Just pleasantly floundering around.....

A draft post I wrote ten years ago that I thought i would publish... I have never been to the Outer Hebrides but somehow have still managed to feel a (very) mild affiliation to them on account of the following.   When I was about eleven our dad returned from work one day with the weighty speculation that we might move to Benbecular so that my dad could run the airport there. Apparently the airport traffic amounted to about one aeroplane a day. The move was carefully and seriously considered over the following few weeks. I remember feeling extremely unsettled by this idea and the more I learned about the Outer Hebrides, the more resistance I felt. Aside from being told most island children go to boarding schools on mainland Scotland for their education and that its young residents usually do very well academically because there's nothing to do but study (this really scared me) my main fear was centred around the fact that devout religion on the islands meant people were not al...

  For so many reasons: Who exactly gets to decide which ideas are allowed one the table? If people don't get the discuss their views, how will they be able to take in new information? Censorship increases polarisation. Polarisation seems to make people less able to discuss ideas outside of their own. 'Toleration' of views other than your own, can help develop understanding.

The world doesn’t hang about for nuance, does it? It makes up its mind really quickly and then starts shouting from a place of emotion and sometimes, sadly, hate. Social media and the media seem to encourage this. I feel they bring out the worst aspects of human nature and appear to revel in them as - after all – contention does keep people hooked doesn’t it?  So the latest shouting match appears to be around the protests aimed at drag artists who read stories to children. One such act read one of my books recently and made  it far more entertaining than I ever could. It was totally child-friendly, really funny and extremely engaging. So what is all the fuss? Well I have been watching closely….  Drag has its history in a gay culture that was mostly pushed underground and  ‘outside’ mainstream – thus not in common consciousness, so many people are not used to it (other than a handful of ‘distanced’ TV celebrities). It also has history in  the fact women were not ...

Once upon a time humans lived in tribes: of 150 people at most. Everyone would have known and felt some responsibility for everyone in that tribe. There would have been a balance of evolved traits so some people were more adventurous than others (which was good for hunting and finding new foods) and some more neurotic than others (which was good for the tribe because someone was always on high alert for any danger that might arrive). Emotions evolved for us to live like this: to optimise chances of survival and as part of that survival, to make us socially palatable to others so that we were not kicked out of the tribe. The tribe lived to serve each other and of all was well, would survive to reproduce. Then we learnt how to farm. This changed things and introduced the capacity for inequality as some people could accumulate more than others, and they did. Thousands of years later, for example, a miller had accrued enough wealth to build a mill. This meant he could work less by chargi...

This is a very special event that I have been to four times. Three of those times I told stories, but the last time I was in the audience. It's hard to explain just how special this event is. It's like people watching plus! And because the audience is - quite rightly - primed to be kind and compassionate towards the speakers, you get a sense that the room fills up with love as more speakers add their stories. Some people's stories are funny, some haunting, some astonishing and others heart-breaking. You certain feel like you've been on an emotional journey by the time it finishes. Here you can find the last story I told: I am not a pyromaniac . You can judge for yourself. And here is the song that goes with the story: Closet Pyromaniac Ooo the incongruence shows already!

Lockdown has certainly meant I have 1) been on a lot of local walks and 2) 'milked' my city as much as I could such that there are few corners of it that I haven't explored. This was a walk my main walking buddy and I did in a highly urban area. I made up the instructions unsure of whether they would work or not - but they worked well so I thought I would share the instructions to the 'out there'. You'll need to adapt a couple of bits - like the names for example. If anyone does it - I'd love to hear how it went! Random Walk Instructions ·       Walk straight unless told otherwise. ·       At T junctions toss coin head left tails right ·       At bends, follow bend round. ·       If you reach a dead-end, turn around and walk back and continue with the instructions. 1)      Walk forward. 2)      Take the first opportunity to turn rig...