Just pleasantly floundering around.....

  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 allowed to play parts in

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 right. Put the name of the road you are walking down into a sentence, a song or make an anagram of that name. 3)     

  I just read an article about how rape prosecutions were in decline. So, the article went on to explain, there was a (long overdue) government review and fundamentally the outcome was that some targets were set for more prosecutions. No more funding, no more preventative or proactive measures put in place such as education, training or raising awareness, no more resourcing within the police to support rape victims. At best, this will bring the lack of rape prosecutions into focus for a while. It reminded me of a time when Accident and Emergency Departments were given the target of seeing anyone who walked in their door within the first ten minutes. I heard anecdotally that this resulted in someone being given the job of holding a clipboard and ‘booking in’ new arrivals within said ten minutes and then the patient had to wait the same amount as time as before. Totally ineffective, and what’s more, the ‘clipboard person’ was actually a resource removed from elsewhere. With no further