why

This summer in the queue for the showers at a music festival

i met a man called Soleil

he was from West Africa.

He was a sound engineer touring music festivals to learn stuff. In between festivals he was staying in Chiswick.

I asked him what he thought of the UK.

'Places like Doris (the festival), it's great, it's a lot like home. But Chiswick is strange. You do everything alone. You live alone. You raise your children alone. You eat alone. Your old people are alone. To do anything you need money. It's not like this in Guinea. If you don't have money you can still take part.'

I'm interested in togetherness and aloneness.

One morning I found myself locked in a hallway of a house divided into flats. I needed help. I knocked on the door to one of the flats. 'Hello?' called a wavering old voice. 'Hello', I called through the door. 'I'm locked in. Could you let me out please?' 'Hold on.'

Three or four minutes passed. I could hear shuffling. I didn't know what to expect. I was becoming a little nervous.

Then the old old man opened his door. He hadn't managed to button his shirt and his concave ribs shocked me. He grinned and moved slowly down the stairs to the hall to let me out. I had the feeling that I was the first person he'd seen for some time. Days. Longer.

There are some statistics about lonliness among the elderly. They make you sad to read them.

It's a shame because we feel that we need them. Some friends and I are having conversations about buying some land and creating a blended community, where there is a 'blend' of self sufficiency and participation in the formal economy. None of us want to retreat from interesting and important projects and work, but we want our lives to be less dominated by work. We want more time. A less hectic pace. And we want more togetherness.

We want older people to join us. We value our elders.

Then there's family time. Quality of relationships. The time that we have for each other. The fact that a house used to cost three and half times one salary and now it costs three and half times two salaries and so both parents have to work pretty much full time and fit in childcare along with the chores and cooking and trying to sleep and vaguely trying to squeeze in a bit of exercise if they're lucky and the quality of life is just shit.

Margrit Kennedy with her unsourced figures estimates that about 50% of our spending - the money we've squeezed so many other things to earn - goes on interest.

Which the graphs show makes a few people very rich.

I wonder what that's like for them. I wonder how much difference it makes to their wellbeing. I'm pretty sure that above a certain level it doesn't. The progress paradox.

I see big business like a bit of a cancer to be honest. It was amazing to come back into a town after being in Doris (the music festival) and be surrounded by junk food at every turn. Ads everywhere. Everyone looked the same. So did the buildings. Clone town Britain. Diversity and creativity had been squeezed out and standardised conformity took centre stage, along with people ill from all the junk food and insecure from all the ads protraying model people to aim to be.

I'm feeling anxious about the money project again today. It's back to the economics thing. I do my best work when it's about, for and with people. The money project pretty soon will become a people project but it has to start with a fair bit of political economy.

And that still feels like cold hard iron.

And difficult. It feels difficult.

But it's my loudest question. These are my loudest questions.


Shit they're too small to read. Back to the graphics anon.

And I think they're really really important. And answering them feels like the most important thing to do.

Because I think figuring out that side will enable us to live more sustainably and with more togetherness. Humm. I haven't articulated the link clearly but I feel it strongly.

My mother says we don't do that kind of togetherness here because it's cold and we need to stay indoors. In Africa they co-operate more because it's warm.

Humm. Alastair McIntosh describes super cooperative communities he grew up in, reciprocal economies etc, and that was on the Hebrides. Which has a much poorer climate than south east England.