I’ve gotten out of shape, I’m also a few years older. But it would be nice to be nearer the average pace for my age than I am at the moment.

I went down to Weymouth for a couple of days this week to see my mum. On Tuesday we drove over to Lulworth Cove for a coffee, picnic lunch on the beach and an ice cream.

The first time (maybe) we went there was Easter 1973. It was quieter than Autumn half-term 2025, the parking wasn’t as expensive (or managed via CCTV) there was a little less erosion and there were fewer ice-cream sellers. But we did have a picnic on the beach.

It seems that seventeen years ago today, I was in Berlin at the Web 2.0 Expo.

Andrea Vascellari got some video of me asking Tim O’Reilly a question about online/offline relationships. In retrospect, there’s a lot of naivety and privilege in the air.

I noted:

the stories we’re telling are still more about technology than about what people are doing with other people.

plus ça change…

We watched Paradise and kinda wished we hadn’t. It’s a less hopeful picture of the near future and how we’d deal with an apocalyptic event than you’d usually expect on mainstream TV. I want my apocalyptic tales to end with a less realistic, but rousing affirmation of the strength of humans to stick together please. I’m holding out for season 2 to deliver, but won’t be surprised if it doesn’t.

I spent a couple of summers in the early eighties selling ice cream, chatting up the odd grockle and looking out over the sea to Portland.

The other stream that I take to when I need to calm down a bit is NASA’s HD Views from the International Space Station

Recent conversations about “the media”, reboots and regrowing cultures have had me looking back to the good old days of 2006 when I disclosed the contents of my “one-person media empire” bag and David Wilcox was starting to talk about “Social Reporting” – (btw the first link in that piece goes to one of David’s typepad sites, but “Thank Brewster!” it was captured by the Wayback Machine.)

In those days it appears it was all about the kit. The first iPhone was just around the corner. And now I carry all of that stuff and the software to edit and publish it around in my pocket every day. And so do you, probably. Utopian 2006 me would have imagined only a blossoming of enlightened civil society as a result. Silly Utopian 2006 me.

Something else happened in 2006 that seemed to offer hope for said blossoming and enlightenment. But the way it turned out makes that hope look appallingly naive. Twitter.

In that December I said:

If it’s quiet on this blog of late, the partial explanation is twitter.

It’s kinda diverting the energy that usually goes into blogging. It is a temporary diversion as I’ve also got some big posts to get out too, but they might come slowly over the festive season.

Dear reader, that “temporary diversion” ended up lasting another 10, 15, 20? years and one might argue that it actually broke what we were doing altogether. It takes practice and willpower to get back into writing in anything more than 140 character chunks (not solved when the limit got stretched to 280) especially when other parts of the ecosystem are working against you.

Dave Winer was pointing out how stuck we were with this stuff in 2014

Twitter says our posts don’t have titles, and can’t be longer than 140 chars. And Google Reader said our posts had to have titles, and could be unlimited in length.

This is why my world is fractured, and so is yours.

Now, I got a lot of good things done with a combo of Twitter (and Facebook/Instagram) and blogging in the intervening years – it wasn’t all gloomy. And I have friends who make a living now from people who pay them to write e-mails (and have Substack deal with the distribution details and some of the marketing. Oh and the payment processing) or make little films and let YouTube pass on some of their ad revenue.

You don’t have to be a wild conspiracy theorist or some sort of nostalgic Web 2.0 obsessive to recognise that giving that much power over your work to a third party owned by billionaires carries significant risk, especially given the way such billionaires have behaved in the past. But most people, me included, don’t then get farther than “Well, whatcha gonna do?”

I don’t have the whole answer yet, but I’m picking away at it here. I inwardly groan when my morning inbox is full of messages from group mailing lists that belong on a linkblog. Or I have to download an interesting-looking article from a friend on a WhatsApp group because it’s behind a paywall or some other barrier to reading it on the web.

Why is this? Why can’t I just accept that the media ecosystem is fractured and that I have to treat this kind of information in one way and that kind of information in another way, because that’s just the way it is.

You can’t expect the world to just organise itself according to your whims, Lloyd!

Well yes, partly it is my own idiosyncratic ways of organising my work and thinking and how I think about information and knowledge. But it’s also the understanding of why these tools get organised in such a way as to enable the exploitation of our collective labour by people who already have more money and power than they know what to do with.

I’m not making generic recommendations for the whole world. I’m thinking here in particular about some small-ish groups I’m in, that could imho accelerate and improve the thinking and activity and effectiveness of the group, if there weren’t these strangers in the room, intermediating between us as friends, and taking their cut at the same time, the owners and managers of these platforms.

I'm taking part in a reading group for "Hospicing Modernity" with a particular focus on how the messages in that book might apply to churches and spiritual community.

We're gathering once a month and the meetings are confidential (I don't think we've even agreed on using the Chatham House rule) but I'm only going to share some of the things that came up for me, both in my prep (I'm medicated, I can now do prep! I read the chapter before the meeting!) and in the course of the gently- and gracefully-facilitated (by Liz Slade and Al Barrett) session.

I'd already tried reading this book a couple of times and then I also tried listening to the audiobook. I've never got very far before. So I'm grateful to have this group as an excuse to make perseverance more of a priority. It's not just me, it is a difficult and challenging book, in the same way that I found my first reading of "Alcoholics Anonymous" difficult and challenging.

The subtitle is:

"Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism"

Yikes!

and the publisher's bibliographical summary reads:

"A discussion on how we must face the multiple crises of modernity, interrupt and retire damaging modern behavior patterns, and reimagine how we learn, unlearn, and respond to crisis"

It's a lot.

I will need more than one post to cover what went through me yesterday. I had the familiar feeling of having my inner world rearranged both by reading and discussing with others. I dreamed weird dreams afterwards.

The first part (which we've covered in the first couple of sessions, while also gingerly getting to know each other) is about sixty pages and it lays the preparatory foundations for the rest. It begins with a discussion of what, or rather, WHO "modernity" is and then invites you to "to witness and offer palliative care to modernity dying within and around you".

We focused yesterday on the third and final bit of "prep work" which clarified for me that this is about cleaning house (mostly within, but also without!). One of the creative tensions that I expect to return to throughout is between the processes presented here of internal decluttering and composting and the processes that I'm familiar with from my step work in taking inventory, dropping the rock(s) and making amends. I'm fairly sure from what I've seen already that they'll be complementary.

Without knowing the content, just before I sat down to read, I'd followed an urge to tidy my desk (if not the rest of the room around me). And then had to laugh at myself reading in the second paragraph: "Since modernity’s logic is one of accumulation, it conditions us to hoard stuff (both literally and metaphorically), thinking it might one day be relevant."

Oof! Is that what all this is? An unconscious hoarding of stuff? Certainly, if I were able to change my thinking about it's one-day-maybe relevance then I would walk away immediately. I can imagine the lightness of doing so. Immediately crushed by the grief and loss that I imagine would follow. And I'm not the worst at this kind of thing. I've done some work. I've let go of a lot. But there are things that follow me around, that haven't really been touched yet.

A lot of my physical stuff is important to me either because it's about me in the past or because it carries some feeling or meaning about people who aren't here any more. When my dad died, you may remember, I wrote about the need I felt to gather up the things that might otherwise have disappeared with him. Was that just modernity? A trick, to distract myself from what's really going on in the world or the pain of losing someone so close? Maybe also the pain of being me (don't worry, I don't expect that it's any worse than the pain of being you!) and the difficulty of recovering from whatever shit went on in the past that wasn't possible to solve there and then.

I was very grateful, for example, to find my old school reports in my dad's stash, the contents of them really helped me understand and have a bit more compassion for the guy I've always been. When I shared about that at the time, there were people around me who said "Now burn them!" but I wasn't ready to and I'm still not. There's another stage in the process between where I am and "that's all gone" and I think it's something to do with transmuting, or in the language of this book, composting all these things that aren't needed in their current form, but which hold something precious that can support another cycle of life.

I've had an ongoing fantasy project that never gets anywhere. You know, a bit beyond "someday/maybe". A bit more like "when I've really got my shit together and am a much better, more enlightened and free person and don't have to sit around writing stupid e-mails and that". And it's about taking all of the books, tapes, records, pictures, files and shit and creating new things out of the precious emotional parts of them, new things that carry the essence of me and my ancestors for my descendants where it's useful, so that the non-precious physical parts of them can be reused or recycled.

I came away from last night's session with a little more hope that regardless of how unenlightened I feel, I might have permission to do more of that kind of thing now.

I'm glad to see that at least Dave B is reading this nonsense. I didn't get a pingback, though Dave, I saw it because I read your post via RSS. Is that deliberate? I don't remember how these things work. Maybe it's an artefact of the way your microposts are aggregated?

Anyway.

I agree with the thing about reading and writing in the same place – I want it to be my (the writer's) place, not yet another centralising force who one day might be tempted to wall it all off. Having a reader built in to the blogging tool was one of the features that I really liked in Radio Userland, back in the brief period that I used it. I actually used it more for reading than writing due to my well-known shyness about talking in public…

The use cases I'm thinking of at the moment are for groups to blog and learn together. So a collected feed from all the people in the group (although a curated set of feeds from outside would be a useful thing too).

I just tried to find my old Userland blog, but instead, Google just threw up this to distract me. Somehow, in 2010, I was invited to take part in a couple of editions of BBC Radio 5 live's "On The Money" with Declan Curry. My brief was to answer listener's questions on how to use social networking in business. It was fun. I got to sit in the Today studio then at TVC. Many of the questions were basically "how do I use this magic social media thing to do magic and make my business really successful, tomorrow?" and I suspect my answers about there being no magic other than persistence and patience was what led to me not being asked back more than once.

I just sat for five minutes waiting for a call to start that isn't scheduled for another hour. That's the kind of me I've woken up with today! Happity Friday!

Still pondering and burbling about rebooting/regrowing and this thing that to some is a living culture, to some is a media ecosystem, and to others is a learning journal/community. It's the thing that we used to call "the blogosphere" but that name doesn't really cut it with anyone now who wasn't part of it (or an observer) twenty years ago. It's about owning your own alternative to facebook/instagram/substack/X etc without having to be a total nerd. I mean, you don't have to be a total computing nerd, you can still (and should still) be whatever other type of nerd you are. That's the point, this is about enabling all the kinds of nerds to nerd out about their thing, connect to likeminded nerds all over the world and maybe every now and then bump into other nerd gangs… or something (too many nerds! – Ed).

It's for people who have something to say and would like to be able to say it in public, but without being bitterly criticised by strangers on the internet and without worrying that the platform they're building community around is suddenly going to disappear or worse – the "worse" scenarios include what Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification" but also the platform being captured by fascists, trolls or others who want to shut down open democratic thought and debate. PS enshittification can happen to pretty much any customer relationship you have these days, I don't think anything is a fix-all solution, but reducing reliance on commercial entities is a good way of mitigating the risk.

I also think that an undesirable effect of the way we've done social stuff on the web for the last while, is increased individualism and a decrease in mutuality – maybe it's just me, but I think it reflects the ongoing trend of isolation, which I hope is starting to turn. Citations needed galore, but don't you think we're starting to get together in new (to us, not necessarily totally novel) ways?

I also think it's connected to the downturn in linking. Some platforms make it hard to do, others encourage a feeling that if you send people away, you'll never get them back and the idea that that's a really important thing to avoid.

We are inspired both by the Buckminster Fuller idea that "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete" and the principle of plurality, which I heard best articulated by Audrey Tang in Taiwan talking about "demonstrations", a word we associate with activists out on the street, but which she uses to mean "showing people another way in which things can be done".

Our solutions will be open and interoperable. The best and simplest way to make interop work is RSS (yes it's still there, kids!). I can pull together in one place all the things that y'all make that emit an RSS feed. I can't do that if you use something that doesn't.

What does? Yes, traditional blogs of whatever flavour you've got – I use wordpress.com, how quaint! – but ghost is popular, blogger still exists, squarespace blogs are a thing – your public posts on substack too. But also your youtube channel for video, flickr for photos and mastodon & bluesky for microblogging (what we used to call tweeting).

If you've got a group, where everyone is making some kind of media in at least one of those forms, and you pull all of the outputs together, it makes for a strong bonding experince between members. The best bit, is when they start referring to each other and building on ideas together – especially if this is a group that also gets together in real life.

Oh god! the cleaners are here! Hide!

I realised today that there's a lot of overlap between "Rebooting the Blogosphere" and "Regrowing a Living Culture". The Coffee Mornings that I'm doing at the moment have that latter tag line and the question is coming up for me of how to regrow living culture online as well as off. As a very bare minimum, we have a shared google doc that people can put things in that come up in the Announcements slot at 11:00 – it's OK, especially for that group at this stage in it's development but I'm yearning for more.

I've spent today thinking about it in this frame: "If we were going to set up a kind of C4CC again, now, a space that was an intellectual and physical home to a number of groups and small organisations, how would we capture, nurture and nourish the knowledge creation activities of that network of people?"

In 2010, most of us were on Twitter, Facebook was going through an explosive growth spurt and although they were starting to tinker with algorithmic feeds, you pretty much got the latest posts from friends in reverse chronological order, Google Reader dominated the news and blogs via RSS ecosystem, Foursquare let you check-in to locations if you wanted to be found IRL. The blogging folk at C4CC had taken a mis-step, but we didn't know it yet – we relied a lot on posterous which allowed creation of posts by e-mail (including attachments). Not only was that useful for those of us who wanted to be able to post from anywhere, but it also made collaborative blogging easier. I made one for people to submit and write about their "most interesting" flickr photos for example. That link of course is to a salvaged version rebuilt on wordpress.com because posterous was bought up by Twitter in 2012 and closed down (with fairly clunky export facilities) the following year.

Now, in 2025, Twitter is unusable for lots of people and there is no single place where that form of microblogging mixed with conversation still goes on. Facebook continued along the feed manipulation path to satisfy its advertisers, Google Reader got snuffed out, flickr remains for now, Foursquare is Swarm, but it feels now like an underground game for people who can't let it go.

With all these changes, we now find ourselves in a place where it's hard to trust any big tech platform with something as precious as your own thinking. But I think if we can get back to "small pieces loosely joined" and take responsibility for the ownership and stewardship of our data, there are opportunities for us to regrow what we had. And the appetite is still there. Often I come across it in people who didn't really get into this fifteen years ago, either because it was the wrong kind of nerdy for them, or because they were only ten years old then.

I made some notes on the things I thought were important for trying to do this in 2025:

Everyone should have a place to publish that feels easy, and doable, and low-stakes. This is about reducing the barriers to publication – a newsletter or a blog (as most people understand it) feels like too much, like there are established formats that you have to stick to. Totally open microblogging either feels at risk from trolls/abuse or pointless because of the overhead of finding your people/having them find you. So I'm thinking of something where you can choose your own policy on openness and commenting. What if the collaboarition platform you're using now (Slack/Basecamp whatever) were open by default, but you could mark some things as private?

An RSS aggregator that does more than aggregate – by adding functionality to search & filter but also repost/link/reply (all subject to individual policies) it becomes a common knowledge store – it needs to not be Facebook! Whatever small pieces you put together, they need to be interoperable and RSS is still a great way to do that (and it isn't owned by anyone). I think that it's possible that the rise of the newsletter format has to do with the familiar functionality of email and that it feels like your own space.

People might just want a linkblog. A place to just share something you've seen somewhere, with minimal commentary – a lot of email groups I'm in end up with most of the traffic being this. As a group activity, it might become like del.icio.us – aggregated across the group with tagging. An extension of this is a reading list (of people/orgs outside the group) or externally facing blogroll.

Rich records of gatherings whether they're in-person or online. This is about bringing the discipline of minute-taking and sharing recordings/transcripts (with permission) to the things we do together. Ideally, decentralised to all members of the group. What's the minimum expectation of someone attending a gathering – what norms do we want to establish about sharing back afterwards?

Some hierarchy is useful. So each group has it's own group blog/aggregator, but aggregation is also possible at a higher/more general level. If I am just on the edge of this network, I don't have to pick through everything else to find the things that are relevant to me, but I can see (and contribute to) the bigger pictures if I want to. This raises questions of autonomy and the principle of subsidiarity.

Writing is not the only fruit. It's important that learning can be shared through audio-visual media by those who find that more accessible.

Lo-fi is OK. This is part of lowering the stakes. If you're walking away from a meeting and making a voice-memo for yourself to remember the things that struck you, or If you've just sent someone a voice message and you realise that what you said might be useful to others (and doesn't breach privacy or confidentiality) then you should be able to post it as a podcast. Audioblogging and Videoblogging are still a thing! And transcription has improved greatly.

The overall purpose is to facilitate the growth of a web of knowledge (and thereby enriching connections between people) both by adding new content and adding links between existing content. Sometimes you'll want to turn your list of links into an essay, sometimes you just want to say ooh, I saw this and it made me also thing of that.

There should be a way of capturing some of the value of all this in commercial products, the income from which should then be shared in an equitable way between the various contributors (including the network as a whole).

This is a bit of a jumble. I know there's a better way, or order, to organise these ideas in, but for today, my brain is tired.

I was just introduced to this use of the word 'palaver' to mean (in Africa) a way of bringing together a local community to creating social links and sometimes for conflict resolution. The notable characteristic of it being a meeting where everyone has a voice but is not obliged to tie their contribution up neatly with references to all of the other speakers. It starts out as the Portuguese for 'words' or 'speaking', gets attached to this, presumably traditional, way of holding town or village meetings, and then, with a classic colonial twist, comes back to Europe with the meaning of pointless talk that goes on without hope of resolution. We look at a process that works and can't see beyond what we would call the inefficiency or lack of sufficient intellectual rigour and so it passes into common usage as a derogatory exclamation – "What a palaver!"

I think the reason it caught my attention is that this reflects my attitude to my own blogging – I'm happy that it's rare for me to write something that is structured as anything more than a note, maybe a bunch of ideas that hold together but not necessarily with any explicit explanation. Every now and then you might see something that looks more like an essay, but regardless, my own internal community nods and accepts that what's been said today is relevant and of value, even if it's not immediately obvious, or if it is actually totally obvious and doesn't need explaining or pulling out in this way over and over again. It's OK, it's a palaver, and that's a good thing.

"If these spaces are important to extremists, shouldn’t they be important to you?" – Dan Slee's long read on what public sector people need to know about Facebook groups. It's a clear and useful read for anyone who's not in the public sector too.

Have I posted a link to Leave Substack lately? I'm still working out how and whether I want to participate in the getting people to pay you to email them business and how to offer that to the people who've signed up to me in Substack on the basis of recommendations from others (nice problem to have!)

Spent the day yesterday talking and thinking about shame, especially in the context of activism. It was a lot. I was grateful for the opportunity to sit quietly and do something with my hands for part of the session instead of being in constant conversation. My headlines were – everyone's carrying an awful lot of stuff, all the time, no wonder there's so much rage and conflict – most of that stuff is the same as everyone else's, but it's hard to feel safe sharing it – and it can be hard to accept that other people really are carrying the same stuff as you, surely my stuff is unique!

We did an exercise where everyone wrote something they were ashamed of on a piece of paper, folded it up in the same way and put it in a box, then we each pulled one out and read it out loud. So there was a small chance that you'd read you're own out, or something very similar, but mostly you'd be reading something from someone else. I found it interesting that many people put more than one shame into the box because we almost went round the circle twice. Anyway it felt good to witness everyone else's feelings and to hear them coming out of your own mouth. It's tempting to think "I don't have that one!" but when you hear it in your voice, perhaps you do, just a little bit less than you thought, maybe.

Just saw an invitation to an Open Space “How do we protect and strengthen democracy in Europe?” My mind went immediately to how to protect democracy from those who will use elected office to make sure that democracy isn’t available any more. It’s not a simple thing. And that’s what makes it a good question for Open Space – these things need talking through, with a load of different people, to get to understand all of it, rather than it just being my point of view. I mean, I know (in this instance) that I’m not wrong, but how we make things safer (here in the UK it’s pretty urgent) with the current state of public discourse isn’t clear.

This is all I managed on the train to Hard Art. Despite what I imagine when I'm walking to the train station, experience shows that I'm not going to do much proper writing in the forty minutes to Waterloo.

Another Coffee Morning today. So much in it. I'd love to write a report, but it's all still whirring around in my head. The first woman to become Archbish of Canterblobs, recurrent references to Bob Dylan, yin and yang and the serenity prayer, substack isn't just problematic because of politics and them hassling you to do stuff but also lots more. I'm hoping others captured more.

The thing about having written at least something every day this week is that I remember that I can do whatever I want, without having to bow to an editor or even any audience, imagined or real. That includes publishing things that are a meandering ramble or just a half-baked idea – if I was treating it like a magazine or even a newsletter, I’d feel like I needed to have some consistent standard that I met – and I think that’s what puts other people off doing it when I suggest blogging to them, they think they’ve got to be good and coherent and the stuff they make has to be defensible by them (as well as thinking it’s going to be attacked). You get things over with people much better by demonstrating rather than explaining, so that’s where I’m going with it at the moment. Writing an unpolished paragraph or two, if that’s all I’ve got today, which is what I do have.

I’m not using it much, but a small step this week was resurrecting my presence on mastodon. I’m here now – @lloyddavis – this blog also has ActivityPub enabled so all posts are full-text published at the seemingly tortologous @perfectpath.co.uk@perfectpath.co.uk – I still don’t fully understand how it works, I’ve just flipped a switch, so I’m not sure why there’s a big gap in the timeline since October last year but, that’s not that important.

The two threads I pulled on a bit yesterday are of course intertwined – the hope has to be that writing in public using your own voice and out in the open (with caveats for personal safety) is the antidote to the kind of horror that’s taken over lots of public discourse.

I don’t have as much writing time today. I’ve still got lots to say, but I’ve got lunch with some old pals from GSA who I love dearly and wouldn’t miss it, but it carves out a chunk of my day and my attention. It takes time for me to get going and then I need more time to actually get these words down and in the right order. Part of rebooting this blog has to be more self-acceptance than I’ve had in the past. I’ve been lucky this week to have had a few days of being able to give almost full attention to thinking and writing – and that has to be tempered with days like this where there’s more thinking than writing, with the thinking not having to be so deep, although it’s always going on. It’s just a log. On the web. And some days the log contains evidence of much movement and others are less detailed. That there’s anything at all is good progress.

Also, Laura just came in with a bit of chocolate brownie from Gail’s that she’d been given in compensation for them not being able to fill an order. She wanted to share the angelic miracle – it felt like there was zero flour, all sugar and butter, but in a really good way. Like any angelic miracle, I suppose, it can’t be described in words, that’s what ineffable means, innit? But now my mind is racing much faster than my fingers can deliver!

I’ll be thinking about this “Rebooting the Blogosphere” idea for a while. Interesting that the provocation for this thinking is FB “exile” – it reminds me of the energy that gets released whenever a platform goes down or otherwise goes awry – the energy of “I’ve got to find an outlet for these impulses in me, and this platform provided that, and now I’m angry/frustrated by the options that are left”. The experience for Typepad users over the last month or so is another of these (compounded with the grief at the loss of all those old thoughts, ideas and experiences once captured and now maybe somewhere in the Wayback Machine… if you’re lucky….)

Some folk take that energy to the so-called “indieweb” – which is fine and works well for those whose temperament it suits. It’s always felt a bit to me like throwing the baby out with the bathwater (and then getting a new baby?) – or like “We don’t want to drive a Tesla, so we’re only going back to driving cars without electronics – don’t worry if you don’t have your own starting handle, I can 3D-print one for you…” I know that it’s not as extreme as that, but it’s hard to shake that prejudice, especially at the point where you’re feeling frustrated.

Steph talks about it being (or feeling) “easier” to hang out on The Socials. There must be some known cognitive bias here, like I feel it’s easier because I’m not actually taking into consideration all the things that I’ve lost – is that a hidden cost fallacy, mixed up with some loss aversion or what? Each app feels easier but none of them do all of the things I want to do and even if they did, each one also comes with a different audience or network and a set of very subjectively experienced social norms for how you should communicate with people there. That feels like having five phone providers and you have to choose which provider’s subscribers you want to talk to before you can say anything, or else hack together something that copies your messages to everywhere and disregards local social norms so you look (and feel) like a robot.

On top of all this, we’re living in a culture where we are encouraged to take the blame/responsibility for everything that goes wrong around us. It’s never the system’s fault, it’s ours. It’s not the idea that five people are somehow allowed to own and control the majority of the economy, it’s your own stupid mental health, so do your stupid mental health walk. And if one of our tools doesn’t work for you, well suck it up, everyone else is having a great time using it – do better or go away.

Today I learned that the Ray Noble/Al Bowlly version of this (the one you’ll know from “The Shining” or, I hear “Ready Player One”) was recorded in Abbey Road Studio 2 – just another amazing bit of musical energy in that space.

So about that hypothesis…

I said yesterday that “algorithmic feeds of the For You Page type become, over time, the same as anonymous feeds of the 4chan type.”

What am I trying to get at here? What is it about anonymous feeds that stands out for me? I think it’s the lack of consequences. You can say anything you want and get away with it. If you are called to account, the people doing it are anonymous themselves (at least if they’re on the same platform). And funnily enough, it seems that allowing people to leave their human identity at the door, ends up with people not treating others in that space as human either (let alone the “others” on the outside), but that doesn’t seem to matter, because everyone’s in the same boat. Yes, everything escalates quickly, and things that would be outrageous in a newspaper are commonplace – this is the troll culture that you catch glimpses of IRL from time to time, some of it requires that you get immersed in the culture, some of it is more obvious, but like all cult(ures) the experience of being an insider depends on there being outsiders who don’t understand all the layers of what you’re doing.

And, as an aging guy, doing OK (so far!) under capitalism, and with a socialist heart, I am definitely not an insider (or even a well-educated student) of 4chan, 8chan or whatever anon imageboard site the “cool (not cool) kids” are into right now. But as a once disaffected youth who hated the world, yeah, I can dig the vibe.

There have always been annoying, nihilistic kids like this, but it feels like it’s bled into more mainstream culture of late – the good news about the internet has been that you can find your people, the bad news is that any awful person in the world can also find their own awful people.

Stephanie Booth has written a really useful three-part series on "Rebooting The Blogosphere" (activities | interaction | integration) – check it out.

I identify with a lot of the reflections and ways of thinking about writing in public that Steph's pulled together. I also feel the enormity of it as a project – we've strayed so far from the times when this kind of writing was the norm – the kind of writing that Dave Winer describes as: "the unedited voice of a person" when asked to define blogging.

That perceived enormity doesn't matter though, because although there's lots for each of us to do, we know (with decades of experience) that this isn't so much a thing that any of us needs do alone, the process of rebooting the blogosphere is by definition a communal act. I'm grateful to Dave, Steph and anyone else who is keeping the flame alive.

Something is coming together for me in understanding some of what's happening with memes in the wider culture (like the St George's Flag phenomenon in the UK). It involves Doug Rushkoff's original concept of the media virus, Venkatesh Rao's Internet of Beefs and a hypothesis I'm feeling my way towards that algorithmic feeds of the For You Page type become, over time, the same as anonymous feeds of the 4chan type. These things together mean that we have a situation where bad actors can win no matter which side they choose, that most media we're exposed to contains an element of grift and that it feels like there is a lack of consequences for lying or misleading people. It's a jumble still, but writing it down like this helps a little.

Typepad dies today. I worked out that I only used it to experiment with video at the end of 2005, so I'm not scrabbling to make a proper archive, there's only enough to merit a screenshot :). The lesblogs would have been the second one where we got a lecture in 'civility' from Mena Trott who co-founded Six Apart, the makers of Typepad. Videoegg, referenced in the post at the bottom of this picture, went on to buy Six Apart (keeping Typepad but selling off Movable Type).

I’d done a day’s work before breakfast this morning. Thanks Geena!

I have to apologise for the LinkedIn-esque final remarks, after a lifetime of thought-leadership and lessons-learned reviews, I just can’t help myself.

The fruits of my labourInvestigations continue, I may have to remove this post later subject to legal action by the accused and her lawyer.

The accused, earlier this week.

I have recurring frustration with the state of the web. I still have a utopian dream and attachment to people using open tools rather than the (semi-)closed platforms to publish their work and knowledge and thinking.

On one level, this is a purely selfish desire. I would rather have one place to go to see and interact with the bits of insta, FB, masto, bluesky, tiktok, youtube, substack, buttondown, patreon et al that I’m in some way “subscribed” to. And I’d like to be able to just put my stuff in one place and know that the people who want to see and interact with it can do so too.

But also, I have a number of communities or groups, of which I’m a member, that I believe could learn and grow together much better if we all had a view into each other’s worlds. This was one of the founding ideas of Tuttle – to see how productive it could get when you regularly brought a bunch of people to the same place in person who were used to creating stuff online together.

And I imagine that there are people who are still working like this, blogging regularly, having creative conversations in the fediverse and using all of that learning and knowledge-sharing to create new things, have new thoughts and find people to collaborate IRL.

But many of the people around me have walked away from writing in public – I have too, it’s hard to write this post without second guessing the responses. But to not write in public feels like a really sad resignation and failure. It feels like letting the bad guys win, and since a lot of bad guys seem to be winning quite often these days, I’m still tempted to believe that there’s a responsibility to put away the closed platforms and only do things that are on the web and controlled by me and to help the people in my communities to do the same.

Ugh, that was all a bit earnest…

My early morning viewing regularly includes the lates from the BBC Archive on YouTube.

This was today. The finished objects themselves are interesting enough, especially to know that they were in such widespread use even in 1974. But the real pull of it for me is these blokes in their workshop in Peckham, talking like South Londoners used to talk. With a craft that they’d gained mastery over throughout their working lives. I know I would go mad if all I had to do all day was make bits of wood, in shapes that I could stick together with glue and fix brass fittings to, but there’s also a romance to the simplicity of these machines and the simplicity of the lives of the men who made them.

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.

In bizarrely synchronistic news, I was reminded last night of the Librivox project, my first (and only) contribution to which, I published here twenty years ago tomorrow…

I came across it again because I was looking up Thoreau’s essay on Civil Disobedience (for, y’know, contemporary culture reasons). And the Wikipedia page references recordings on Librivox

I believe the Secret Agent project (and Librivox as a whole) was inspired by the AKMA-initiated collaborative reading of Lessig’s Free Culture – which happened in April 2004 just as conversations about podcasting were getting going.

At the time I recorded a chapter, podcasting was in full swing – we even had a conference here! I had achieved what little notoriety I ever would for making podcasts out of me talking to myself while walking around in London. I remember walking up and down the backstreets of Westminster trying to find a suitable location that was close enough to Scotland Yard to feel like it had some local colour. But it was too wet and windy even for my low production standards!

Speaking of production standards, there’s a very samizdat feel to those collaborative recordings that I think we’ve lost touch with in our need to make polished media for each other. Something about the content (yes the actual contents of the work) being more valuable than the presentation.

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.

Overheard in a medical setting:

“Have you brought a urine sample?”

“No, I couldn’t because I don’t have a wotsit”

me: eyes widening… and trying not to look at the receptionist

turns out that by “wotsit”, they meant “sample bottle”

20 years ago, podcasting felt like (and mostly was) a DIY movement. It was part of the fun to have to jump through all sorts of hurdles to get your stuff out there. It felt highly unlikely that more than a handful of people would ever hear it. That made the few who did hear it and who let you know that they’d heard it, feel close to you, whether they liked it or not.

Now I can put a short video on YouTube or TikTok and within a few hours see hundreds of “views” from people who I’ll never hear from again. And what I make is in some sort of weird competition with people selling products, ideas and ideologies.

All the talk in 2005 was about how to make production easier for creators and discovery easier for listeners. Discovery is still not great for longer-form content, but I can reach a lot more people than I ever could before, with way less effort.

Which just shows how meaningless “reach” can be. I’m not entirely convinced that we’re any better off now than we used to be. When a comment from someone on YouTube turns into a relationship where I end up sitting face to face with someone, grinning at the ridiculousness of it all, I might change my mind. Till then, keep on posting!

I was reminded today of the point in my life where I needed to sleep until I was ready to work and then work until I was ready to sleep. Few other calls on my time. I don’t miss it, but it worked for a while.

Pinch, punch, first of the month (no returns!)

I picked this up when I went to see the memorial to Nick at St Bride’s a couple of months ago. It has sat on my desk since then and this morning I thought I ought to at least try reading it properly.

I’m not going to try to convince or argue with anyone who is unable to read this because of the first and last lines. My own feeling is that I don’t think it really matters what you think the mechanics are, I do hold a wish that the will of those among us whose work it is to write what many read can be strengthened and pointed in the direction of the highest good for all. That such people (including me) might be bold in confronting evil and injustice. And that we might use our power with honesty and courage, respect and integrity so that I can face myself and my peers (and whatever might or might not come after this life).

The same unwillingness to convince or argue is a feature of the Living Culture Coffee Mornings (next one this Friday!) – they’re not for discussing angels and pinheads. Much more like whatever you do or don’t believe about how the universe works, what’s the best thing for us all to be doing that might help us get along better?

Yes, I’ve got something to say about flags. I’m not sure I’ve got it all straight in my head yet though.

Oof! This is the question that formed the basis of yesterday's "Unreasonable Connection". It's a lot more direct than I heard it in the room!

The breakout group that I was part of, talked mostly about running events and dealing with such events "not working" in some way – usually evidenced by the feeling that not enough people turn up. I believe, and said so, that there are loads of reasons why people don't come to an event at their coworking space, but that we, the community managers, (or whatever we're calling ourselves this week) usually make up that there are only two possible reasons – we chose the wrong subject or put it on at the wrong time.

My blog archive tells me that I've been failing to get people to come to things since at least March 2007 so I feel pretty expert in this!

The approach I've developed over the years has boiled down to "have no expectations" – that's what's working well (for me) at the Living Culture Coffee Mornings but also to have a theme, which distinguishes what you're doing from most other things people could be doing, while being loose enough to allow people to see themselves fitting in. That can take time and a few iterations, but it's good medicine for the "wrong subject" bit. When it comes to the "wrong time" all I have is that within the constraints of when you're open, every time is equally able to be wrong and right for everyone, so you have to choose the right time for you (with a little help from your friends) and stick to it unless and until you've been proved totally wrong.

So on occasions when I've been really focused on showing someone else that I'm actively persuading people to come along rather than accepting that "whoever comes are the right people", have I been killing real community? Does what I focus on really matter that much? I guess the thesis underneath that is that when you're doing something mostly for performative value (ie for the impression it makes on stakeholders rather than the value it adds to the network) then the network suffers.

I've been fond of saying that to add value to a network, you can either add new nodes or new connections, but also you can make existing connections richer and that enriching connections is the tricky bit. What makes interpersonal connections richer? It's not just finding out how people are the same as you, it can sometimes be finding out that people are different, or (more likely imho) how they're the same as you in some ways but different from you in some important other ways. At this point at C4CC, Brian would probably say something about homophily and propinquity and we'd all nod.

"Where am I going to put my attention when I actively build this community?", "how will I know I'm doing a good job?", "what will add value to this group of people?", "what reduces value among this group of people?" Those are questions that I prefer to dwell on.

Also, is there a "fake community" to distinguish this "real community" from? It feels to me like that's the spreadsheet version, or the "directory". It's a capture of the nodes in the network rather than the nature of the connections. And even if you manage to draw in some of the connections that you're aware of, these aren't all the connections there are, possibly by a really long way. Because there will be connections that none of the participants are aware of, that don't get revealed simply by getting people to further fill in a form about what they know, what they like or don't like, where they've worked before, what they can offer, what they need etc. And the problem is mistaking all that for the "real community", mistaking the data about the network for the messily human, complex system that it is. (extra credit for pattern matchers who ask "is there a 'dead culture' to distinguish this 'living culture' from?" – a common question in these parts)

Again, does this "kill real community"? Or is it no worse than a distraction, something that makes people (including you) feel better about the level of connection (and diversity) in the group and that it's at least kind of manageable when you've got some data and you can feel like you've done what you can. Or is it possible that the only way to get me to unpick this for myself is for Uncle Bernie to make up a provocatively-worded question? Empirically, it would seem so.

On Friday, it’ll be 34 years since I first became a father. It’s the role I’ve played most consistently (if not always brilliantly) in this lifetime. Since then that time of year that used to feel like “back to school” has felt more like “woah! wtf?! we made a person!”

I’ve done a lot of dadding, but I still feel like a noob. Last week we went to Frinton for a few days and Ewan joined us for a couple. We had good conversations over the breakfasts that I made for us. Cleared some things up, laughed at ourselves, got a bit more understanding. Walked down to the sea and paddled together. Like you do. Like we do.

This is my desk this morning. Yes it’s a mess, but it’s my mess and I love all the bits of it.

I’m finding it hard to disconnect from the rolling dopamine frenzy driven by social media algorithms. I bet nobody else ever feels like this (ha!) Even when I write here, I’m thinking, should I be putting this somewhere else? Should it be somewhere where it will get more engagement? So the work at the moment is to simply put one word after another, here in my own place, to practice detaching from who is reading or even who is just noticing that I’ve posted something – which is what I’m doing most of the time when I’m scrolling. It takes a lot for me to click through, but I think, “Oh, @friend47 has posted something, that’s nice”

That can’t be what all this typing is for. Just a mutual neurotransmitter depletion game.

I think though that I will resurrect my mastodon presence, not because I think masto is a great place to hang out, more that wordpress has good integration with it. You get to see the full text (unless it’s ridiculously long) rather than a link that you won’t click on unless I write a click-baity caption that will take as much time and effort as writing the actual post in the first place.

Dan has been appointed Writer in Residence on the Sittingbourne Steam Railway and has published his first piece.

One sentence – four links, that’s what the web gives you, my dears.

Thanks to the awesome Bernie Mitchell, I just went along to “Unreasonable Connection” billed as the “world’s smallest coworking event” – it’s a tightly-run (but relaxed) hour-long call with a bunch of people running spaces or building community or both. Interesting conversation about the things that we think we ought to do in a space and what actually works. I was in a break out with lovely people doing their coworking magic in London, Tunbridge Wells and Toronto. Thanks Bernie!

In the last couple of days, I’ve watched both Oppenheimer and Barbie (in that order). Over the weekend, I rewatched Stephen Poliakoff’s 1999 TV play ‘Shooting The Past’. So all in all, I’m feeling a bit emosh.

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.

What does it mean to gather around "regrowing a living culture"?

I've been using that phrase to talk about the monthly coffee mornings I'm doing in London and I thought it might be worth going back to where I picked the phrase up.

Late in 2023, my friends Dougald and Anna ran a course with that title as part of their "school called HOME" but the phrase had been rolling around in our interactions for a while before that.

Dougald explains some of the territory to be explored in this short video, from which I've taken the following questions. These are the kinds of things that I'm interested in sharing experience about when we get together on these Fridays.

What does it mean to speak about a living culture?
What does doing this say about the ways of living that most of us grew up taking for granted around here lately?
What are the first moves of regrowing? The simple practices that we can start with in the places we find ourselves in now?
What are the daring moves that might be called for? The places it might just be possible to intervene within the big systems of the world, as we have known it, to help create the conditions of possibility for presently unimaginable futures?
How do we find each other and stay sane and face the depth of the trouble the world is in without letting that just paralyze us

The next one is next Friday, June 6th. See you there, if you're near.

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.

We did it again on Friday morning. Sorry if you wanted to come but didn’t see a reminder.

It seems (to me) to be working, whatever it is and whatever it’s supposed to be for. I realised today for the first time explicitly that what I’m doing with the Friday “Living Culture Coffee Mornings” is most like calling an open space session to talk about “What are we doing to regrow a living culture?” And that my personal position is one of curiosity about that question and a willingness to engage in conversation about it, while doing it, rather than me thinking I have all the answers or that anyone else can come with all the answers. That’s always been true, and may have been obvious to everyone other than me, it’s just that I haven’t formulated it as explicitly as that before.

The things I remember talking about were secrets (in the sense of secret handshakes etc), wanting people to know that you exist but also wanting some level of exclusivity to avoid the bland, surface-level interaction of some open groups; the desire to be be part of a gang but not wanting to be part of any gang that would have me as a member; we touched on what happened recently when the Metropolitan Police broke into a Central London Quaker Meeting House and how outrage was felt and expressed by people who wouldn’t normally have any interest in places of worship; and how to do all of this in the context of a world where we’re all (potentially) connected online but recognise that connection online has its limits and that coming up against those limits is frustrating.

But there were six other people there, who will have different perspectives.

Related: a facebook post in the Open Space Technology group suggesting that this description of the making of “Another Green World” implies that Eno works in Open Space.

All this to say: it’s working, I’m finding out what I’m trying to do, we’ll do it again on Friday 6th June.

I was going to write something on Facebook, but Nick was a blogger and so this belongs here.

I heard this afternoon that my dear friend Nick Booth died yesterday after a fall at the weekend. It’s not right. It shouldn’t be like this. We ought to have been celebrating his 60th birthday next month. We should have continued to intermittently tramp around bits of South Birmingham together as we got older and older. We should have sat in odd cafés and nattered and sniggered and laughed our socks off at our respective ridiculousness.

Nick got me, in a way that few people truly do. Maybe it was being Brummie boys of a certain age. Maybe it was our shared love of seeing people do things for themselves and each other in community. Or maybe it was just because he listened better than anyone else I know. As a natural-born journalist, he listened and he didn’t forget.

At first it was the power of podcasting that drew us together. I have David Wilcox and Simon Baddeley to thank for separately suggesting we might have common interests, but it would have been hard for us to avoid each other in those early days. We were both most at home in loose, unconference-y spaces and we connected through our dark but gleeful, sixth-form humour with a dash of self-deprecation.

I think Nick’s most generous gift to the world was Social Media Surgeries – they had just the right balance of ease and informality together with a desire to get shit done and really help people who were helping others and embodied the Podnosh company values of “Think, Make Things Better and Give a Fuck!”

We attended the G20 in 2009 together, swooning under the Obama-fever but mostly just wandering around laughing at how bonkers it all was and we were for even being there.

I also had the privilege of working directly with Nick (and the late John Popham) on the Nominet Trust’s “Our Digital Planet” project – luring people into portakabins and generally being “the ice-cream man of the internet”.

But mostly we enjoyed the ambient awareness of each other’s lives that came with blogging and being on Twitter. When we were fortunate enough to be in the same neck of the woods, we got to hang out and snigger at things it would be inappropriate to list here, even if one of us hadn’t just died. I had a look through our various private messages and there’s not much in there except lots of “I love you”.

I did love him and I already miss him desperately.

This was just sitting waiting to be published for almost 55 years. Those who’ve heard my more recent (ie since 2004) podcasting will recognise the roots of my presenting style. As far as I can tell, it was recorded on the same day as the picture was taken.

Script assistance by “Mummy”. Sound Engineer: “Daddy”.

Special thanks to Mrs Kimberly for straightening my tie and my hair.

I’m on the train to London and trying out Wordland on my iPad. All seems good. The editor box is left-aligned rather than centred, but I can live with that – maybe it’s an update that I haven’t noticed because I haven’t logged out on my desktop machine yet

I’m doing another round of the Living Culture Coffee Mornings aka “Tuttle Soup for the Soul” this morning. It’s good practice in noticing and putting aside my feelings about it, remembering that I have no idea who’s going to be there and what is going to happen. I do know that the appeal ruling from the Walney 16 is being delivered at 10am over the road at the RCOJ and that means there’ll probably be some different people around who might or might not want to sit and chat. But otherwise it’s basically “Tuttle as usual” – it could be 20 people, it could be 2.

At least the sun’s shining. I’ve come out without a coat for the first time so far this year.

a reverse-chronological list of things I’ve posted today to lloyddavis.micro.blog – replies aren’t included

14:26 – : I’m going to barcamplondon xiii next week. I went to number 3 in 2007 and number 10 in 2014. There’s an arithmetical gag in there somewhere.

This is an experiment in trying to pull together all the things that end up in all the places.

a reverse-chronological list of things I’ve posted today to lloyddavis.micro.blog – replies aren’t included

15:52 – : Good lord! It’s Friday afternoon again.
12:58 – OK. I’m seeing many places where this needs saying.: Many things can be true at the same time.

Even things that you have always thought were mutually exclusive.

I think the work for us to do now involves making spaces (within and between ourselves) in which all the overlapping, layered narratives can live, rather than trying to find one unifying story for us all to get behind.

It’s work, it’s not easy, it’s not necessarily how we were raised, or how we’ve lived for most of our lives, or even how we’d like it to be.

This is an experiment in trying to pull together all the things that end up in all the places.

I’m reminded that it’s now eight years since I wrote this song:

At that point, it was easy for some to say that we didn’t know what was coming. I think it’s less easy now. Even so, the temptation remains to think that these men don’t really mean to implement the things they’ve talked about in election campaigns, that to do so would be crazy. But we live in crazy times alongside crazy people and the line between crazy and sane isn’t as clear cut as we’d wish in any of us. Neither is it as straightforward to diagnose in others as seeing whether a person cast their ballot the way we agree with or not.

I updated this song a little when I released it as part of “Half A Pound Of Monkeybread” – in particular, I wanted to point at fascism where others saw bufoonery. If more bufoonery is all we get, I’ll be very glad to be proved wrong.

I’ll blog about this properly when I’ve got my head around it a bit more.

Basically, I took a bunch of Tuttle-related videos and documents and fed them to Google’s NotebookLM – one of the standard outputs from that is an “Audio Overview” examples of which you may have heard elsewhere – they take the form of a “deep dive” podcast between a man and a woman, all artificially generated.

I followed the instructions on this video to make avatars of each of the speakers and animate them with lip synching.

I added the following prompt when generating the original audio: “Imagine it’s 17 years after the founding of the Tuttle Club. Target an audience who knows of Lloyd, but isn’t aware of Tuttle or his contribution to it.”

There’s another 14 minutes of audio, but I only had the patience to do the avatars for the first 50 seconds.

Older viewers/readers may be familiar with this story, but I don’t think I’ve ever told it while actually doing the thing that I was talking about in the story!

Others will have seen the “finished product” but not necessarily see how it emerges.

This is in the “extended voicemail” format where the narrative wiggles around as much as the lines I’m drawing

I dug into an old backup drive at the weekend and found this. I’ve been looking for it for ages.

It’s the very first piece of video that I made and shared via the internet. This was August 2005, 8 months after I’d started podcasting in a similarly impulsive, unplanned and amateurish way (three adjectives that have defined my career ever since!)

We’d heard of YouTube by this time, but I don’t think it was available in the UK so this was originally at libsyn.com where I was hosting my podcasts (audio blogs) – I can see I used a thumbnail of me gurning in the original blog post that linked to it.

Within a couple of months I had my first (unpaid) promotional vlog series for a line of men’s grooming products. So yes, I happily describe myself as an (if not ‘the’!) OG beauty vlogger.

I finally joined YouTube in March 2006, by which time I was regularly collaborating with Debbie Davies on our (too) short-lived series “All This And Brains Too” so my first video on YT was “Desperately Seeking Harvey”.

I’ve made a playlist of all the vlogging and vlog-like content I’ve got. I find it annoying that I can’t seem to edit the metadata so that things will show up in the order they were created rather than when they were uploaded. But that might just be me being old.

If you’re silly enough to try bingeing that vlog playlist, do let me know how far you got before your brain melted.

I’m trudging across the gap between my aspiration and my ability to fulfil it. Too much b-roll, not enough meat. Never mind. I’ve managed to get the red nose treatment on the thumbnail here.

It’s all helping me to see what I need to work on more. And in the meantime, I’m lucky enough to have work work to do. More fun again soon.

Stating the obvious today.

I got sidetracked today, thinking about how to make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear.

Another day, another videoblog.

I went up to London for a couple of meetings and remembered how tiring it can be to just exist sometimes. It was nice though to hang around the West End without the tension I used to feel that I ought to be somewhere else doing something else.

Fun to see my subscriber count going up on YouTube after a long flat line for so long. I’m making a determined effort not to look at any other stats though, just post these things and get on with life.

“I don’t know if this will be a ‘daily vlog’ or a ‘daily vlog except when it isn’t'”

“I don’t know what I’m talking about”

Classic Davis Vlogging

Something something, whatever it takes to get me working out loud again.

The convention will be that the date on these will be the day they get published, but they may contain footage shot at any time in the past, present or even the future. I think.

It’s my blogiversary. Here’s where it all started in September 2004…

What I remembered in the holidays

Some thoughts now on my thoughts then:

“The world really has changed” – I obviously thought this needed saying. Who was I trying to convince? Will there ever be a time when this isn’t true?

“I am connected to a very diverse network of people” – I had no idea how much this would grow. Especially when Twitter came along.

“a traditional CV doesn’t give the flavour of real me” – still true. I spent another hour with someone the other day who wanted to understand “what it is that you do?” These days I’m much more light-hearted about it and worry less about being misunderstood.

“a blog is a perfect personal knowledge management tool” – this was marketing, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t still true. I wish I used it more.

“It’s OK to turn up late to the party” – I really thought I’d missed the boat. Again, I had no idea what was just around the corner.

It does feel like the same sort of need is here again, for us to take responsibility for making our own media and building our own online relationships, instead of delegating it to the new corporations that have appeared in the last 20 years. I got close to taking August off again this year and we’re off to some woods for a week, but I’ve got some ideas for how I want to take this thing into it’s third decade. Thanks for sticking around x

So, I woke up thinking about practice. Just choosing to do a something, over and over again. Like, this morning, at 7 a.m., the kettle’s boiling, and there I am, setting up my camera, pressing the red record button and talking to myself in the kitchen like any other ordinary person in the 21st Century. But seriously, I like making this stuff and regardless of how it turns out, it’s a bit of practice I didn’t do yesterday.

And then I’m also thinking about acceptance, particularly in the process of making stuff. Like, nothing is ever totally right the first time, which I’ve been banging on about forever, but still find it hard to accept. I don’t want to draft stuff and then polish. Just. Don’t. Want. I want authenticity and I revert to believing it has to mean nailing everything in one go or giving up completely. Often, things just come out in the wrong order. They’re in some sort of right order in my head, but that’s a sub-optimal order for telling a story. Editing and switching stuff around isn’t just okay, it’s essential and I’ve had to cultivate my acceptance of that too. And since the camera never lies, I’ve had to accept that I now look like I’m 100 years old.

But acceptance is something that literally “comes with practice”. I have to keep doing the thing—setting up the camera, pressing record, and then gradually coming to ignore my tummy, or the dumb things I say or the number of times I touch my face. And that’s the part I didn’t fully understand until I talked it all through. I knew that practice was important and that acceptance mattered, but I hadn’t realised that practice is what actually leads to acceptance.

That’s what I wanted to say. But it’s not how it came out the first time. I had to write it down and think it through and turn it around. You see, I’m trying to get back in the habit of shooting video of myself and when I came to seeing if I could edit this morning’s ramble into something intelligible I realised I hadn’t noticed how much I’d been touching my face. So I made the video into just a montage of that instead.

My first public photo on Flickr in 2004. It’s another interpretation of “perfect path”One of the things I’ve been reflecting on lately is that I’ve been making things on the web for at least 20 years now. It’s been almost 20 years since I started this blog, and that got me thinking about why I called it “Perfect Path.” That’s a question nobody ever actually asks. People always say, “Hmm, yeah, I get it.” I think for a long time, I was waiting for someone to ask, but nobody did. And this goes for a lot of the work I’ve done – I’ve been itching for someone to ask me what it means, but nobody does because they just get it. Or they don’t get it at all and it seems no amount of explanation helps them.

So, the story behind the name: I was in a bit of an odd place in 2004. By the autumn of that year, I was approaching the end of my 30s. I had been sober for less than three years, though it didn’t feel like I was new to it anymore. When you’ve struggled with drinking for most of your adult life, and then you manage to stop for two or three years, it feels incredible. You think you’ve got it under control, and everyone else tells you it’s still early days. But you think (I thought), “Yeah, I know, but not me.”

But it did mean that for the first time, I had some form of spiritual life. I was, I suppose, wrestling with the first three steps of recovery. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, I kept going over those first three steps, particularly the third one, about turning your will and life over to the care of a power greater than yourself, or God as you understand it. I came up with a prayer that included the words, “I am willing to follow God’s perfect path for me, wherever it may lead,” which is very much in the spirit of Step Three. And I really liked that image. So, that’s one version of where the words came from.

Another source of inspiration for the name came around the turn of the millennium when I working on improving public services and expanding my organisational thinking, especially as the internet was becoming more prevalent. I was drawn to complexity theory, and in 2000, I took a course on managing complexity. One idea from that stood out: the concept of a creative boundary between stagnation and chaos. It’s a very simplistic model of complexity theory, but I found the idea compelling—that there’s a perfect path between those two extremes, you don’t want to fall either side of it because it’s hard to get out. So that became a more secular interpretation of “Perfect Path.”

Both ideas were very much alive in me at the time, and they fed off each other. And then by the summer of 2004, I had stopped doing an interim management job that had run its course, and I’d already been trying to blog for three or four years but always gave up after a few posts. That summer, I decided I was just going to go for it and see what happened. I knew by then that blogging wasn’t as scary or dangerous as I once thought, and I was already confidently telling people that it was OK to blog. Around the same time, podcasting was starting to emerge, and I knew I needed to do this thing—to write stuff on the internet and see where it led, both in terms of my personal work and my consulting.

I had already called my company Perfect Path Consulting. I think that was actually in 2002, when I left the Audit Commission and needed to start billing people. It became a brand for me, so I used it for my blog too. I used a typeface from Neuland, the facilitation company which had a distinctive way of writing with a chisel-tipped marker. That became my blog’s logo, in a green that felt fertile, and I dove into it all.

This is a kind of preamble to me reminding myself that I’ve been doing this stuff for 20 years now. Sometimes I’m tempted to think I still don’t know what I’m doing and that I have no idea “how to do the internet”. But then I look back and realise it’s been two decades. I’ve definitely put in a few “10,000 hours”—probably on multiple aspects of creating social media. And by “social media” I just mean media that is social, not just the microblogging, photo-sharing, social network platforms that people think of now. I’ve been doing this for twenty years, man. If I have to point to something I can’t stop doing, it’s writing silly stories on the internet.

That’s my thing, and this blog is the place for it. For a while, it got a bit lost because the dominant popular format of storytelling shifted, and a lot of my stories don’t fit into those neat little boxes. Which sounds a bit like Norma Desmond but I’ve also come to understand a lot more about how I work particularly how my brain works and what is realistic to expect from it.

Another thought: when I’m feeling exhausted, when I feel like I’ve done too much but it’s only half way through the day, I’m finding more suitable ways of dealing with it.. Yesterday, I found myself cutting up bits of magazines to make letters for titles of an video series I’m planning. And that’s the way to move forward while resting. Mindless art-making. Not even art, really—just mindless action that is also towards a goal. I wrote a lot in my journal yesterday about getting organised and about the tasks I need to complete, but those tasks can sometimes be too stimulating. They don’t replenish my energy in the way mindless activity does. So, I sat there, cutting out letters to use in a collage-y kind of a thing that isn’t totally defined yet. That was exactly what I needed—no decision-making involved, just: are these letters big enough? Yes. I’ll cut them out and use them.

The other option is putting a record on (no, not flicking to spotify, putting a record on a turntable and hearing the hiss of the needle in the groove). Chopin’s Nocturnes are the most magical to me. They transform me. I don’t care why—maybe it’s something deep, but I don’t need to know.

Speaking of something deep, I had an interesting (to me!) dream last night. In the dream, I was with someone I know, although I couldn’t tell you who they were – a kind of amalgam of wise, kind, brave men in my life. We were talking about the inner work I still need to do, and they asked me what else I needed to let go of. I described some of my fears—that boiled down to fear of being out in the world, being seen, being misunderstood (haha – see the opening paragraph of this post!). It’s hard to explain exactly because it’s more of a feeling inside me. If I had to name it, it would be the fear of being out in the world. The person in my dream said, “Well, let’s get rid of that, then.” They had me open my mouth and tip my head back, and then they pulled something out of me—a long, black, gooey thing that looked like a fish skeleton without a head or tail, just a long spine with ribs (is that what fish have?). It was covered in black sludge and had obviously been inside me for a long time, rotten, but strong and coherent. The guy just pulled it all the way out and it was much longer and blacker and more gooey than I’d expected. Very David Lynch.

Now, this morning, I’m wondering: am I free of that fear now? Is it gone? How will I know? How will I know if I’m free of it? Part of me says, “Let’s just trust that it’s done, that the magic worked.” That it’s been removed and I don’t have to live with it anymore. It was prickly and uncomfortable, so it’s good to have it gone. Who cares what it means? It sounds like a good symbol. It feels like a good thing to be rid of. So, let’s be rid of it.

Onwards.

So many breakfasts, so little timeThe 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?

I recently came across these gems among my sixth-form reports:

School reports: a “confidential and private record of the pupil’s progress”

“I should like to see a minimum of 15 hours study per week at home to begin with; then a greater commitment to the detail of his subjects and less reliance on his natural flair. If he exerts himself next year, the reward could be some very good grades.”

“Lloyd has clearly not put enough work in for this element of his course. He must accept that, at this level, innate ability is simply not enough to secure a satisfactory grade in the public examinations.”

“There has been some progress in Latin, but what of the rest? I cannot believe that a boy of his ability and potential is going to let himself down. We recommend at least 15 hours per week of study at home. Is he doing even this minimum?”

This is all forty years ago, but it still hangs in my psyche. I still think that, no matter what I might have achieved, the only truly valuable things are those that are the result of great exertion, that my “natural flair” and “innate ability” are never enough.

And yet, for most of that time, I’ve continued to find that exertion harder to exercise than most, while my flair and ability have gained me attention and love, I’ve seen less of whatever today’s equivalent is of “a satisfactory grade in the public examinations”

Maybe it will always be this way, that I’ll never be satisfied with my own efforts. But my diagnosis with ADHD nearly four years ago also sheds some light on “How do you solve a problem like Lloyd?” By the time I showed up for the Sixth Form, I’d lost a driving interest in my subjects. I got cornered into three language A-levels when my stubbornness came head to head with the titanium-plated wall of the school timetable, so the only variety in my attention was the fairly tame difference between translating Catullus or Camus or Kafka.

Plus, I had the exhaustion of executive function that characterises my experience of ADHD. Relief came from the variety between school and not-school – and “not-school” was a no-contest between home (TV, food, bed) and everything else that catches the fancy of an eighteen year old “boy”. There simply weren’t another fifteen hours.

Since the end of 2022, I’ve been part of this thing called Hard Art, a collective working on cultural responses to all the things we’re facing right now, but particularly various climate-related ugh-nesses.

Over the last year, as a kind of ice-breaker, people have made blind contour line portraits in pairs and then amazing artist/musician Ian Bruce has coloured lots of them in.

Now, as a fundraiser for the collective, 100 of them have been collected in an exhibition, “Drawn Without Looking” which is on in London for the next few days (through to Saturday 1st June) at the Paul Stolper Gallery in Museum Street. Astonishingly, the one of me (by Love Ssega !) is still, as yet, unsold – get your credit cards out, people!

They’ve also been collected into a book which has been released on metalabel – there’s other Hard Art stuff on the metalabel page too, so have a dig around.

Bonus Link: in a similar vein, older readers might remember the blind contour self-portraits I did, one a day, in February 2020

Citations galore needed but…

Keir Starmer is quoted as saying there’s an “anti-politics mood” at the moment (as we move towards a General Election in the UK).

I don’t believe there’s an anti-politics mood, but I understand why professional politicians see it like that, because they believe that politics is only what politicians and activists do.

Politics is too important to leave to politicians in the same way that your health is too important to leave to doctors, the education of your children is too important to leave to teachers and your relationships are too important to leave to online social networks.

I think that we all need to take responsibility for actively participating in those things that have been professionalised out of our communal experience, not because we’re anti-expert (some of my best friends… etc) but because professionalised expertise only gets us so far and over a (shockingly short) period of time it reduces our ability to care for ourselves and others.

I saw a demo of a new platform called “metalabel” on Monday. I was excited by what I saw.

How do you split the pot
?I saw a solution to a problem that we’ve chatted about for the last 15 years or so, a problem that’s easy enough to understand at a simple level, but once you get to the levels of complexity that make it interesting enough to pursue, it seems just too hard to bother with. Or at least that was my experience.

The problem, as I would state it is: how can members of a community release a series of collaborative works and share any commercial gains according to pre-arranged splits without either bleeding money away in financial transaction fees, paying lawyers for creating, interpreting and enforcing contracts or creating a managerial class within the community whose only function is to make the whole machine work (and to take a slice for themselves)?

See, when I started writing that sentence, I thought it was going to be much simpler than it turned out. And that’s what happens with these projects too.

The promise of metalabel is that you can create a series of works with (or without) splits that can evolve over time and the platform does all the work for you. Your community (or group of pals or whatever) becomes a “meta label” that can release all sorts of different creative works.

The proof of the meta-pudding will be in the meta-eating of course, and it’s invitation-only for the time being, but that’s what I took away from seeing it shown off by founder, Yancey Strickler. I’ve been fortunate enough to get pulled into the artist collective known as Hard Art. Hard Art is still being a bit mysterious ahead of “The Fete of Britain” event in a couple of weeks at the Factory International’s Aviva Studios in Manchester (a venue takeover that I’ve been likening to 2013’s “Hack The Barbican” except in the service of making a cultural response to Climate Crisis and the rest of the shitshow we’re experiencing these days). But this metalabel “release” gives you some hints and more will be revealed as the event approaches.

The best social art and community building that I’ve made has resulted in bunches of people who get inspired and trust each other enough to undertake projects – what people quickly notice is that these situations “have great potential” – the realisation of that potential though can be patchy – and while some projects find their feet (and their revenue stream!), lots of them fizzle out, often because the people are already busy and because things just get hard very quickly.

Some examples from my glorious past to help me think this through:

Tuttle ClubAs well as having fun, learning lots about the social media scene at the time and inspiring a ton of blog posts, vlogs and podcasts, the people who came to Tuttle, especially in the early days, also ended up getting a new job or starting a business or some other project that ended up being their job. We (I) struggled for a long time with how to make it work financially for myself, given that most of those opportunities were being created while I was giving a friendly greeting to a newbie and I didn’t want to take the “easy” route of selling out or being responsible to a funder for (in)consistent results. Many times it was suggested that if people made stuff there that generated revenue, that a percentage could go into a central pot to support group expenses and me. But as I say, things get pretty complex, pretty quickly and it turned out that this was the kind of “why can’t you just” suggestion that I couldn’t implement (especially back in 2008/9). Even when we did Tuttle Consulting the headaches were in the various informal contractual arrangements and the difficulty of paying for non-billable work.

Centre For Creative CollaborationOne of the ways I did manage to turn the Tuttle conundrum round for myself for a while was by working with Brian when he (and his partners) created C4CC for the University of London in 2010. As Social Artist in Residence though, there was enough to do in curating the social space and relationships in the building. I probably clung onto it a bit long as a source of small but stable income. The question of how to fund and run such a space was, in the end, the thing that killed it off. And this wasn’t for want of trying – very talented people with big brains were grasping for a way to balance revenue and costs without relying on a big (and fickle) sponsor – a way that projects could contribute to the financial well-being of the space and the management overhead, when they mostly in start-up mode themselves.

We Will GatherWe had funding for this platform for a year in 2012/13. That paid us some salary/fees but mostly went on developing and hosting the tech – you could initiate up a “good” thing in your neighbourhood with it’s own web page, just by tweeting and using the hashtag #wewillgather. And lots of good things happened, but it didn’t reach a critical mass partly because of the Twitter API fuckery, but also because it needed some income and some curation/promotion/community building work that we just couldn’t maintain for free.

Workshop34 and other empty shopsThese projects were shops! They’re actual retail premises where people are used to going in and spending money – what could possibly go wrong?! Dan and I only had 6 months in Workshop34 in Sittingbourne in 2014/15 but we established a way for the local community, especially local artists to show and sell their work and reap the benefits of working with other people, gaining confidence to keep trying other projects after our EU-funding had dried up. And we did deals with everyone that usually amounted to a 10-15% commission on any revenue they took. This would go into a pot for tea, biscuits and other expenses I incurred. But nobody wanted the hassle of earning money there – whether they were people who might risk their means-tested benefits or people who just didn’t want the responsibility of holding cash for a loosely-organised community. And nobody wanted to manage it afterwards – one of the hardest bits of the work for me was finding someone who’d take the £300 that was left in the community pot at the end.

In all of these situations, the primary purpose (and survival) of the group was ultimately undermined by the difficulty of paying for overheads or organising collaborative work once money was involved.

In each case, people (including me) could see that we were creating something of value. That as collaborative communities, the value had the potential to be realised by making creative assets – learnings, souvenirs, joint celebrations etc. and use the network effect of our joint social capital to promote and sell them. But it was always just too hard. We always ran out of juice (physically, emotionally and financially) before we could get it going. And I started to believe that the common denominator in all this was me and that it was my fault that it never worked, so I stopped trying.

I had a flicker of hope for this situation, when Imogen Heap asked me to help facilitate conversations about her Mycelia for Music idea and I got to see that this problem wasn’t just about me, my collaborators and the communities that we worked in – it was also there in the messy way music gets made. And at the time (end of 2015) it looked like crypto was the way to do this – distributed ledger so that nobody can tinker with the splits or metadata and nobody has to run it, the fees are all included in the blockchain etc. etc. You remember 2015? Yeah, good times!

Metalabel brings me renewed hope. I got it as soon as I heard Yancey say that one of the inspirations was the foundation of the Royal Society – people getting together in pubs and coffee shops and then publishing their work and incidentally creating a whole new method for creating and testing and disseminating knowledge? Well I can’t claim the whole new method thing, but it does sound familiar, doesn’t it?

In a nutshell, it’s a bit of infrastructure for individuals or collectives to release work for digital or physical distribution and, if there’s money involved, a way to set up how the money gets distributed between the people who did the work (and a commission for the platform) – so you can publish a book/EP/film/artwork and have a set of splits that operate while the initial costs are recouped and then a new set of splits thereafter or whatever you and your community want to do.

The difficult bit is still pull together a group of people who want to make cool innovative stuff and won’t kill each other in the process of deciding what gets published and who gets paid. But y’know, that seems a lot more fun when you’ve got a platform to do it on.

PS this is based on a privileged (and otherwise uninformed) sneak peek behind the scenes. I might have got the wrong end of the stick on something. If you go to metalabel.com right now, the concept may or may not jump off the page at you, but I believe the first curated releases (it’s invitation-only for the time being) will be available soon and then it will be a lot clearer.

On. Those. Trays.

Oh Basil! #

The Chamberlain Memorial and Birmingham Town Hall, from a car park between Chamberlain Square and Gt Charles St, showing the partly demolished buildings believed to be the Mason Science College (later to be the site of the 1970s Central Library)

Tony Davis, 1964, I think. #

Birmingham City Centre, 1964-ish

I spent a little time in Flickr today, and it reminded me of so many good intentions. I could easily (not easily) spend all my time tagging and annotating photographs and putting them somewhere with some commentary on my life and what was going on. Obviously the one above wasn’t taken by me, but I know a few things about the man who did take it. #

I’m irritated by Threads. The only reason I go there is because Instagram and FB have little clickbaity embeds and I sometimes can’t resist the bait. I don’t want to write there. I don’t like the way it’s becoming, for some, the Twitter replacement – I don’t think FB/Meta can be trusted with that any more than any other platform-owners. I don’t like the way they’ve implemented tags. It might have to be the first instance of me proactively deleting a social media account. #

That’s the second time I’ve seen Dave point to Indieblocks – it does look like the sort of thing I ought to at least have an opinion on. #

I like this format because it reminds me of primary school, where the first thing you had to do was write today’s date at the top of the page. #

Today I learned that Stanley Baxter is a) still alive at 97 and b) out of the closet since 2020. #

A reminder that the four horsemen (or Gupta’s Path To Riches, depending on your perspective) are Blockchain, AI, VR/AR and IoT. Just because there’s been lots of focus on one or other of these of late, doesn’t mean the others have gone away. #

Dave asked about how much of a hassle it was to do anchor tags in wordpress. Not much faff, in my experience using the wordpress.com block editor. I have a sidebar menu for the paragraph block I’m typing. Under ‘Advanced’ I add the same Block Name and HTML Anchor for the first paragraph of a new section – for ease, yesterday I just used S1, S2… SX for sections but for readability, if I were doing a longer piece, I think I’d use somethin more descriptive. Then I add a hash symbol at the end of the block which is linked to the anchor tag (just type eg “#S2” in the link creation dialog). This is meant to be a demonstration of the degree of faff involved (ie non-zero), not a polished set of instructions, ymmv. Yes, of course I’d like something automagic and better fitted to my dainty hands but I also like making more work for myself than is needed sometimes. #

The main way in which it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas is that the overall volume of incoming messages has increased – mostly from people trying to clear things off their todo list before the end of next week (or earlier). I am not altogether innocent of doing this myself, either, soz. #

Ah me, it’s week 49. #

I usually write something at the end of the week, but rarely (if ever) manage to publish it. For me, writing is thinking more than it is anything else and giving my thoughts on the week an extra polish in order to share them is usually too much effort. But I’m remembering the benefits of sharing this rough stuff in public and every now and then the internal battle turns out with a victory for openness rather than discretion. Week 49 seems to be one of those now and thens (that’s now a then).

I hate raising expectations. And I know that writing here raises expectations (even if it’s only in a very small number of people) that I will write here again, every day or, if not then perhaps every week. I’d love to be the sort of person who puts this first. But I’m not, I’m just not. At least not at the moment.

Black Elephant had a little press last week. There was a feature in the weeked Culture supplement of Politiken, the Danish broadsheet (though I’ve been banned from calling it that in official communication, apparently ‘broadsheet’ is too British for an international audience). Part of the benefit for me of being in an international team is that I get to see where some of my blind spots are. I may think I’m pretty good at writing for a general audience, but, without turning this into a self-inflicted Struggle Session, there’s a lot that I’ve been able to get away with in a small UK pond that doesn’t fly so well (oh god, the metaphors I’m mixing) with people who have English as a second, third or fourth language or who’ve grown up in places where the British are seen, perhaps not as the enemy, but definitely as colonialists, insisting that the world run on our terms. Oh, wasn’t Dr Who good, on Saturday? I’m glad to see in the trailer for the Christmas special that he will eventually put some trousers on. #

Spent a lot of time on “Project Hidden Gems”. Trying to get the invitation right and out to the right people, but also working out more clearly what it’s for and how it helps us do what we want to do.

Oh and what it might cost. Again, I notice an overhead of working internationally. Not only do we have to think about timezones, like all the time, but also when we talk about money we have to be explicit about which currency we’re talking about. I’m getting better at thinking in multiple currencies at once, but it’s hard.

I’m glad that we’ve created a bit more project management infrastructure for this one. It’s a delicate balance when the team is so small, we don’t want to over do it (I mean honestly, this is always the case though, isn’t it? Who really wants more PM bureaucracy than you absolutely need? Other than people who make a great deal of money selling PM bureaucracy, obvs.) but I think one of the things I’ve appreciated since I got my ADHD diagnosis is being able to focus on clarity that helps other people, rather than the vagueness that really only helps me. #

We wrote a newsletter together this week, to highlight the press piece and what we’re doing in the New Year. I drafted something that was too long and wordy and then had my insides pulled out by the team slashing it down to three bullet point paragraphs. Having spent most of my career butchering other people’s wordy and over formal prose for the sake of comprehension and engagement, I didn’t like to be on the receiving end. I got over it. #

“Project HA!” is not a Black Elephant project, it’s with a larger, more local and more openly creative bunch of folk. It’s much closer to what we were doing at C4CC. It’s fun, but not without moments of difficulty and personal growth. I was glad that at our meeting this week, we sat in a circle for the first time (having a table between us, just feels wrong) and that I got to say that. I’m also glad that I’m very far from leading this. It’s great to be part of a thing that’s doing stuff, but not have to own every bit of it. #

I hosted two parades this week. My regular Thursday morning “On Golden Sands” and another, that was arranged with more of an invited crowd, on Friday evening. All the parades I’ve attended have different characters, and it’s not just about the people who come and the questions we ask. Partly, I think, there’s something about how I change and react to people that I don’t already know, but also time of day. Most of all, I think it’s the very difficult aspect to pin down, of “diversity” in the group. While you may understand beforehand, the checkboxy kind of differences between people: age, gender, race, geography etc. once you get in the room, you never know quite how the mix is going to play out. It’s exciting but a bit tiring on a Friday night. #

I’m enjoying having a weekend again. Different from when I was working at church and the weekend could always have the possibility of needing to attend a service or a church meeting. As well as having a very nice lunch and the necessary preparations for what’s happening in a fortnight, I spent too much time on the new Fortnite update, particularly the Lego and Racing extras that were released last week. Highly suitable for a man approaching 59 years old. #

LX
I’ve always known that the JFK/Doctor Who 60th anniversaries would mark the 13-month countdown to my own encounter with 2x2x3x5. But it really started last Christmas when I was in the midst of whatever non-Covid knock-out virus that had entered me and I shuddered as I turned 58. 59 was a year a way and then… For now, I’ll settle for 58 and 11/12ths and forget about what’s to come. My daughter is also celebrating her half-birthday for the first time, now that she’s in her thirties, I think it’s a good habit to encourage. #

Our back garden for the time being. The chain is rattling, we could exchange anytime and maybe complete by… (no don’t tempt fate!)Wisteria is hanging on tight to her leaves. She doesn’t believe that it’s the end of November, either. The creeper has given up. Olive appreciated getting a bit of a trim a few weeks ago. Rosemary is as persistently mad as ever. We’ll leave the leaves for now. #

Ripples
I listened to a writer last night talking about his preferred narrative structure being an exploration of the ripples that spread out after an event. Basically taking a seemingly simple (if odd) event and noticing the huge but not obviously connected consequences. I think his point is what complexity people refer to as non-linearity, ie that complex outcomes can arise from the simplest stimuli.

The examples he gave were negative – ie seriously bad things happening as a result of smaller bad things. The problem I have with it is that it’s a creativity killer. For some people, thinking like this has to mean STOP! don’t make this thing, don’t make anything, because you can’t control the unintended consequences. But that can’t be right – if it were then the only people left making art would be people who have no problem with or remorse for doing bad things. Oh… wait…!

When I speak about the ripple effect, I prefer to dwell on the positive version. That small incremental improvements in how we are with ourselves and others can spread out and touch people far away, even people we don’t know. That me taking care of myself means there’s one less angry person on the tube train adding to the madness, one more person ready to smile and help someone who’s lost and afraid and alone. #

I updated my BlueSky profile to say:

You may know me from such hashtags as #tuttle #wewillgather #c4cc #PLATE and #blackelephant
Sings with a non-hashtagged ukulele.
Blog (like this only bigger chunks) at perfectpath.co.uk

https://bsky.app/profile/lloyddavis.bsky.social

You might not be on BlueSky, but you can infer that it’s like this, only in smaller chunks. I don’t know how much longer it’s going to be invite-only, but if you’re interested and impatient, I won’t dissuade you – I have invite codes for those who ask. #

Anchor Links
I’m also experimenting with anchor links so that I can more easily link to any of the abovementioned “chunks” – that’s what those hashes represent at the end of each section – if you click on one it should open a new tab with the “cursor” at the top of that section. (Maybe not) obviously, they’re there for you (or me) to easily link to a bit, rather than to be clicked on while reading… or has this sentence made it more confusing? Anyway, if you’re confused, ignore them. If you understand, just nod to yourself. Grand. I’ll probably forget all about it after a while. #

Small talk kills me. I think it’s an attention thing. On my way home from another thing last night, I was having some regret about going, but then I realised that the people weren’t a problem and the majority of the content wasn’t a problem, it’s that it got to a point where we were left to do even more small talk (having already had an introductory bit and a break in the middle) and I don’t like to just rush off immediately, and I also did enjoy talking to all the people that I talked to, it’s just that it drains me completely and leaves me thinking I’ve made a mistake in coming out at all. It doesn’t matter how many interesting things I have to talk about or lovely people there are in the room, I will gravitate to an internal state of thinking I’m boring and surrounded by people who are disappointed to have ended up next to me because they only came over for another of those samosas. It’s not you, it’s me… and small talk. #

60 years ago today, my parents (who were engaged to be married) were taking the bus to get into town and had to change by the cricket ground at Edgbaston. That was when they heard the news from Dallas – on a street, in a crowd of people waiting for their bus on a Friday evening.

Further research is required to ascertain whether either of them watched the first episode of Doctor Who the following evening. Personally, I doubt it.

A sunny spring day in downtown Dallas, TX.I’ve told the story before about my first experience of downtown Dallas. I was on a train from Chicago to Austin in March 2011 and Dallas was a point where there was an extended stop (half an hour or so) to change engines. I like to think that there are northern engines that can handle Chicago winter and southern engines that are more at home once you get into Texas, but I’ve never dug deep into that one. Anyway. Some friends that I’d made on board and I decided to take a little walk while we were waiting and strolled along the road. As we got into the more built-up area, I started having the weirdest feeling of deja-vu, or really that I’d been there before, but I knew the nearest I’d gotten was to change flights at Dallas-Fort Worth once. But then, as I looked, I saw a sign saying we were in Dealey Plaza and everything suddenly fell into place and came into focus. Those familiar landmarks of the railway bridge crossing the road, the green spaces (one might call one of them a ‘knoll’), the tall redbrick buildings all revealed themselves to be the backdrop of that dramatic day, the location for the Zapruder film, a place where a man got shot and the world shifted. I tend not to want to travel to places just to see sights – to be in places where things happened. I’m more interested in the people who are here and now and what’s going on today, but this shocked me out of that present perspective and said “Oi. There’s something else to pay attention to!”

I’ve had time to think a bit more about the thing I went to last night. I think what disturbed me was focusing on the testimony of the newly converted, or as we call them in recovery circles “the newcomer”. In AA, the newcomer is often described as “the most important person in the room”. This is not just to flatter them into staying (although it worked on me!) it’s also a reminder to the rest of us that a big part of the work is “giving away what we were so generously given ourselves”. Our own recovery depends more on being able to help someone who has no hope than it does on sitting around with the same bunch of folk reinforcing our well-worn stories. And that means that the newcomer needs to be welcome, but also to recognise that they have more to hear than they have to say. Much is made in media portrayals of our meetings of the poor addict who wanders in and gets to tell their story for the first time – it’s great drama, but the more important stuff comes after that, when they sit quietly and hear the testimonies of other people who’ve been in a similar predicament – not telling them what to do, but just letting them know that they’re in the right place, and importantly that there is a solution and it’s a spiritual one. This, of course, is an ideal that is practiced less than 100% and often the newcomer has to step over the line in order to know there is a line (as do we all at times). The bottom line is: just because you’re the most important person in the room, doesn’t mean you get to dominate the space or preach to everyone.

I had a lot of love for Martin and Paul telling their stories of coming to their brand of faith, but the setting was confusing, because people who stand at the front on a platform with a mic (whether it works or not) are taken to be the ones who have more important things to say than everyone else and then the Q&A reinforces that. It’s not that I was desperate to tell my own story, just that it felt off, like the content was being shoehorned into a format that didn’t quite fit. So you can see I’ve thought it through a little, but not completely.

Yesterday, I said in a team meeting that I needed to be working out in the open more. Very soon after, I got an invitation to go to a thing tonight, coincidentally featuring someone who is associated with Black Elephant. Fun.

But really working out loud or working in the open is not restricted to going outside and talking to people (the horror!). It means this place. Or this place and all the other places that I have a tense relationship with – the places we’ve come to call social media, but only because “soul- and relationship-destroying online social networks that feed us more crap than the mainstream media every dreamed of” is a bit of a mouthful.

When I first heard that phrase “social media” it was at a conference, probably in 2005 or 2006. It got an immediate “ugh” from me. At the time I was doing that thing where I’d turn up to a conference and record the speakers (with or without their permission or knowledge) and then publish it online, and everybody (I spoke to) thought it was great. People started paying me to do it for them and to create an RSS feed for them as podcasts. Until they didn’t. Until they (or someone in legal) thought through the ramifications because this did seem to be becoming the new normal and maybe people wouldn’t go to the conferences if they could get them free or bootlegged. Ah well, by that time, I’d got new fish to fry. But anyway, the point is that making media was only the means to an end, it was a way of me thinking out loud and making things that other people could reflect on and think about too. And that’s what this place ought to be too, certainly not a place where media is made or shudder… content!

I’ve spent much of today working on a new deck for Black Elephant. And I’m still getting used to how to do this sort of work remotely in a team that exists separately in England, Greece and Mali (at least we’re vaguely on the same time zone). Yesterday we just had a bunch of text and the old deck. First thing this morning we had a first draft of the deck and we spent almost an hour in our morning meeting talking through what was needed. Then two of us worked together in Google Sheets to pull in stuff that we’ve used before and amend new stuff and put new ideas in. Just as with blogging, the writing of these things is the thinking. It’s really hard (for me) to think through an idea for a slide or set of slides without typing something out and then looking at it and realising that it’s wrong and going back over and over. This is the work today. We have a better draft. And as the cult of done manifesto says: “Accept that everything is a draft, it helps to get things done.”

And so this evening to St Ethelburga’s in the City, y’know the one just along from St Mary’s Axe that was blown up by the IRA and is now a Peace and Reconciliation Centre. I heard Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw talk about Seeking God in Wild Places. I don’t know what I think about it yet, so don’t ask me. No, I’m on the train and it’s nearly 9:30pm and it’s getting more and more crowded because there’s only 5 carriages and everyone’s trying to get home.

Martin Shaw obscures Paul Kingsnorth. It’s not a metaphor.

I can’t believe it’s four years since we went to Iceland and then I came back and started work in the church.

3pm is golden hour at this time of year in Iceland

When people say “We’ve had enough of the madness” I hope that’s true, but I know that I’ve said it about my own odd choices and divergences and it takes longer than we think. Nonetheless, “the best way out is through” (according to Robert Frost) and we just have to keep trudging.

We smashed the windows of a major bank. A jury acquitted us. This is why – Gully Bujak in the Guardian.

There’s a bit in here about people’s assemblies. I went to a thing at Nesta last week about similar forms of democratic infrastructure that might be an antidote to our current quagmire and impending authoritarianism. Of course though, it’s complicated and in particular, it’s tempting to end up talking about such processes coming to a “better” conclusion, when what we really hope is that means they agree more often with what we believe in and we get our own, “enlightened, progressive” way.

I’d quite like to write some more here, but as is the way when one has “a job”, there’s always another meeting in the way… or somewhere to go. Tomorrow is another day.

Oh and, just a note really that there’s something rumbling in me about coming back to blogging as a remedy for all the splintered remains of the the former microblog monolith. Something about what I need to say, what needs to be said in public, and how my thinking just benefits from me expressing it in a place that’s mine, regardless of which platform you end up reading it through. Sorry, that’s a bit of blogging about blogging again, but I do notice that I’m not being as open and transparent about my work as I used to be and that there’s an irony in it being even easier to publish than ever before (technologically) but the culture into which the writing goes makes it more difficult (at least for sensitive souls like me).

PS. I’m also going to do something about the ads that appear here. If you look and go “what ads?” I’ll have done it properly!

I’ve recently started working with Black Elephant, which is a movement dedicated to building connection through more open, honest conversations among truly diverse groups of people. I believe that this kind of connection, and the sense of belonging that can come from it, should be available to everyone.

The basic unit of our work is a 90-minute meeting called a “parade” (cos that’s a cute name for a group of Elephants, and feels nicer than calling your friends “a herd”). There are some in-person parades, but at the moment, most are online (on Zoom). They’re different from other video conference meetings in a couple of ways:

there’s a simple structure, with no talking over each other. A couple of days before the event, everyone gets a couple of questions to reflect on and to answer when we get together. These are designed to get us talking about real life, the world and how we feel about it, rather than to stimulate an intellectual debate. There really are no wrong answers and you can reveal as much or as little as you feel comfortable with in the group. No-one will comment on what you’ve said. We just hear each other. We also do very simple intro and outro rounds to top and tail the meeting.
everyone is there as a peer, these are groups for mutual connection, support and partnership, and although there’s a host who runs the process, we’re doing our best to make sure it’s not “us and them” – the host shares of themselves in just the same way as everyone else.
everyone gets the same amount of time to share – it depends on the size of the group, but it’s usually about three minutes each per question.

I’m starting my own parade “On Golden Sands” (a slightly ironic reference to my local “beach”) on Thursday mornings at 11am-12:30pm UK Time.

If you’ve been to meetings with me before online or off-, you’ll know that I’m a fan of “as much structure as we need to make something useful happen, and no more”. This format has more structure than something like Tuttle, but not much.

If you’d like to come along, let me know. The first is next Thursday, 21st September 2023 I’m limiting them to 10 people including me, and I want to ensure diversity within parades, so we might need to have some to-and-fro over which week you come. You can also sign up on https://blackelephant.app and then you’ll be able to see the other parades that are available and request a slot on one of them (note that all the times on the site are GMT/UTC – welcome to global community building!)

Wayback archive of my dopplr pageI liked dopplr – in 2007/08, I mostly liked the idea of dopplr, it let me fantasise that I was able to travel the world, dropping in on friends, while in their town to speak at one of those shiny conferences they had then, being able to help out people in my network wherever I happened to be. By the time I’d actually built my network a bit (only a year later…) and was able to do that kind of thing, the service had been swallowed whole by Nokia, as part of the smartphone wars. It went quiet and died.

I also gradually had less of a desire to show off at big conferences and more of a yen to connect with people directly in smaller groups. My focus went more local and hyperlocal. But since working on Black Elephant, the pendulum has swung back suddenly to give me a global perspective again. It’s not that I’m going to be suddenly hopping on planes and living that fantasy life, but I heard a colleague say the other day that he thought that “being generous in supporting local community can cut you off from how the rest of the world is changing” and that rang true for me. Doing this work is opening me up to people I’ve neglected because they were far away, as well as introducing me to new folk in places I’ve never heard of before.

We’re working on two versions of the Black Elephant product (“parades”) at the moment. You can sign up for a virtual parade that happens on Zoom, but we’re also introducing more in-person events that are a bit longer and over dinner. Obviously those give you more of an opportunity to get to know other participants and they’re the best way to introduce people to the concept, but they’re relatively expensive to organise. Also, diversity can suffer. For all parades, the level of diversity at them is some function of the diversity of the host’s own network, but my gut feel is that it’s still easier to gather a group of widely diverse people online than it is in-person simply because of the logistics of getting people together in meatspace and the bigger pool of folk who are available in a range of timezones, as opposed to who’s in, say, Barcelona right now.

Wayback Archive of Dopplr’s Bogotá pageSo that’s why I’m thinking about dopplr again. I need a tool to tell me where I know people or rather, who’s currently in a particular place or easy travelling distance – I see Mike Butcher using his FB to ask this sort of question occasionally, but I’d rather have a more geographically-aware network so that if someone’s trying to set up a dinner, I can honestly say “No I don’t know anyone in Tblisi right now” or “Yes, you should speak to my friend X, they know everyone in Bogotá, let me introduce you.

Which raises the other important point – this only works if my friend X in Bogotá is happy to have me share their location. dopplr and foursquare, et al may have let everyone manage their privacy to some extent, but the shortcomings inherent in that privacy model (mainly that it such openness is much much easier for rich white straight dudes than it is for everyone else) meant that most people just couldn’t afford to play.

I don’t want a fully-automated system that only builds the value of my network at the expense of my friends. So for now, it will all have to be “manual” and slow, and rooted in conversation, and talking to people directly, making introductions the way we always have done, even if that doesn’t scale as quickly as we’d like. The model I work with is generally this:

Friend1: “Oh, do you know Friend2? I’d really like to speak with them.”

Me: “Sure, I’ll let them have your details, if that’s OK, and they can decide whether they want to be in touch, let me know how it goes”

Maybe it will always have to be like that, in order to maintain the trust, or maybe, by paying close attention to what we’re doing we might find a way of doing it in partnership and for mutual benefit.

I’ve found Rich Bartlett’s concept of microsolidarity really useful since I saw it a couple of years ago. It’s gotten complex fast, but the basic stuff that “groups of different sizes are good for different things” chimes with my experience of Tuttle and of other social art and community building practices and projects. I think … Continue reading Looking through a microsolidarity lens →

You might remember a little piece I shared a few weeks ago about the idea of Black Elephants. Well, part of my re-ignited interest was in watching how some folk had taken the idea and the name and made a thing out of it. And now I’m going to work for them! First off, I … Continue reading The Black Elephant circles back →

It’s two weeks now since I finished my job as Community Worker at the local United Reformed Church and I’ve had some time to think through what I think about the last three and a half years of practicing community in an explicitly spiritual context – that’s how, when I started, I set my own … Continue reading What was all that about then? →

I’ve been reminded by Dougald in the comments of his latest newsletter that I did a bad thing. I posted some writing on Facebook that really should have been on the open web. I remember writing it, on 24 April 2019 – we were having new carpets fitted – but I don’t know why it … Continue reading The return of the Black Elephant →

I woke up with an “excessive-certainty” hangover – it comes from hanging out with people who seem absolutely sure of their rightness and are very reluctant to consider theories other than their own. The usual disclaimers about “people” apply – namely “no, not all people, obvs” and “yeah I’m a people too”. It can sometimes be difficult to spot, especially if you broadly agree on things, but there’s a vibe that I definitely notice the lack of, the morning after.

I get talking to people often about the parallels between recovery from addiction and the “state the world’s in right now”. It’s an interesting way to look at things – it’s hard to argue against the idea that we’re addicted to growth for example. But talking about it with people who’ve little direct experience of recovery is different from talking to those who’ve sat in the ruins of their life and had to have a good look at themselves. And yeah, I think there’s something more to write about the more complex dynamics of addictive behaviour in relation to how we think about climate crisis and think about our ways of helping each other deal with it. It’s a bit fuzzy at the moment, but I hope to get it more in focus.

There’s another something that’s taking shape in my mind around creative collaboration (and the late, lamented “Centre for…”), scenius, regrowing a living culture, empty shops, local democracy and resilience, finding different ways of looking after each other, y’know, the usual. And yeah, it’s as well-thought through as that.

I thought we had a power cut the other day. I thought that it was just coincidental that everything went off just as I was turning the oven on for dinner. So I waited and looked outside to see what was going on in the rest of the street (nothing) and looked on Twitter (nothing) and so looked on the UK Power (or whatever) website which said nothing had been reported in my postcode so please tell us what’s happened. And that got me muttering under my breath about useless infrastructure and privatised utilities and bastard Tories and all that. But hey, look at the first paragraph of this post – “excessive certainty” I was sure, because I’d seen other people elsewhere, earlier talking about having their power off, that this was just another slippery slide towards anarchy and chaos. My certainty extended even as far as me looking at the fuse board and being sure that nothing had tripped when the nice man from the infrastructure bastards called me back. But no, taking it slowly and going and turning everything off, resetting the trip switches and then turning things back on one by one meant that I now know that it was the oven and it was no coincidence – I was wrong.

I just posted the following on FB and remembered that I went looking because I was inspired by old blog posts and so really I ought to be making new blog posts out of such stuff rather than adding to the Zuckoverse (I left the FB identity links in tho).

Encouraged by Dean I went looking in the Wayback Machine for a project that Deborah and I made in early 2006. It has a splendid “This plugin is not supported” message instead of any video but it gives an insight into a world where it wasn’t at all clear whether YouTube was for people like us or whether it was going to stick around.

https://web.archive.org/web/20060410213157/http://www.perfectpath.co.uk/atab2/

I’ve spent most of this week being “Global IT Services Director” (this is a joke – I’m supposed to be a community worker, but I am the person who “understands computers”). New laptops, archaic mailservers, “free” software for non-profits have all dominated instead of “making cups of tea and being nice to people”. This is not a good thing.

Dave Briggs is also “daynoting” at https://da.vebrig.gs/ and doing it very enjoyably even though he’s still a youth. I had a lovely coffee and chat with Robert Brook yesterday and much of our conversation revolved around this thing of just making the thing that you make and doing so regularly (not even every day) without worrying about what’s going to happen to it next.

A tune came to me while brushing my teeth this morning – it’s a bluesy thing that goes with the drone of my electric toothbrush (at least the way it sounds inside my head when it’s… y’know inside my head). I recorded the melody but I’ll have to check back on the note for the drone because my toothbrush ran out of juice at the end of this morning’s brushing. For the time-being it’s called “Toothbrush Blues”

There’s a train strike today, but I’m going to attempt to go down to the coast to see my old ma. Who knows (or cares) how long it will take?

“What shall we do for the Coronation…?” – to the tune of “What shall we do with the drunken sailor?” the lines to replace “early in the morning” – six syllables, come up with your own!I forget how much of a put off it can be for me to write here, if I think I have to have a title to pull it all together. It’s one of the ways we ruined the blogosphere (with a lot of help from Google Reader imho) by making tools that insisted on having a title rather than just being today’s log of the web.

So here’s some of today’s stuff.

I worked yesterday afternoon on an idea about an “alternative oath” that came from Liz Slade Here in the UK, on Saturday we’ve a day of what, supposedly, “we do best” – pomp and pageantry in celebration of a new monarch and his missus. And part of that has been a suggestion that we all pledge an oath of allegiance to C3 (as he’s most efficiently, if not respectfully, called). Rather than kick back hard on that and try to get everyone to directly rebel, Liz suggested accepting that people are free to make the official oath to the King or to refuse to, but they might also like to make a pledge to being the best we can be in society and in relation to all life on this planet. She shared some words in a little group I’m in and as I was in the middle of writing a piece of music that didn’t have any words, I wondered what it would take to make the pledge also be a little song. You won’t be surprised to hear that it took more than I initially thought, that I had to record many many takes and change the words a lot before I had something I was happy with sharing with Liz and then even more changes once I’d shared it because that’s one of the points where, regardless of what they say in response, you realise the things that need to change. It’s one of my biggest beefs with being a creative human being – that first drafts are always shit, that fifty-seventh drafts can be as hard to write as the first one and show very little progress.

I’m helping to run an Intergenerational Music Making Hub as part of my community work at church. Today we did #3 of 4 in the current round of experiments with this format – it needs experiments and iteration for the same reasons and with some of the same feelings as expressed in the last sentence of my previous paragraph. It’s always good. Like all the interventions we make around the church building, you can’t go badly wrong as long as you stay human, with a touch of humilty and kindness. There are things we learn all the time, but in a delightfully meta way, that’s one of the things that I’m always learning, that the learning is never going to be finished.

I took my version of the oath/song to the hub and tried it out with people. Ugh. It’s bad enough sharing one of your brain-babies with a group of friends on a private internet forum, but actually playing and singing something new, with people who have no idea what you’re trying to do, is the kind of thing that only someone with the temperament of a “Lloyd Davis” would do. I can’t give up these little experiments in stretching people’s experience away from the “way we’ve always done things” along many many dimensions. That’s as much as I can say about it today – btw this was only about 10 minutes out of a ninety-minute session, I don’t want to blow it up as a big disaster that dominated the day – it’s more that I don’t think I know what I think about it yet.

One of the things I heard myself saying after the hub was “the challenge in this kind of work is that people come with some identity based in a group and/or a selfishness or expectation that their individual needs are going to be met and that works against us all doing the same thing together.” – and that feels like something interesting.

Well I had a lot more to say today, but that’s as much as you’re getting – it was a full day.

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.

“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, 2023This 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 ) 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.

So first, here it is, the thing I was talking about yesterday:

But I feel I should say something more about it than “here it is”. Perhaps where it came from, how it came to be. And as usual where to start that story is hard to pin down.

In terms of writing the words, the first bit that I wrote was about 12 years ago when I wrote a limerick on a napkin in the Pret at Hyde Park Corner, shortly after the end of a sweet but doomed-by-long-distance relationship. And it’s still there as the first verse of “Keeping My Pictures of You”

Then it grew because at the time it was becoming a thing, in certain corners of the internet, for people to be sending intimate photographs of themselves to each other, because they could. And it seemed like there might be some fun in thinking about how that might play out in a light-hearted way (before the concept of revenge porn came and ruined some people’s lives) – the perils associated with the persistence of digital media.

The other three were all written in 2015/16 – Blockchain Blues after I went to some technical seminar on how Bitcoin works, which is why it has references to “merkle trees” that most people won’t understand. Enemy Within came days after the election of the 45th President of the USA. It was slightly different then, more repetitive (using “choose not to” over and over again) and was more inspired by the shock that someone could say all the things he’d said and still get elected. And at the same time, we were seeing the Brexit vote here and the same sorts of people involved. Finally The Ballad of Ned’s Head came about as part of a fundraiser songwriting challenge for some good cause or other. I think the prompt was simply a picture of a guy called Ned and it seemed like the quickest thing to do would be a nonsense song based around things that rhyme with Ned.

I had them all as demos with me singing to ukulele, as is my way. Ned’s Head and Blockchain Blues are a 12-bar and 16-bar blues respectively. Enemy Within is set to something like the traditional tune “Red River Valley” and Keeping My Pictures just came out like that, I don’t have enough music theory or history to know what it is. I just knew it was a waltz – are limericks particularly suitable to a 3/4 setting? I don’t know.

And then over the years I’ve performed them all live, which helped to refine the lyrics based on audience reactions – always much less outrage than I anticipate and oddly, more laughs than expected, so you work up the laughter – this particularly applied to performing Ned’s Head to see what kinds of picture you can paint and how the character of the storyteller emerged.

I’d never done any proper home-recording. I’ve been in proper recording studios with proper engineers doing things with tape, because I’m old, but never really got the hang of stuff like Garageband.

Then in October, I had Covid and had time to watch “Get Back” and seeing them in the studio sparked something in me. People always say that the Beatles were successful because they were ordinary and just like us and it reminded me too of the beginning of Mark Lewisohn’s book where he goes through their family trees and it struck me that not only were they “just like us”, their whole families were just like mine – the same characters, the same stories and so I was watching “Get Back” with them practicing and recording and evolving the material, with much less technology than I’ve got on my desktop and I thought “perhaps I could have a go at making something a bit more polished of the songs I’ve got” – Y’know, if they could do it…

So the short version is that I then downloaded Reaper (it’s great!) and found an online course in how to use it to record your own things at home and did that. Spent a couple of weeks coming out of Covid recording a version of Sweet Georgia Brown and once I’d done that, I set myself the 30-day challenge of making something every day with the four songs that are here. That’s all.

So do have a listen, you can stream for free (though I think there’s some limit, I can’t remember what) and if you like it, chuck us a fiver.

I’m doing something unusual for me tomorrow. I’m releasing some musical recordings that I’ve been working on since the beginning of November.

The main oddity in all of that is that I gave myself a release date ahead of time and have finished the work a couple of days ahead of it. My custom has been to make things quickly and just put things out there as soon as they’re done, because earlier on in life I found that deadlines would always be missed and then I had the awfulness of delivering late and often it felt like just not delivering at all would be preferable.

In reaction to that, I developed this style of producing material in the now – rough and ready, improvised, immediate – maybe you’ll like what I make today or maybe you won’t but don’t worry, there’ll be something new along tomorrow (or maybe the next day). It suits work that is performative, but what if I don’t have the capacity to put on a performance today? And for my writing, over time, if I (or anyone else) ever wanted to draw stuff together and make something new out of it, or develop ideas at length it’s been difficult and disjointed – it’s made to be read now(-ish), like you just bumped into me and we went for a coffee or like I left you a really long voicemail. That’s why I found my voice in blogging and podcasting and then Twitter. There’s polish, but it isn’t used to improve the individual items, it’s spent on the practice of being able to create rough and ready items that are just about good enough and which might, if you’re lucky, have some charm for showing some humanity in this world of slickly, machined “content”.

And there’s a defence in there too, that you’re being brave and putting stuff out there and of course if people don’t like it, you can hide behind the fact that you didn’t put much work into it anyway.

And yet. And yet I yearned to make something that had clearly taken some time and effort, something that wasn’t just the first or second take. The most recent breakthrough came at the end of October when I decided that I’d set myself a “30 days of making something” challenge – no project plan or milestones but a simple plan to do something towards a project every day in November and allow that to be enough. The first thing off the top of my head was to work on these songs, to make something more than a demo and to implement ideas I’ve had about making music ever since I saw someone making weird shit with a portastudio.

The practice became just letting myself do something towards it today, rather than trying to get it to a particular stage or be able to share the latest half-baked version. I had four songs. Some days I did something with all of them, some days I focused on the tiniest part of just one. But I kept going through November, just ticking off the days. About half-way through I thought perhaps it would all be ready for release at the beginning of December. That soon evaporated as a goal, but I was OK with it. I’d succeeded in the actual goal, which was to pay attention to something every day for thirty days. The day job got in the way at the beginning of December and then I had a viral wipeout over Christmas, so in the new year I edged towards the idea of fixing 1st Feb as release day. That gave me something to work towards, which was eminently do-able and suddenly it was last weekend and everything was pretty much done.

But also I’ve been working alone on this. I know that the songs are alright in themselves (they’ve all been out in the wilds of YouTube for some years and I’ve worked them out live, with audiences of varying sizes and levels of friendliness) but the only other person who’s heard them in this form is my wife and as she’s pretty much guaranteed to be positive about them, I’m now feeling the first-night nerves of unveiling something in public.

What I’m ignoring though is the fact that I’ve been working on this for a while now. And you can’t work on everything all the time, so you do a bit on one and then come back to it a few days later and that’s a collaboration between “past you” and “now you” – sometimes nothing has changed in you in relation to this thing, but most often you will hear something new or have another idea while doing something completely different that means you can come back to it fresh. So I’ve not been working alone after all, but it’s not just a collaboration between teenage me day-dreaming about multi-track recording on cassettes, with ten-years-ago me writing silly words on napkins in Pret a Manger and me sitting in my front bedroom in front of a microphone with my ukulele, it’s all the bits in between that have fed me and the material and continue to do so.

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.

Back, because #fediverse and because #music

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 … Continue reading What even is an idea? →

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 … Continue reading Simple body maintenance things →

I’ll be opening space, as part of my work with Guildford United Reformed Church, on 14th May, for the question: “What are we going to do to nurture and nourish the spirit of Community in Guildford?” There’s a booking page with the full invitation, but here’s a little video version I did: I’ve called it … Continue reading For the ❤️ of Guildford →

It was good to give myself a break over the weekend even if it means I’m thinking about trivial things like day numbering… Having chosen this topic, it was easier for me to tidy up the most immediate stuff around my desk, making a “Tony” box and putting everything else away. But that did also … Continue reading Tony’s Memorial (day 2? or 4?) →

Today was a thinking day. Starting a new project. Well, choosing a new project first of all. Last weekend I went through the cards I’ve been using for the last 28 days and wrote down what project idea I had for each of them. Just the first thing off the top of my head. Today … Continue reading Family History Project Day 1 of 28 →

Again, building connections between people through social objects. Social objects that are things or ideas that are sitting around waiting for someone to go “oh this is interesting” and someone else to go “yes I think so too” because that’s the beginning of a new relationship and lots of those together make a community. That’s … Continue reading Share Something Every Day – Community From What’s Lying Around →

A gentle day at work today. I was a bit tired after going to London last night. The Sunflower Café group are getting to know each other better and relaxing a little. They’re excited about the music group that we’ll be restarting soon. We found an Order of Service from the opening of the building … Continue reading Share Something Every Day – Community (and Wife) →

I pulled the coding card again today and carried on working on automating my general knowledge management workflow, basically how I take notes, organise ideas about things that I’ve read or written in the past and turn them into something new. Today this involved fiddling again with Drafts to do something that’s basically a mail … Continue reading Share Something Every Day – Coding →

First thing is that 13th September is my blogiversary. It’s now seventeen years since I bit the bullet and committed to keeping a weblog at https://perfectpath.co.uk and not deleting it. The main things I thought about this today were how much stuff there is in here and how I’ve never quite achieved the goal I … Continue reading Share Something Every Day – Various →

I overdid it this week. I found that adding in exercise, more water and better sleep this week worked well on my ADHD, but left me vulnerable to doing too much. It all needs to be balanced with rest outside of sleeping at night. Yes it’s all common sense. No I still am not able … Continue reading Share Something Every Day – Sunday Review →

I put today’s gig in the book late in November 2019. Just after a holiday in Iceland, my last flight and last trip out of the country. It came out of one of those random conversations on Twitter – someone said something like “do I know anyone who’s a busker?” to which friends of friends … Continue reading Share Something Every Day – Music/Performance →

Community Today I learned that there are (at least) two model railway societies in Guildford. The one that most people seem to know about is the Guildford Model Engineering Society who have a base in Stoke Park. They have 3½, 5 and 7¼ inch gauge passenger railways and have open days throughout the year. I … Continue reading Share Something Every Day →

When I wrote my review of the week on Sunday, I forgot something that I’d meant to say. I regularly forget that making Community is something that I probably work on every day. If I’m not actively doing it, I’m thinking about it. I’m writing about it or writing something that will help people connect … Continue reading Share Something Every Day – Community →

Today was my wedding anniversary – we walked over to Watt’s Gallery along the North Down’s Way and had lunch. I was glad to see my friend Debbie Davies’s artwork “Belonging” is still hanging in one of the oak trees outside. It looked great today against the blue of the sky and the green trees, … Continue reading Share something every day – weekly review →

I went for a nice long walk this morning, about 5 miles, before breakfast. It was warmer than it has been lately but still cloudy. It’s supposed to get warmer this week. It was a good space to think about things – especially my desire to make some very simple automation for my blogging. Everything … Continue reading Share Something Every Day – Coding 002 →

Back to the candles I went for a run this morning, because I was reminded, by a slight deterioration in my mental health, that I need to do physical and manual work as much as thinking and making digital artefacts. So I just gave myself to whittling down some of these candles, chipping a bit … Continue reading Share Something Every Day – Craft 002 →

Today, I was more gentle with myself. I pulled “coding”. Now I definitely don’t have any coding projects all set up and ready to go. But I am interested in how to automate my workflow for blogging on Hive. The process for wordpress is straightforward and handled by lots of different clients. I currently post … Continue reading Make Something Every Day – Coding 001 →

It was bound to happen sooner or later. My heart kind of sank when I saw that I’d drawn “podcast” today. I haven’t made a podcast for quite a while and the reason for that doesn’t seem to be that I haven’t given myself time to do it. Because today, I gave myself the whole … Continue reading Make Something Every Day – FAIL 001 (was Podcast) →

I pulled “Film”. That’s tricky – make a film, on a Bank Holiday Monday… starting….. now! My first reaction was to cheat it, by applying it to all of the actual bits of film that I have lying around in various states of processing. One way of looking at this way of working (I hesitate … Continue reading Make Something Every Day – Film 001 →

On Sundays I’m going to review the week past. I’ve done 9 days of making something every day. Woohoo! The formatting of this post is wonky and shoddy because it’s 8.30pm on Sunday and I haven’t made the dinner yet and I’m going to get yelled at. what i set out to do (having written … Continue reading review – week 1 of making every day →

Today I rebelled. Slightly. Or perhaps I just tweaked the rules based on learning what works. I’ve been thinking for a couple of days that Sunday needs to be a review day rather than a full “production” day. Writing And then I pulled “Writing” again. The first repeat. And while I have done some writing … Continue reading Make Something Every Day – Writing 002 →

“Family History” day kicked off with a memory shared from Facebook. Last year, I saw this photo shared on a South Birmingham Past/Present type group and was pretty sure I’d spotted my aunt, Saffron, so shared it with her and I was right. We think it was 1956. She and Sue gave me some more … Continue reading make something every day – family history 001 →

THERE ARE DAYS WHEN I SEE THE TASK AND GO “YUK, I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M GOING TO DO” AND THEN SPEND HOURS THINKING ABOUT IT AND OTHERS, LIKE TODAY, WHERE I KNOW IMMEDIATELY WHAT I WAS GOING TO DO. Today was “WasteCraft” – which is inspired by Ian Willey‘s workshops of the same name. … Continue reading make something every day – wastecraft 001 →

I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that today was “Make Photos”. I can do that. I feel good about my photography. I’ve been doing it for a very long time. I mean, I suppose, technically, I’ve been writing longer, but it doesn’t feel like that and I’m just much more comfortable with … Continue reading make something every day – make photos 001 →

Seek and ye shall find... Ask and it shall be given. LOL.

OK, so the answer to the question of whether I work on Sunday was “yes, kinda”. There’s a reason for the sabbath. At a practical level it’s about unwinding and connecting with people we care about. Today was my son’s birthday and I’m glad I had a good long chat with him. But I did … Continue reading make something everyday – music 001 →

You get two posts today as I catch up. Can’t find a catchy enough title for this project, but this is only Day 2, we’ll see. Do I work on Sundays (tomorrow)? Dunno, we’ll see. If you missed it, the beginning of the previous post has an explanation.

Today I pulled “My Archive”.

Already, I can’t remember what I was thinking when I wrote these out. But there’s a lot to be done with “My Archive”, that’s for sure, whatever it is. I’m not certain quite where the line is between my archive and family history at the moment, I suppose it’s things that I made or things that are about me – but who cares? So there’s a bit of the process emerging which is that I have to have a bit of a think and a bit of a write first before I settle on what it is that I’m going to make. The writing, thinking and doing might not all get represented in the blog post.

I got a bit distracted by the perennial blogging software/where to publish/how to publish bullshit and that’s the last time I’m going to mention it. But when I’d calmed down and thought about it, I realised that actually scanning some negatives that I shot in about 1980 or ’81 and putting them on Flickr with some tags and a bit of a description was a worthwhile enough thing to do, it does get me engaged with organising the massive cloud of stuff that’s on digital platforms and in cardboard boxes, the only real index of which is my brain. Just writing stuff down instead of thinking about it is really useful, if only because it helps me to stop thinking about it.

1 of 23 in the first roll I’m not entirely happy with how the album got embedded from Flickr in WordPress, so I’ve replaced it with just one image. You can jump to Flickr if you want to see the whole thing and maybe like and comment and stuff. Maybe you recognise some of the people I don’t. Or the venue. Or know when it was. None of which I have much of a clue about – some archivist.

It was shot on HP5, and these are straight from the scanner, no cropping or colour correction yet.

I was using a flash, so wasn’t at the stage where I was experimenting with pushing the film speed to extremes. I know that I got my first SLR for my 15th birthday, so this is most likely to be 1980. Tony joined the Zenith Hot Stompers in October 1981 and so this will be before then. If I didn’t fear contradiction, I would say it was a configuration of the New Delta Jazzmen – Tony Davis, trumpet; Mick Jones, trombone; Clive Millward, drums; Pete Barnard, banjo; I don’t know the clarinet or bass players. And I’d also say it was upstairs at the Booth Hall at Hereford, but I have no evidence for that other than forty-year-old memories that are very unreliable.

This was just the first 24-exposure roll, there’s another 36-exp one to do, which might yield more clues.

It’s very odd looking at pictures I made forty years ago and trying to think about what I thought I was doing. I can see that I was experimenting and getting my eye in. But it was hard then, not having near infinite storage or the ability to check what you just shot. Experimentation with shooting live events was risky when you wouldn’t get anything back till you’d had some time in the dark room. There are plenty of rookie composition mistakes and bits where the person I was shooting turned their head at the last minute, but again, you just don’t know that until you develop the film.

So how does that add to my archive? Well it’s a bit more action research, I suppose. I’ve done something, thought about it, recorded some data and written about it. It’s not nearly as organised as I want it to be, but it’s an improvement. Progress.

Back from a week in Wales, I am newly inspired to walk and talk.

I didn't run as far as I set out to and this is why

A more episodic episode today with me puffing post-run, making my smoothie and strolling past a busker in the High St.

Stuff about swimming in a polluted environment and acting responsibly towards your environment both the material one such as the river I'm walking by but also the information ecosystem that this podcast forms part of.

Not as heavy as it sounds. Or is it?

The video I reference is Daniel Schmachtenberger talking to Rebel Wisdom about The War on Sense-Making.

Just a few words to describe what's going on here.