Transition Culture has moved
I no longer blog on this site. You can now find me, my general blogs, and the work I am doing researching my forthcoming book on imagination, on my new blog.
Come find me at robhopkins.net
Showing results 111 - 115 of 506 for the category: General.
Lots of people have asked about it, especially those from outside the UK who weren’t able to see it on the BBC iPlayer, but I’m delighted to have found that the programme in its entirety is now available to view on YouTube. Sit back and enjoy…
https://youtu.be/vunRJIqGToA
Evening sun lights up the cathedral in the old quarter of Deventer, Holland.
How’s this for an interesting sign of the times? I travel to Brussels on Eurostar, I arrive and write a tweet saying “just travelled to Brussels on Eurostar, very nice it was too”, and almost immediately get a tweet back from them saying “glad you enjoyed the journey”! Didn’t expect that one. That’s either really great or a bit scary, I haven’t decided yet. Anyway, I am just back from a mad-dash tour of Belgium and Holland. It was fascinating to see the level of interest in Transition in those places and to meet some of the people involved.
I loved Ed Mitchell’s post over on the Transition Network site as part of the ‘fantastic ‘social reporters’ project. There are 12 ‘social reporters’ around the UK who will be blogging in a rota, producing one blog post every day, on a subject set by a guest editor at the beginning of the week. Ed’s was called “A liminal song of thanks”, and in it he wrote:
“That’s why we’re staying up late, working on personal time, finding friends who don’t want to support this future, even though it seems unavoidable, and jamming with them, making it up as we go, sharing our personal stories, openly, our successes, our failures, our hopes, our dreams, our loves. Our vegetables. Wrestling with content management systems that aren’t as perfect as our hopes”.
Beautiful. No mention of making your own paint out of cheese though. So I thought I’d better put that right this morning.
As part of last weekend’s Transition Town Totnes Open Eco-Homes weekend, I visited a house in Lower Allerton that was built in the 16th century, and which has recently been making many changes to reduce its environmental impact. As regular readers will know, I have done a fair bit of cob building in my time, and have often had to deal with the question “won’t it just wash away in the rain”, a question as infuriating to cob builders as Three Little Pigs jokes are to straw bale builders. The highlight for me, therefore, of the visit to Lower Allerton, was the 500 year-old cob walls.
In 1968, according to Immigration Department papers found on a rubbish dump near London 18 years later, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band arrived at Heathrow Airport. Their inept manager had booked them a series of gigs in the UK, but had overlooked to arrange work visas. As a deeply eccentric, highly individual group who had previously only played the West Coast of the US, to say they stood out like a sore thumb in drab, late 1960s England, would be an understatement. According to the Immigration Department papers, “the group arrived together and presented a very strange appearance, being attired in clothing ranging from ‘jeans’ to purple trousers with shirts of various hues, and wearing headgear varying from conical witches hats to a brilliant yellow safety helmet of the type worn by construction workers….
