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
On Wednesday night in Totnes, TTT held its Election Hustings event. By the day of the election, there will have been 7 hustings events in the area, most of them following the traditional format of candidates in a row being asked questions by the audience. TTT wanted to do things a bit differently, so a different format was devised in an attempt to get away from the usual experience of such events, and it worked very well.
I am writing this as I travel back from a great trip to the beautiful city of Lancaster. The reason for the trip was two-fold, firstly to co-present a workshop to the City Council, and secondly for that evening’s Unleashing of Transition City Lancaster (TCL). I arrived off the train in Lancaster at about 2pm, and met Alexis Rowell, Camden’s eco-councillor and author of the forthcoming Transition Books tome on how to work with your local Council, as well as Steve and Rob of TCL. We headed over to the Council offices to set up the workshop we were doing there for Council officers and members.
Last week none of us had ever heard of an Icelandic volcano called Eyjafjallajokull, and still even now, very few of us can actually pronounce its name. The volcanic dust spewn forth across Europe as a result of its spectacular eruption has had a remarkable effect, leading to, among other things, the total grounding of the UK’s aviation fleet for several days until this morning. The headline on Metro, the free newspaper the person next to me on the train is reading as I write this, is “Fly, fly again”. It will take days to clear the backlog and to get things back to normal, but let us not pass up this opportunity to meditate on vulnerability and resilience, which led to major disruption to the air freighting of produce from Kenya and other places, thousands of people stuck in their Easter holiday destinations, and Liverpool Football Club having to travel to its Europa League fixture with Athletico Madrid on public transport . But perhaps rather than seeing it as the ‘misery’ most news broadcasts labelled it as, we might see it as good practice for the near future.
Here’s a great short film about Transition Town Kingston, created for their Unleashing, which took place on Saturday. Wonderful when initiatives document their work like this. Not quite sure what’s going on with Shaun Chamberlin and the phone box… looks like he has wrestled it to the ground….
As regular readers will know, I get very excited about good compost. It is one of the most exquisite things on earth. Words like ‘crumbly’, ‘friable’, ‘rich’, ‘humus’ and ‘moist’ verge on the erotic for me, and from comments posted here previously, I know many of your share my enthusiasm for the ‘brown stuff’. Therefore, the pictures I am about to show you verge on being ‘compost porn’, an entirely wholesome way to set the collective pulse racing. A bit late in the season, I finally tracked down a local farmer with well rotted muck for my raised beds. Often such a request results in a load of barely rotted, nettle-filled stuff you have to leave to compost for a couple of years. However, I had little idea what exquisite compost fate had in store.
