Keeping a Track Record - Transition Themes Weeks #1-8

We began our Transition Themes Weeks in December 2010. During the last three years Transition Norwich has shifted its focus and energy - from an early burst of enthusiastic gatherings, world cafes and open spaces into creating and delivering several (hard) working projects. Many of these have sprung out of the 13 original theme groups where people met and discussed what we can do in the "real world". Norwich Farm Share came out of the Food and Farming group, Magdalen Street Celebration out of the neighbourhood NR3 group,The Low Carbon Cookbook out of the Stranger’s Circle, Carbon Conversations and TN2.

As a result of this shift many of us find ourselves working in different areas and our paths do not always cross. So the intent behind the Transition Themes Weeks was to bring these strands together, so everyone could see the whole pattern of the initiative. To cohere news from these groups that wasn’t covered in the monthly TN bulletin and relay what was happening at a more detailed in-depth level. Published every five or six weeks these reports are filed by regular contributors and also by people commissioned within TN and other outreach groups (last week's TT featured pieces for example by a Green county councillor and a local vicar). The week is introduced with all the latest from the Communications crew, including outside comms work that happens within the Transition Network.

These reports are not indiviudalisitisc “Me” pieces, they are told from within the social groups and in many ways have served as the framework for the new Social Reporting project. We have run eight weeks now and have covered everything from Bees to Zero Waste. Some of the year’s highlights include Mark giving a round-up of the Transition Circles, Tierney on Permaculture, Kerry on Café Conversations, Helen on starting up the Magdalen Street Celebration, Olivia Heal on Lacto-Fermentation (Low Carbon Cookbook), John on Toads Talk Transport.

The one we’re publishing today is by Simeon whose intelligence and concise style epitomises the editorial slant of these weeks. Here he is talking about the group he started after the meeting to discuss the Nicole Foss talk in April.

Photos: Notebook from The Sea Kale Project by Charlotte Du Cann; oil tanker from Transition Circles review by Mark Watson

Do We Control Money or Does Money Control Us?
Simeon Jackson
18 May 2011

Like many of Transition Norwich’s theme groups, the Economy and Business (now Economy and Livelihoods) group was set up in October 2008. It attracted a lot of attention throughout 2009, but dwindled somewhat at the end of 2009 into 2010. With Nicole Foss’s recent presentation, and the follow-up discussion, it is time to revive it! So what is the group all about?

At present, our monetary system dictates much of our activity. It is through our wages that we are directed to work in the interest of our employer. And once we have earned that money, it is through advertising, legal obligations (such as mortgages) and other forms of persuasion that we are convinced to spend our money in the interests of others. These “others” are often corporations, governments or other institutions that in themselves have obligations to their stakeholders and are willing and able to direct the activity of even more people to ensure that they meet those obligations. What makes this worse is that the obligation for corporations is no more complex than “to make profit”, and that therefore a large portion of our human effort goes towards the continual and unsustainable expansion of an ultimately doomed consumer society.

There are numerous books, videos and websites which explain these concepts much better than me, but what is clear is that this structure is wrong. It is fundamentally opposed to our individual freedom to do what we want with our lives, and makes money a master, rather than a facilitator in exercising our liberty as it should be.

The primary function, therefore, of an Economy and Livelihoods group is to establish what our requirements are for a monetary (or other exchange) system, and to try to shift from the current paradigm towards something which more satisfactorily meets those requirements.

Although there will be differing opinions on what those requirements actually are, the following actions would undoubtedly move towards it:

- Sharing knowledge about what the current financial system looks like, so that we can make informed decisions about government economic policies, as well as personal decisions, such as where our own money is invested and what we expect to be the benefits and risks. This may be through discussion sessions, talks and blog posts.
- Investigating, establishing and promoting alternative exchange systems that more closely meet the needs of people, including the promotion of existing local trading schemes, where appropriate.
-Stimulating a resilient green local economy, by encouraging development in renewable energy generation, energy conservation, local production of goods, sharing schemes and other enterprises that enable a low-carbon lifestyle.

The above is provisional, and may be added to and changed depending upon the discussions that we have as a group together. I therefore invite you to join us for the first meeting of the revived Economy and Livelihoods group upstairs at the Bicycle Shop Cafe, 17 St Benedict's Street on Tuesday 24th May at 6pm. Simeon Jackson

Picture from http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/, which tells the story of the man who, starting with a paperclip, traded his way to obtaining a house; cover of Prosperity Without Growth by Tim Jackson

No-one is an island

We read to understand other people and to know that we are not alone.

This year has not been kind in many respects, and the country has faced the chill winds of the government's austerity measures. It would be easy to retreat, to hunker down and try and shiver it out alone. This blog, our blog, "This Low-Carbon Life" was meant to be different from the start; not just one person's inner musings, but the intimacies of our lives, individually and collectively, open for all to share. It was intended as an act of giving.

Reading the blog reminds me that other people share the same joys and frustrations that I do, have the same hopes and ideas, the fears and worries that I may not even wish to acknowledge to myself. I know that I am not alone.

The blog's reflected this change in mood and I've particularly enjoyed the despatches from the Transition Conference, from the "Fight the Cuts" marches, and from the Dark Mountain.

For me, this year in Transition has been about bees, and I love the posts on the Norwich Farmshare, the Low Carbon Cookbook, and more recently, the opening of Nectar. Real people doing real things that make a real difference.

But I'm going to choose something different to post as my "post of the year", and it's Mark's early morning walk back in March. I love this because, reading it, you feel you're actually there - the sights and sounds are real and close. And the photos are gorgeous too. Read. And enjoy.

Bumblebees, Honeybees, Archangels, Box
Mark Watson
Wednesday, 23 March 2011

Last Sunday when the sun came out after what seemed like a winter of aeons, I looked out of the window at the garden, saw all the work that needed doing and despite the good weather an enormous lethargy come over me. I wanted to crawl back into bed with a book!

But instead I decided to take a look at what was out there and grabbed the camera on my way.

The first thing I found was a group of Red Deadnettles (or Archangels) all in bloom in the long sere grass, which we leave unmowed for the insects. Bending down to take a photograph I heard a buzz and out flew this bumblebee, followed shortly by a second.

And something stirred in my dormant self: Isn't this Spring? Aren’t I part of Bungay Community Bees? Haven’t I just been reading reading the newly published United Nations Environment Programme report, Global Honey Bee Colony Disorder and Other Threats to Insect Pollinators, which states a clear need for the presence of many more wildflowers? Am I not preparing a series of wildflower bee walks this year? Wake up Watson!

This is from p.5 of the UNEP report:
"Bumblebees are highly social, like honeybees, but with smaller, less structured nests, that can consist of up to 1 000 bees. Bumblebee colonies are annual; the entire colony dies out each year and leaves only mated queens to hibernate through winter. The queen will start a new colony in spring. Bumblebees pollinate tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, blueberries, and cranberries, just to name a few. Bumblebees are the only pollinators of potato flowers worldwide."

Red Deadnettles are a native wildflower and a major source of pollen for bumblebees during March and April as they wake up after the winter. They are a modest plant and I didn't take much notice of them at first, but the more I look the more beautiful they become.

I still remember the days before I gave any plants, let alone wild ones, any thought at all, beyond their being pretty or tasty. Then in the 90s I started visiting every kind of territory from waste grounds to canal and riverbanks and seashores getting to know our native wild plants. I became totally hooked.

It's only since becoming involved with Bungay Community Bees though, that I've been paying more attention to the relationship between flowers and bees. And realising that what started out as a personal interest is really about being connected with the web of life.

I'll be talking more about wildflowers and bees on the blog over the coming months. Right now I'm off to track a bee walk through the market town of Beccles with fellow Transitioners Charlotte and Netta. You might like to take a look at this great national wild flower project, River of Flowers.

Pics: Spring Morning March 2011; Garden Bumblebee (Bombus hortorum) on Red Archangel; Honeybee on Box Tree flowers

The year in blogs

Scanning through the blogs over the last year was like fast forwarding through the seasons. As I write this we are enjoying an Indian Summer but reading through the blog reminded me that in just 11 weeks we will be stumbling around in the dark of the solstice. So my first pick is Charlotte's heartfelt Spring Ahoy where she celebrates the end of winter with some great photos - though I don't see what she has against parsnips!

Jon gets to heart of the craziness of global economics in Woolly Thinking when he finds that the 'wool' that he has just bought is in fact an oil derivative and manufactured in China - whilst farmers in Norfolk can't give the real stuff away.

One of the photos that has stuck in my mind is the completely whacky picture of Mark wielding an axe in I'll Give You Cuts, George Osborne. The post is both a reminder to get our heating sorted out for the coming winter and a flash back to the cuts that were so much in the news a year ago and which have now been overshadowed by the Eurozone crisis.

Pic: Sun through goat willow (MW)

Spring Ahoy!

Charlotte Du Cann

21 March 2011

Happy Spring equinox everyone and welcome to our spring week on the blog! We’ll be taking a look outside, exploring what’s coming up and celebrating the end of winter. Low Carbon cooks and growers will be checking out new green shoots and leaves, our wild earth reporters, toads and bees and the medicine of trees.

I’m really celebrating the end of winter, throwing out that hot water bottle and thermal gear and throwing open the windows. No more shivering! No more parsnips! There’s a fresh breeze out there this morning, primrose on the banks, blackbirds practising their arias, woodpeckers drumming the oak trees. Time to wake up early, stretch the body and walk out. In the Chinese five element system this is the season of wood and the warrior when the deep energies of winter start uncoiling and branching out. Its organ is the liver and its sense, the eyes.

So I’m sensing out the world beyond all those rigid squares and pixels on my computer screen, looking at the undulating earth shapes of trees, the way life is bursting out of wood everywhere and colours and scents flashing past: tortoiseshell butterfly wing, crimson bird feather, musty and sweet fragrance of gorse and box. The equinox is when the sun is straight ahead, day and night are balanced equally and the new astrological year begins with Aries the Ram. It’s a big planetary time (Did you see that gorgeous moon?)

Like most people my attention has been caught up in the cataclysmic events in Japan and it seems almost incorrect to be considering these small events in our own secure neighbourhoods. And yet the Japanese famously gather under cherry trees to welcome the Spring. And perhaps we could do no better than sit beneath the oriental blossom that graces our city streets and connect with them – the people of a fellow island nation. You can never underestimate the power of the heart.

My chief Spring medicine tree though would be the willow, specifically the goat willow, that old craggy fellow now bursting into gold along riverbanks and canals.

Willow is a big water tree and well-known for its properties to relax and make fluid everything that is crystallised and cramped within (the bark of white willow being the natural precursor to aspirin). It's hard to feel joyous and alive with a stiff and tense body. Hard to sit under this tree and not look up! and see the sunlight in its branches. When you do, listen and feel the thunderous buzz of bees, now coming out of hibernation and gathering pollen from trees everywhere.

Here are my fellow Transitioners, Mark, Nick and Eloise spring cleaning at our Sustainable Bungay Give and Take Day on Saturday. It’s time to shift and move and recycle old things on all levels! I’m not in the picture because I played truant and went to the woods for the first time in a long time, lay underneath hazel trees and checked out early violets and upcoming bluebells and watched a flock of goldfinches feeding on knapweed seeds that had been left uncut in a meadow. Afterwards I dug the garden and made myself an inner spring clean tea of cleavers, plantain, dandelion and angelica (all great for moving sluggish systems, especially the lymph).

On my way home I gathered a few wild leaves to toss into one of those robust and tangy salads Elena’s been talking about: bittercress and tansy, hawthorn and chickweed. Here are some green and growing tips from my garden. I’ll be taking some feisty alexander buds along to try out with my fellow Low Carbon Cooks too tomorrow. It’s a full-on week ahead, including Nicole Foss on Friday and the big TUC march on Saturday. I’ll be needing those greens!

Under the neighbourhood cherry plum; coastal gorse; Sustainable Bungay Give and Take crew and van; Japanese cherry at Castle Meadow, Norwich; garden tips of bronze fennel, salad burnet, lovage, hawthorn, dill, chickweed, tansy and cleavers

Sustainability - environmental, economic, social

I only really started reading This Low Carbon Life in February this year, and started contributing in May. The posts I'd like to reflect on during our "Retroblog" week are therefore all during the later, summery months of our blog's year.

There couldn't be anything more summery than John Heaser's "Watery Bits" photo blog, which included beautiful photographs, and was a lovely reminder of what nature is doing all around us all of the time and how awesome it is!

As an architectural engineering graduate, I couldn't help but be interested and inspired during the green building theme week on the blog. It was a particular paragraph during Chris's post which really struck me, about how the behavioural change is just as important as the technical installation when it comes to energy efficiency in buildings.

One contributor whose posts never fails to touch my heart, though, is helenofnorwich. Her summery post "Sun, sea, sand and..." was one such post, and got me thinking about where I should go to meet people and socialise where there are people who take environmental and economic issues seriously. All too often, social events for people of my age (26) are characterised by loud music, wasteful consumption of branded alcohol and shallow conversation (if indeed there is any at all!). Not really my thing! Any suggestions welcome!

Photo: summer crop by pond by John Heaser

Sun, Sea, Sand and . . . .
helenofnorwich
4 August 2011

Sustainability of course, what else would you be thinking?

But if you were thinking about something else then how would you have an environmentally friendly romantic relationship? More and more of my friends are meeting people through Internet dating. You can find your absolute perfect match. No need to be three dates in before you find out they don’t recycle or read the wrong newspaper. But it seems that when you find your perfect match they invariably live in another part of the country.

So how would you find a partner in your own postcode area? We were discussing this in the Magdalen street Celebration meeting (yes we had drifted off the point slightly).

So I have come up with a few places I think you could try. Please feel free to add send us more ideas:

The bicycle shop ( full of green types and great locally produced food)
Transition meetings and events have lots of lovely people and you could probably go to several meetings a week until you found someone that took your fancy.
Norfolk Quakers (I slipped this one in as they are very environmentally friendly individually and as an organization).

I recently took some flowers on a date that I picked from a graveyard (they were not from a grave, that would be wrong) and I took some cider from the Norfolk Square Breweryshop in Magdalen Street. Of course if you were going out with a non-environmentally type they would just think you were either weird or a bit of a cheapskate. These things are only partly true.

Poppies, Palms and Planetary Survival

Looking through the second year of posts on This Low Carbon Life, I kept stopping to read them. Beginning with all of last year's Retro-blog pieces! When I got to Helen's car breaking down in the woods last Hallowe'en, I laughed out loud very loudly - it had taken me more than an hour just to get to November. That brought me back to the task at hand. Finding ONE post from 350 to choose as my favourite of the year.

Almost impossible. So many intelligent, deep, immediate, funny, moving and informed pieces. With such a diversity of voices. I even enjoyed some of my own posts! I had no idea when I first got involved with Transition that the shift to a low-carbon life would be so creatively engaging.

Or that proofreading this blog daily for spelling, text and picture alignment would be such a predominantly enjoyable activity. I say predominantly because grumpiness can occur, for example when I've aligned something and blogger won't save it or great gaps appear between paragraphs (which sometimes happens with certain browsers) even though I've corrected it FOUR THOUSAND times in the last hour!).

Reconnection with Nature, read planetary living systems, remains not only a principle focus for me, but is also the most frequently used label on the posts of This Low Carbon Life. With that in mind, the three pieces I've chosen for this year are:

Charlotte's Poppyland and Elena's Palm Oil, which both look at the human interaction with the natural world, albeit in very different ways - see what I mean about diversity?

And John's Survival - A Planetary Healers Manual from this Summer's bookweek, reprinted below. Love it!

Photo: Different Times - Me, Car, Arizona, 2001

Survival - a Planetary Healers Manual

John Heaser

27 August 2011

Can reading a book change someone’s life? Who knows what course my life may have taken had I not bought a very strange book back in 1976. I had a pretty conventional time at University – by the standards of the 1970s – and enjoyed myself at the taxpayer’s expense in rural Devon. That was followed by an equally conventional life of work in London in the early days of IT – yes computers really were the size of buses then. So I have no idea what made me spend quite a lot of money on ‘Survival into the 21st Century, Planetary Healers Manual ‘ by Viktoras Kulvinskas – maybe it was the pretty cover!

I read the book on the tube (no Ipods in those days) and people peered over my shoulder at the exotic (and some erotic) illustrations. The contents were a complete revelation to me – in the dark ages before the internet people were much less likely to be exposed to ideas and thoughts from outside their immediate circle of friends.

My partner at the time took one look at the book and exclaimed with dread “you’re going to become a vegetarian!!” – well she was not quite correct but I certainly ate a lot less meat and to her credit she took on board a lot of the messages from the book once she got over the initial shock.

‘Viktoras’ – as we called the book for short – led me to join Friends of the Earth, take up Yoga and WOOFing and ultimately to move to the country to grow my own food and now to Transition. I don’t claim that this book will have that effect on everyone – it was very much a product of its time – but if it inspires some people the way it did me, then so much the better. Unfortunately I leant my copy to someone in 1978 and I’m still waiting for it to be returned – so I’ll have to refer people to the library if they want to read it.

So what did Viktoras write in this magic book? From what I remember it was a compendium of ideas for healthy eating, sustainable living and just about every weird idea that was new and crazy in the 70s. One fact that I have tucked away for use in a time of word turmoil is that one can derive much more nutrition by sprouting grain than by baking it as flour. So you will know things are really bad when I dig up the remaining lawn to grow seeds for sprouting!

A Year of Living Differently

This Low Carbon Life is two years old this week. Our blog year began with apples and angels last frosty October and ended with a sunrise over the sea on the hottest autumn day on record. In between eight of us have monitored the shifting mood of the world every day (except some Sundays) and shown how these shifts affect our ordinary lives in Transition, both from the inside and outside. The blog started out as a record and an experiment, a way of showing what a low-carbon culture looks and feels like, and for some of us during these two years this project has become a way of life.

The blog has undergone some changes since it began. Its shape has remained the same: regular bloggers writing for three days each interspersed with topic weeks with 5 or more contributors that explore subjects such as Waste, Climate Change, Health, Deep Nature, Buildings and Happiness and celebrate the changing seasons. But in December we introduced the Transition Themes Weeks with their regular reports on TN's theme groups (which we will look back at on Saturday) and there have also been shifts within our crew.

In May Kerry went to work outside Glasgow and Elena became more involved in Norwich FarmShare and both have become occasional rather than regular bloggers. At the same time we welcomed Simeon who's started up the Economics and Livelihoods group and Jo from the Permaculture Group and Low Carbon Cookbook. We've invited guest bloggers to contribute too during our theme weeks: Mark Crutchley (OneWorldColumn) on the the state of the oceans, Adrienne Campbell (100monkeys) Whose Land is it Anyway?, Rachel Lalchan (EcoMonkey) on giving up supermarkets, Andrew Boswell (Norfolk County Council) on the region's controversial waste incinerator and road scheme, amongst others.

Meanwhile we've covered events from Norwich Pride to the Uncivilisation festival, from the Transition Conference to the Norfolk Anti-Cuts demonstration. We've reviewed films and books, had a rethink about turnips and towerblocks, talked about the birds and the bees (oh, and sex) and all things under the sun (which has also starred in our many photographs). We've been cross-posted and quoted and perhaps most successfully been the editorial blueprint for the new Social Reporting pilot on the Transition Network.

This week on our retroblog we're selecting some of the individual posts that have struck us during the year. Tough call. How to choose from Helen's witty urban reports, Elena's feisty (and frequently delicious) pieces, Mark's warm and perceptive social reporting, John's practical, earth-connected prose, Chris's kinetic and lateral thinking . . . How to chose just three from over three hundred?

There's another question too looking back. How is this year different from the last? On reflection it's been soberer, deeper, tougher. Politics and economics have entered all of our lives and the posts have reflected this shift. There has been less on the domestic joys of baking bread and growing stuff and more serious thinking on social enterprise, livelihoods and activism. Most of us, following the shape of the initiative, have grounded ourselves within practical projects as the Transition movement has become more socially aware, less inward looking, more connected to other progressive groups. More conscious in many ways that we hold something precious in our hands we need to hold dear as the culture so many of us took for granted is falling apart at the seams.

Within this frame I'd select the kind of posts that were written after Nicole Foss came to speak to TN in April: My Struggle to make Sense of the Financial Crisis in an Era of Peak Oil by Mark and Defining Freedom by Kerry. Both have a sense of discovery and openness that are key to writing in the field. We are brought up in a civilisation that loves to have everything down and be in control, to be above it all, smart after the event, safe from all the messy and difficult challenges of reality. To write on the edge of Transition means you have to experience change from a position of not-knowing. Why I love this blog is because it gives space and time for that creative process. Because it shows how this downshift that none of us have done before can be done with grace, fortitude, beauty, intelligence, courage, style and above all, with great humanity.

What I love too is that here you don't have to market Transition or spin yourself or your life. You can say how it is in ways that you can't elsewhere, at home or work or amongst your friends who are all hoping things will turn out otherwise. You can write stuff you don't find in the mainstream media or written in books, because none of us who blog are hip or connected enough to register on that business-as-usual radar, we don't fit the box or the mindset, we live in the wrong city, we're from the wrong class, we're unfashionably in Transition, too old, too poor, too green, too radical, not radical enough . . . whatever. You can wake up with something to say and today you're going to say it anyway, straight from the heart. Even though you are under the kind of pressure that Jon captured so clearly and honestly in his A Shocking State of Affairs (my third choice). It's a different narrative. Written by the people who are experiencing it first hand. On a deadline.

Here's to us and all our fellow bloggers, citizen journalists of a disappearing and emergent world, and to all our dear readers. Thank you for being with us.

Still from Ken Russell's Amelia and the Angel: with Helen at the Magdalen Street Celebration; with Jon and Simeon outside the Greenouse after our summer meeting; A Darkling Thrush; October sunrise.

A shocking state of affairs

Jon Curran

30th November 2010

I feel like I’m coming out of hibernation. The last few months have been crazy and I feel like I’ve had no time to think. Every single day was as hard as the one before. I felt disconnected.

One of the things that fell by the wayside while I tried to get things back under control was my involvement in this blog. I didn't have the time or energy to post, and wasn’t able to contribute to John’s excellent Make Do and Mend theme week, even though I had a piece all mapped out in my mind.

These recent months have taught me that I’m not as resilient as I thought I was. Pushed for time, and pulled in all directions, I’ve driven the car more, eaten more junk, taken less notice of things around me and the impact that my actions have had on the environment; I bought more stuff to compensate for how frazzled I felt in the rest of my life.

It’s not so much that things have calmed down, but I have perhaps got used to it. Luckily things in my immediate life haven’t changed that much while I’ve been out of the loop. "Luckily", because things could have – I was reading George Monbiot’s recent post “Britain’s Shock Doctrine” and yes, this is what happens when you take your eye off the ball. If you haven’t read Naomi Klein’s book “The Shock Doctrine” I cannot recommend it highly enough. Read it, read Monbiot’s post and then look back at events of recent weeks and months. It’s a sobering thought.

Which is why I’m very much looking forward to tomorrow night’s meeting of the Transition blogging community. It’s a chance for us all to catch up on what’s been happening in our lives, talk about ideas for the blog in its second year, and, for me, most importantly, to reconnect with just how important this work is; perhaps, now, more important than ever.

Just connect

As the Magdalen Street celebration takes place today on what looks like being the hottest October day on record, I wonder what else it takes to get people out - of cars, homes, offices - and talking and celebrating together?

Rachel's blog piece on Thursday spoke powerfully about what makes community and what enables connection, and conversely what produces the opposite - isolation and disconnection.

What struck me today was that this trend toward isolation extends itself to our places of work and office environments. Whilst offices, like homes, appear to have become more sophisticated places, this same sophistication can have subtle effects of human disconnection, with sometimes bizarre manifestations.

I do some work for Norfolk County Council, who, in it's wisdom, recently moved our particular office base from a lovely converted Georgian House, to a shiny new open plan job on the Broadland Business Park. Yesterday was my first foray into the new base. Once onto the labyrinth of the site itself, I immediately felt a sensation of being out of place riding my bicycle between vast swathes of car parks and aircraft hangers masquerading as offices. My body sensation was similar to my reaction to being in supermarkets..... but that one needs to wait for another blog! Actually asking the way to a building that had more numbers to it than a name produced blank responses. "Never heard of it mate" was the most common - this from an employee of a neighbouring building that turned out to be about 300 metres away from my destination.

Once found, and inside - having punched in security codes and swiped a card through various doors ( much reminding me of scenes from Starship Enterprise) - I searched for a vacant hotdesk amongst whole lines of computer terminals with the occasional head to be seen protruding above the partitions. At the desk, I felt strangely cocooned, even though there were actually many people spread around me. So welcome to the new office, I thought. Whilst everything looked shiny and functional, actually there were some bizarre results of technological interface. I discovered, for instance, that when return phone calls came in, the person answering the phone who was on the opposite 'wing' of the building to where I was located, could not route the call to my desk - because there was no way of telling where I was sitting. This resulted in the occasional sprint by the person taking the call to find me.... she commented that the new office was getting her quite fit.

The contrast to the old office could not have been starker. Here we had exactly the same group of people, moved to another office environment, albeit combined with many other staff, who then appeared to change behaviour around and within the environment.

So back to Magdalen Street. Refreshingly free of supermarkets and the big 'multiples' - so far - it certainly encourages lots of human interaction, on the street, in the small shops, and around the bus stops. It seems to have resisted the trend toward functionality, retained it's historic quarter, yet introduced the new through the appearance of more cafes and small businesses.

We have good cause to celebrate it as a place of community and creativity, and the organising group deserve great credit in bringing out the best in locality and authentic community-building in this year's celebration. I don't quite know how they managed to create the weather to go with it.... but it makes for a promising start to the day.