Transition Culture has moved
I no longer blog on this site. You can now find me, my general blogs, and the work I am doing researching my forthcoming book on imagination, on my new blog.
Come find me at robhopkins.net
Monthly archive for May 2007
Showing results 1 - 5 of 14 for the month of May, 2007.
22 May 2007
We are in the process of moving house, so other than blather on about cardboard boxes and the things you find down the back of the sofa when you start rummaging about, my head is not quite able to focus on writing the usual scintillating material to which you have all become so accustomed. In the interest of focusing on the moving process, I am going to take a break from posting here until after the Transition Network meeting in Nailsworth, which I will write about here hopefully in some detail. Until then, take care, and wish me well… hopefully I can get through the movng process without doing my back in!
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21 May 2007
On the final day of the three day pilot **Transition Tales** programme we did at King Edward VI Community College in Totnes (I wasn’t at the first one, I’ll ask someone else to write that one up) we turned to storytelling. The day was facilitated by Chris Salisbury of Wildwise, a well known and highly gifted local storyteller. He began by introducing the art of storytelling and where it came from, how we are all storytellers, and how our culture has always been built on the telling of stories. This led into a series of exercises that were designed to free up the students’ creative expression and imagination.
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18 May 2007
**Peak Oil Session – Transition Tales.**
Transition Town Totnes’s **Transition Tales** project just did its first workshop with the local secondary school, year 9 students (13-14), which went well. It is part of a 3 session pilot we are doing, this being the middle session about peak oil and the degree of our oil dependency. We began by producing a large bag which contained all kinds of household objects, trainer shoes, hair gel, inner tubes, spoons, and so on, and asked them what all these things have in common. They didn’t get it, the answer being, of course, that they are all made of oil. I then asked them what is the hardest work they have ever done in a single day. Answers ranged from “last Friday, we had English”, to “well, my Mum made me wash up last week”.
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17 May 2007
**’Wattle and Daub’ by Paula Sunshine. Shire Books. 2006. pp40.**
There is something very nourishing about the process of rediscovering the building materials of our ancestors. I often remark when teaching people about cob building that in the UK we have an earth building gene, that deep inside ourselves, once we start to handle these materials we find instinctively that we know what we are doing, they feel right in our hands, we feel at home with them. The first time I made a wattle and daub panel, we just decided we wanted to do one, and we used a book and made it up as we went along. We didn’t have great clay, we put the wattles too close together and didn’t use enough straw in the mix. It worked, but only just.
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16 May 2007
It’s not every day that Transition Towns stuff is translated into Italian, but with the recent coverage in the Guardian, foreign papers are getting in touch and running articles. Here is one, in Italian, and seemingly quite balanced. They aren’t all quite so rational. A few weeks ago a Mexican reporter rang me up, and the main thrust of her interview, in not very good English, was to what extent Transition Towns was like John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ (an exceptionally odd question). She sounded positively disappointed when I told her that I had grown up drawing far more inspiration from the Buzzcocks than ‘Imagine’. The final article turned up the other day, all in Spanish so I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, but bizzarely the article’s lone illustration was of a caravan park, which we are positive is nowhere near Totnes. Ah, tis a wonderful world.
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We are in the process of moving house, so other than blather on about cardboard boxes and the things you find down the back of the sofa when you start rummaging about, my head is not quite able to focus on writing the usual scintillating material to which you have all become so accustomed. In the interest of focusing on the moving process, I am going to take a break from posting here until after the Transition Network meeting in Nailsworth, which I will write about here hopefully in some detail. Until then, take care, and wish me well… hopefully I can get through the movng process without doing my back in!
