This week as it was to me

Especially the tail end of this week I have been feeling a bit grumpy and low, hard to put my finger on. I’m increasingly a believer in emotional climates, and it’s a week with a couple of high profile suicides. It could also be the post-singing hangover, which a few people have told me is a thing.

On the plus side I had a really nice weekend, hanging out with the new (and very cool) lady friend. Weather was great, and we spent Sunday at a lovely ecofair at a church in Durham. We checked out the transition town network, a time bank exchange system (sadly I live outside the catchment area) and some cool garden furniture from an organisation that employs disadvantaged people to build things using recovered and recycled wood.

The shape note crew did a short singing demonstration and the whole thing was a mix of jolly vicars and eco people. Plus I saw this text from my favourite saint.

Building

This week I’m trying to get on top of my taxes, before the new job starts. So much to do.

Art and improv

Saw an uninspired show and played an uninspired show, one after the other. But one highlight was working with Will to do our mask format that we developed in Austin Texas, which is a kind of advice column where the mask meets with petitioners who bring to him sincere problems they would like solving. It was funny and moving and exactly what I want from this mask work.

Giving and receiving

It was nice to be at the eco fair, helping out at the sing as part of a skeleton crew of regular hands (and boy is it hard to take the lead for a part you’re not used to singing), setting stuff up, etc.

Recommendations

I watched Infinity War and I don’t have opinions, really. It was what I expected and done fairly well. Some of the villains were nicely creepy.

Branches outward

I need to take a look at this, maybe you do too: Grandma’s trauma – a critical appraisal of the evidence for transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in humans

Ditto, although Lomborg is a bit of a contrarian who is always undergirded by an uncritically pro-market perspective. So heads up. But the topic is pertinent to me. Do Children Cause Global Warming?

Jay’s talk in Rotterdam is online:

And a talk with David Holmgren on RetroSurburbia (see below):

Reading

RetroSuburbia. And it’s great. Really love the use of Aussie Street, a hypothetical set of neighbouring houses that see changes in occupancy, carbon emissions and above all land use over the decades, to paint what is possible as well as show how permaculture principles are often simply recapitulating what was done as a matter of course decades before.

Thinking through

Did this happen a) this week, b)  a decade ago c) neither, it’s fake news?