Random Memeage

[danieldwilliam]

I asked for and was given 7 topics by alitheapipkin

After some delay here are my responses.

Edinburgh,

I feel at home in Edinburgh and it’s difficult to imagine living anywhere else.  Certainly, I’d want to live somewhere very similar. Its virtues are remarkable but its vices oft unremarked.

The place has some problems to address.

A lot of Edinburgh’s housing stock is old. A lot of central Edinburgh is some form of conservation zone. We can’t (or won’t knock them down) and they are nowhere near as energy efficient as they need to be.  So we’re going to have to find a way to make buildings built in the 18^th and 19^th centuries have the same energy profile as buildings built in the 21^st century.  I think the danger of not solving this problem is that we turn central Edinburgh into a slum, which we can’t knock down, where only those who are transient or too poor to afford to buy a house live and everyone one else moves to the fringes of Edinburgh to live in zero carbon, low energy new build housing.

Edinburgh also has a greater income disparity than Glasgow. Whilst Edinburgh appears prosperous there are some quite concentrated areas of poverty.

music,

I wish I were more musical.  I like music. I’m not particularly good at it, either listening to or performing.  I have a strange relationship with singing. I can only carry a tune if no one else is singing and there is no other accompaniment.

I know some people for whom listening to music is a passion. People whose lives were changed or saved by music. People who carry an abiding love of music. I wish I were one of these people but I am not.  Music, for me, is more of a vehicle for the lyrics.

That said I do have periods when I take more of an interest in music.  I have a Napster subscription and I sometimes stay up late listening to a new band or the back catalogue of an old band. My current musical enjoyment is to find songs with a few cover versions and see how different people have performed a song differently. This interest was triggered by one of my favourite television programmes as a teenager. The show, a satirical comedy programme, used to close with a different version of Stairway to Heaven each week. Responsibility for Rolf Harris’ cover of Stairway to Heaven lies with Andrew Denton, the host of the Money or the Gun.  I do think Rolf’s version is one of the most joyous things I’ve ever heard.

I also quite like the history of bands. The combination of artistic influence and personal and business relationships I find interesting.  I’m currently investigating all the bands all the members of Cream were in.

If I ever were stranded on the famous Desert Island I’d much rather take books than music. I’d rather take plants.

But music is an important part of my life because My Lovely Wife is very passionate about music. She sings and plays and is about to step down as Chairqueen of her choir.  My home is filled with music. Music I’d never heard or heard of before I was 30. For someone who isn’t particularly keen on music I know more than most about renaissance music.

gardening,

I do love my garden. I have a small garden at the front of my ground floor main door flat. It’s about 4 meters by 8 meters and divided in the middle by a path.  My flat overlooks the Meadows in Edinburgh so the garden feels more roomy that it actually is. When electric self-driving cars are the norm in about 20 years I’ll be able to sit out in the garden.

When we bought the flat the front garden was not just concreted over but covered by a foot deep layer of bouncy rubber coating.  I like the fact that every plant, insect and bird that lives in my garden is there because of work that MLW and I have put into encouraging them there.

I know that my mental health would be much improved if I spent more time gardening.

I’m looking forward to spending more time in my garden this summer. Now that the Captain is old enough to help and old enough follow instructions MLW and I can spend some time in the garden.  I’m planning to plant lots of flowering perennials to jazz things up a little and I’d like to add a herb garden.

Wider than my own personal love of my own garden I think gardening is probably one of the most powerful community activities.  Creating a shared space together and working together I think are very good for communities. Also good for communities are having to make shared decisions and then deliver on those decisions.

I look forward to the days when my personal circumstances allow me to take a greater role in community gardening.

I think my experience of gardening underpins a lot of my thinking on structures of politics.

holidays,

People who complain about the cost of holidays during the summer holidays should have a really good think about economics specifically the effect of supply and demand on prices and the cost of infrastructure and how that is shared out.

A plane or an airport or a hotel or a cottage that sits empty during the winter so that you can have access to it during the summer is going to have to be paid for.

Of course businesses who produce holidays are profiteering during the summer holidays.  Are you slipping them £50 a month during the winter? 

On the subject of economics and holidays I’m looking forward to some very cheap holidays in Greece once they leave the euro.

sea,

I like to live near the sea. Living where I do in Edinburgh I find I miss the sea.  I grew up in Aberdeen and my parents would take me to the beach often. I remember long walks along Balmedie beach (still, thanks to Donald Trump, free of windfarms off the coast but destroyed, thanks to Donald Trump, by a golf course.)

I’ve lived near the sea for most of my life.  I used to sail.  If I don’t live near the sea I feel diminished in some way. If I could afford one I would have a second home by the sea.

seasons,

One of the strangest places I’ve ever lived was Darwin in the Northern Territory. By our way of reckoning things the place only has two seasons; Wet and Dry. During the Wet is it 30 degrees and it rains heavily just after the sun goes down. During the Dry it is 30 degrees. The aborigines who live in the Top End have dozens of seasons. They are partly meteorological and partly game seasons but they also include seasons in the sense of Ecclesiastes 3.1, a season to do certain things.  Many of these things were tied to the meteorological and game season. Aborigines live very very close to nature.

games.

I wish I played more games. I’m currently playing a fair bit of Civilisation III on the PC but I’d like to play more social games.

I used to play Warhammer and D&D.

Games are one of the casualities of responsibility.

Games are also part of the lexicon of Improv.  Personally, I think Games are a sub-set of Handles but others use them interchangeably. They are wrong. A Handle is the specific set of rules that provide the structure for a piece of improv.  Handles include Games, Exercises, Warm Up, Long Forms. They are called Handles because they give you (or the audience) something to hold onto.

A Handle might give you then number of characters in a piece, how they will access inspiration, settings, use of equipment, restrictions on language use or physicality.

Inspiration for example might come from having the audience shout out suggestions for setting and character relationships or you might use the concepts of Laban on movement to inform characters and then let them get on with it.

A Game, as a subset of Handles, tend to be short-form (5 minutes or less, one scene). They tend to be suitable for performance in that they begin, expand and conclude a narrative – even if that narrative is just a joke.