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I've been doing a lot of ranting about current affairs lately.
This is in good faith, because this is the most hopeful and positive moment for truth and justice that I can remember.
So anyone who is against smugness and badness needs to stand up and be counted in any way they can.
We've got about a year, so if you have a bonkers-one-person-crusade to launch, now is the time. And remember, the smaller the better.
But I have to remember that listening is a much rarer and more valuable skill than talking, and especially than shouting.
So to make sure I don't forget that, I decided to copy out my favourite poem, which is My Mother on a Seat Outside a Hospital by Peter Sansom.
It's about the man that Sansom's mother was married to before his father, dying alone on a hospital ward after an accident, because his mother and her sister were too shy with people in authority to ask to be let in early in the morning, even to sit with her husband while he died.
I like it so much because it listens so carefully to people who don't get heard, and so bear more pain than they should because of that:
"It took him days to die
where, outside on a municipal bench,
two young women, girls they call themselves,
are anxious and not tired,
deciding to give it another half-hour -
despite the sixth sense that sent them there -
before bothering anyone so early."
Point of Sale by Peter Sansom on amazon.
Forty three quids worth of knick-knacks from Oklahoma in Manchester to be won as treasure during this week's Five Trees Forest story.
There is some cool and not-cheap stuff in there, especially the bouncy LED dice, which I'm sneakily hoping don't get won so I can have them.
40 Prayers for Atheists
Please let me have some battery left.
Please let me have the right change.
Please let them miss the penalty.
Please let them score.
Please be single.
Please don't be late.
Please don't let me forget.
Please don't make me remember.
Please let it be negative.
Please let it be positive.
Please don't change your mind.
Change your mind. Please.
Please make the sun come out.
Please make this last for ever.
Please make it stop.
Please give me a drink.
Please let there be a splash of milk left.
Please make the room stop spinning.
Please be the right answer.
Please accept our offer.
Please hurry up in there.
Please have snowed.
Please be found.
Please don't let them find me.
Please let me turn the clock back.
Please remember to put your clocks back.
Please have my size.
Please be enough petrol.
Please stay on green.
Please be open at this time.
Please let me get to sleep.
Please let me wake up.
Please let me speak.
Please let me be listened to.
Please let it be me instead.
Please be OK.
Please be the right way.
Please be mine.
Please forgive me.
Please. Let me get a signal.
This is what I would have done if I'd gone in Nexus cafe's 40 Days of Public Solitude
Over the last year I've been working with Jo Claessens and Jo Quaye from BBC Learning Development on Stories from the No. 4
We wanted to find somewhere the BBC could go and make something together with its audience (or perhaps the people who aren't its audience?).
And to find a journey the BBC could go on to share learning resources in the places the audience were.
The place we came up with was the No. 4 bus between Archway and Waterloo.
A bus journey is a great way to tie together everyday stories - it has a shifting beginning and end for everyone who gets on, but invokes a bit of curiosity because no one ever goes right from one end to the other except the drivers; time on the bus can be a reflective in-between moment in which we might be glad of something to read or learn; all sorts of people pass through and pass by a bus journey but the journey also has its own changing character as it moves into the city.
And in an old city like London there is also quite a lot of history and writing layered onto the route, from Charles Dickens to, of course on the route of the No. 4, Nick Hornby.
Some of this "professional content" is part of Stories from the No. 4, but we wanted it to be a process in which the BBC and the people along the route made something together, so we had to think of a way of letting those people tell their own stories.
We came up with a workshop that first of all taught people a tiny little bit of film making awareness - A BBC editor, Kumail Tayyebkhan, went along as the professional expert, and I think this role is quite valuable because people enjoy the sense they are learning something useful.
Then the next part was a structured way for the participants to use the pocket-sized film making equipment they were already familiar with - the video camera on their mobile phone - to record rich autobiographical fragments.
Once again it's this structured process, no matter how light the structure, that is what makes it work - a blank page staring back at you saying "go on, create something" is frightening for both professionals and amateurs.
Despite this workshop structure happening with the hardest possible group of participants - people on an ESOL course, mostly teenagers and newly arrived in London, learning English as a second language! - it worked.
Taken alongside the work I did with Lee Hutchinson at Northampton Museum on Mobile X, and even the very early camera phone project Postcards from Fenland (in which we used the same structure of a skills introduction from a professional photographer first, then gave a group of teenagers a camera phone to share - this was 2004 when most people still had phones without cameras - to record a picture message diary of their summer) the Stories from the No. 4 workshops show that it is possible, by using everyday-mobile, to engage with participants straight away, in any context, and get them to create rich audio-visual as well as text fragments. I wondered whether or not this would be true because talking into a camera is much more unnerving than writing.
The question then is how to present those fragments as a whole story in a meaningful way.
A bus journey is great for that, both to make a narrative structure and as a place to hand out the stories to the people for whom they will be most meaningful - the people who are part of the story by being on the bus.
This handing-out was the second part of Stories from the No. 4 - we decided to distribute the stories to people by bluetooth while they were sitting on the number 4 bus, along with literacy and numeracy learning games made by the bus drivers (which is a really nice touch that I can't claim any credit for).
The bluetooth buses are now trundling up and down the route until 20th April, so if you are going anywhere between Archway and Waterloo look out for the number 4s marked TP 1, TP 9 and TP 16 and turn your bluetooth on.
After that we are hoping there will be a small exhibition in Islington Museum, dates to be confirmed.
"Hidden in London are Monsters three
use pens, brains and texts to set them free."
And to set them free you have to solve three riddles written in very cheesy rhyming couplets.
If you solve a riddle, a monster will magically appear.
When you have collected all three monsters, get felt tips from the furry orange pencil case and draw them.
There will be treasure to be won for the fastest and the best monsters.
London Monster Hunt! will be part of Sandpit #10, next Wednesday 22nd, again at the Institute of Contemporary Art .
But I'm also going to post the riddles and the rest of the rhyme on here at 7.00pm on the 22nd so anyone who wants to can play.
The rhyming is so cheesy that it might be fun for reading aloud with children, and I'd be very grateful for any responses to that, because it is something I'm thinking of developing.
