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…
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…
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…
LXI’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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Wayback archive of my dopplr page I 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…)…
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 we are heavily conditioned into thinking a) that any group of less…
“Elephant drinking water” from Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums on Flickr 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 should explain that we’re not creating any new Black…
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 intention for learning, it was the main thing that seemed different to me about the work that I’d done…
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 went into that walled garden, it probably made sense at the time (actually seeing the tags of people’s names, I probably…
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…
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…
“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)…
#onthebus https://www.instagram.com/p/CqU2y3DNZP2/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
