Weeknotes 02025 Q1 Week 3

DCAP

Various admin tasks – registration as trustee, bank account stuff. The Trustees are considering our Membership model and how best to manage it

I’ve received hints of a local actor taking an interest in the organisation and seeking information about us without just coming and asking us. For me, this reinforces the need to protect ourselves from malign intentions.

Wednesday Evening – Saltmarsh Coast Walking Festival meet-up in Maldon

Friday – First of a new regular chat with Jo Phillips, Chair of Heybridge & Maldon Community Action Partnership finding synergies between our groups, sharing learnings, planning collaborations

Saturday – I lead a Saltmarsh Coast Walking Festival winter walk, A circular route Burnham-Creeksea-Burnham.

Day Job

Ticking over. No hints yet of how future Labour austerity will hit our grant in aid. I expect things will be quiet until the Spending Review later in the year but the recent economic jiggles leave everything uncertain.

Everyday Life

Monday – My bro went to Bedfordshire to pick up family photos from my Aunt’s old house. 4 years after her death we’re finally reaching the end of a difficult and expensive process. I’m yet to meet up with him and decide what we are going to do with the photos but he’s already shared a bunch of images I’ve never seen before and I’m so glad we got them, they seemed lost forever just the week before.

Now the rise of the Right has reached the Town Council Chamber, 3 minutes walk from my house the fear of the Fash is fully realised. I went on to a local Facebook group and posted the anti-Reform UK graphic above, I got quite a few likes but the Reformistas were soon in the comments and I bowed out. I see engaging on social media as solely about presenting counter-arguments to silent readers who don’t engage, arguing with the actual nutjobs in the comments is part of that – it’s never about trying to win the nutjobs over. Knowing when to withdraw is essential to protect one’s mental health and I don’t always judge it right.

The incipient ant-racist grouping of associates from previous projects has solidified plans. The local election is soon. Some resistance to Reform UK has also appeared from unknown players.

Thursday – I didn’t have enough disposable £ to go to London for the Long Now meeting (again). Its schedule means it always happens the week before my pay day when I’m most wary of spending: the cost of return travel and a couple of drinks divided by the minimal time I can attend (due to 10.13 pm from Liverpool Street being the last train that will get me home) makes for a poor cost/benefit ratio.

Saturday – the Saltmarsh Coast Walking Festival walk mentioned above. I was looking forward to seeing Steve Jordan but he couldn’t make it on the day.

Sunday – C and I went to the Tirzah Garwood – Beyond Ravillious exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery and met a friend of C’s there. We hadn’t checked in advance and faced double bus replacement in Essex and the Jubilee line closed at Stratford. I particularly enjoyed Garwood’s small wood engravings. Her paintings were subtly surreal and more effective for that, a good contrast to the visual work of the English Surrealist movement – much of which is awful.

Claire harvested red tomatoes from the Greenhouse – our first January yield of tomatoes!

Media

Films

Thought about returning to Megalopolis – didn’t

Silo – episode 9 “The Safeguard” was a good episode with plenty of plot progression after E08’s makeweight. Episode 10 “Into the Fire ” was the season finale with some significant situational stuff which I appreciated. Good storytelling.

Skeleton Crew – finale. It was alright, candy.

Severance season 2 episode 1 – So long awaited it’s hard to have a balanced response to a single new episode – too much expectation. Episode 2 should be more approachable.
(Apple is in good form with its sci-fi though, We’ve enjoyed Silo, Severance, Foundation, For All Mankind, and Invasion)

American Primeval – I was drawn in by the promise of a landmass before white domination. It was engaging to view Brigham Young and Mormon Zionism through a patchwork lens that suggested counter-factual possibilities in North America (Kim Coates as Young was also suitably menacing). There was a grittiness in Renée Reâd’s production design that felt genuine but I thought some of the colour decisions by, the usually reliable, Stefan Sonnenfeld were off. Good soundtrack work by Explosions in the Sky, this is the ideal backdrop for American post-rock. Towards the end the series suffered the classic failing I can’t stop seeing everywhere – nobody knows how to end a narrative anymore.

Books

Struggling to find time to read The Future is Degrowth book. Too much TV?

Music

Online

The BlueSky bot problem is killing the platform, closely followed by the lack of a bookmarking facility. I’m interested in the possibilities of Josh Ellis’s Kowloon, but I never properly engaged with Mastodon and the Fediverse – so am I bothered? Social media is dead really. They pretend they care, we pretend to post.

I don’t know how the increasing pay-walling of content has a future either, nor what sustainable creative work on the internet looks like without it.