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A few days before Christmas in Totnes, the monthly Wondermentalist Cabaret shifted its poetic gaze towards Transition…. host and local poet-in-residence Matt Harvey has been making a short film for the BBC about Transition, and so part of the show featured his thoughts on it for the programme. You can hear it using the ‘Traydioplayer’ below. His set also included his rather good Christmas poem.
Since it was launched, Transition Culture has grown its readership rapidly. Until recently it was hosted by the wonderful Oxford-based LumpyLemon, but in the weeks running up to Christmas, the scale of the traffic we have been generating led to their server crashing on several occasions (as you may have noticed). It reached a stage where they could no longer host a site of our size, and so we have had to move home, to a more commercial server. As a result, this site, which has no financial income or support, is now having to pay £20 a month just to exist, and so I’d like to invite your support.
When viewed with detatchment, there is something profoundly sad about the annual deeply stressful and financially impoverishing orgy of Christmas consumerism, as distinct from the far more enjoyable aspect of it, the time at home, time off work, seeing friends and family and so on. My thinking this means that I must be a dreadful pain in the arse to take Christmas shopping. What follows is an account of my forays into the world of the Christmas shopper….
A Tale of Two Cities… well three actually….
The first was NYC. We had a quiet night at The Bridge Winery in Brooklyn. Several people turned up, young mostly, and turned on -a good group. We had a small conversation about TTs; they listened and asked good questions and we had a dialogue. Two things struck me. Firstly the audience was young. That’s unusual, and that probably reflects my daughter, who organised the evening. The other was that of the 7-8 million people in NYC only 8 could be bothered to show up.
It’s that time of year when the laptop gets turned off, put in the drawer and when family, friends and not getting up at 6.45am to write Transition Culture posts come to the fore. Thank you so much for all your support, comments and hard work during 2008, the year that, I think, will go down in history as the point when the Great Unravelling really began, and when the seeds of the Great Turning began to grow with phenomenal speed. What an extraordinary time to be alive. Sharon Astyk has made her predictions for 2009, my only prediction to add is that by the end of 2009, very few people, especially those in positions of authority, will still be talking about “when things get back to normal”. Anyway, have a great break, and normal service will be resumed at Transition Culture on January 5th. See you then.
