2012: Friday Walks 17, Walking with Champions

This week we broke with our normal tradition, and there was no Friday walk. Because we were away working. But there was a walk during the work, on Wednesday actually, and we thought you might like to see it. The pictures that follow are mostly stills from the film we were making of the event as we ran it. Ronnie takes us round.

This week we spent Wednesday to Friday at Goblin Combe Lodge, a camping barn in Somerset, with a group of twelve Social Enterprise Champions from HCT. This was one of a series of events we are running for them. And during it we investigated social enterprises in Bristol and worked on their own skills, knowledge, opinions and reflections about the possibilities for social enterprise as a force for good in society and the economy. But when we all first got there we went for a walk.

Arriving at Goblin Combe Lodge

Exploring social enterprise in Yorkshire

We’ve been in Yorkshire, where we spent an intensive day learning from social enterprises in Leeds along with the HCT Social Enterprise Champions.

Followed the next day by a look at what another social enterprise is doing with a disused sewage farm in Heckmondwike. Really. The Able 2 project is an ambitious but entirely practical attempt to use every bit of a potentially wasted industrial plant, to create new jobs and enterprise. And along the way, they’re creating a new lake and experimenting with how we might construct buildings on floating pontoons, the better to survive the rising water levels on floodplains as global climate change causes chaos around us. Fascinating and truly inspiring.

Turning a sewage farm into a fish farm and much more. Able 2 at Heckmondwike in Yorkshire.

2012: Friday Walks 16, Ynys Llanddwyn

Off to Wales for this week’s walk. Ronnie takes us to a magical island.

Normally our Friday walks take place relatively near to where we live. So we can spend most of the day walking and enjoying ourselves. But today we decided to go further away. On a walk that we know is special. We first did it three years ago, just before Sarah had some major surgery. It’s in her book, but we’ve not written about it on here before.

It’s about a ninety mile drive from Liverpool. Around the North Wales coast, past Bangor and first left after crossing the Menai Straits to the island of Anglesey, Ynys Mon. Then around the southern coast of the island to the village of Newborough. This was set up in around 1280 by the brutal English invader Edward 1 as the new forced home of inhabitants from elsewhere on the island, as he wanted to build himself a castle and a new home, Beaumaris, where they used to live. (Edward went on to become the ‘Hammer of the Scots’ – he just didn’t like us Celts did he?)

Newborough (or Niwbwrch as it is in Welsh) these days is just a small village, and we turn left again at its centre, drive through a pine forest and park by the sand hills at the edge of the sea.

Off we go, into the sand hills

The Pleasures of Reading

Yes, today Ronnie’s talking about books. Just in case you’ve arrived here thinking it’s a post about a well known English town not too far from London.

I love a good book. Settling down into someone’s knowledge, opinions or imagination. Not knowing what you’re in for, but knowing it will be good.

Yes but how do you know it will be good? Well, I think it’s all down to the reader’s book-finding skills.

I do most of my book-finding around where we live. In charity shops or the public library. Sometimes I’ll buy brand new books in town, from our long treasured feminist co-op, News From Nowhere. But most of my mooching is done locally.

Today, the books.

2012: Friday Walks 16, The Edge of Nowhere

Ronnie follows up a post about silence, with a post about nowhere and Angel Delight. Hmm.

We’ve been on this walk before. Sarah wrote about it before. About ‘The Beyondness of Things’ – this time ‘The Edge of Nowhere’. Get the idea. It’s like walking off the edge of the known world.

Even if you’re not using the walk as a metaphor, it still feels like a mythic thing to do. To walk right out into the mouth of an estuary, to get to three tiny islands, only reachable at low tide.

Setting off from West Kirby.

Sarah looks out to our distant destinations.

And sets off. To Little Eye, Middle Eye and Hilbre.

Silence

Did you hear that?

No, it’s hard to find. What with sirens, builder’s radios in the street, alarms no-one’s bothered about. The sound of silence.

But it’s a frequent sound around our house. For all we love music, for most of the day we don’t play any. We live and we work mostly in silence.

It’s a part of the clearing stuff I wrote about in the continuing story of how we got going. We need space. Space to think. Space to dream of what might be. Space to breathe.

And I was reminded of this, this importance of silence, by what Paul Buchanan‘s just said in ‘Uncut’ – a music magazine I was reading yesterday. He says:

“It saddens me that music has just turned into a loss-leader in a supermarket. It’s like a miracle that has been turned into a marketing factor. I’m dumbfounded. Every record should be compared to silence – silence is perfect, what are you going to put on it?”

Silence is perfect. Perfect.

The story of a sense of place 2: Expecting to fly

Ronnie continues with the story of us.

So, we roll into 1996 feeling like we’re on the way. We’ve been paid for our first gig, at Trafford Hall back in November. We’ve also learned our first lesson. Because we hadn’t said expenses would be extra when we agreed the price, we’ve actually made no money from the work! Spent it all on materials and printing and just putting it all together. Oh well, we won’t do that again. And anyway we’ve learned loads. An idea’s just an idea ’til you’ve tried it out in real life, and now we have.

What’s next? We’re full of confidence now. Thinking our ideas about senses and places and creativity could be applied almost everywhere. So we experiment.

1996, the Penny Lane collage. In a New York gallery, and in the Liverpool Echo.

While we’re both still doing four days a week at our day jobs in different housing associations, it seems like we spend the other three days and most of our evenings playing with possibilities for ‘a sense of place’.