I wrote this, and my manager Graham kindly read it, for the service last Sunday about the music work we do with people living with dementia and their carers. “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” Twenty voices in unison releasing for a few minutes the individual identities we brought…
I started working as Community Worker at Guildford United Reformed Church in the middle of last November. It was fun trying to find my feet working in a church for the first time in the weeks running up to Christmas. I’ve settled into a bit more of a routine now and started writing weeknotes, primarily…
On Saturday afternoon, the weir and footbridge on the River Wey just upstream from the Millmead Lock collapsed. It’s a popular place for people to stroll at the weekend, so it’s not surprising that there was someone on the bridge at the time and given it’s 2019, equally unsurprising that they managed to shoot some…
I helped run the Redecentralize 2019 unconference in London last Friday. “Everyone wants to know what happened, but nobody wants to write a report” is an exaggerated version of a familiar refrain at unconferences. We used etherpads for people to be able make contemporaneous notes (although that was minorly scuppered by poor WiFi access). So…
I’ve spent some time this afternoon working out where some of my earliest stuff on the web is. It’s easy to forget now what it was like, at the turn of the century, to get a web site up and write stuff to it. The Wayback Machine is a great help, but the archiving runs…
When I was in the Sixth Form and applying for drama degrees, my headmaster invited me in for a chat one day. He very much wanted to impress on me the folly of relying on the arts for a career. Little did he know at the time that I was doing so little work on…
It’s the time of year that without cultural cues like sweet sticky chocolately smells or repetitive music from (mostly) happy times in our childhood, we’d stay at home. But that would be derelicting our civic duty to shop and engage with our favourite brands downtown! So someone hires the chocolate peanut man and pays the…
Look, it’s only been twenty-five years we’ve had this thing, it takes time to understand how it works over longer time periods. I know that for some people the web is over, blogs are over, because FB is where everyone’s talking. And I do know a lot of people who seem to spend a lot…
I’m thinking about this a lot. When we moved to Guildford eighteen months ago, I would find myself gobsmacked at the zombie-ness of the Saturday shoppers – wandering the town centre looking for something, anything to fill the hole in the soul. Bloody Surrey! Bloody boomers with their early retirement and 10x property value increases….
Sorry. This is a bit of a filler to say that I’m intending to be writing here again more. I’ve been blogging over on Steemit the blockchain-based blogging platform where you get paid in cryptocurrency for writing, commenting and curating and I’ll still be over there, but because of the market-like nature of it, it…