Greenbelt 06 - pictures

I have posted my Greenbelt pictures on flicker, there are some nice ones of the Foundation Poetry shed!

Greenbelt 06

Just back from Greenbelt 06 - good to catch up with friends, and spend time with people from foundation. I even got to spend sometime with my wife this year, who had managed to delegated some of her normal responsibilities to Ben and Ian who did a fantastic job with the New Forms cafe. The farm seemed to be the highlight of Gayle's weekend, who now wants a pig as a friend for Frank! I also had a great birthday - thank you foundation for the amazing chocolate cake. I have some pictures and reflections to come but my initial thought is GB needs to bring back the edginess and risk into areas of the programme. I am sure also that conversations within foundation started at Greenbelt will rumble on for sometime!

The masked ball

last weekend Gayle and I made what is becoming an annual pilgrimage to the Beautiful Days festival nr Honiton Devon, with some friends. We had a great time despite the somewhat dodgy weather and it is good to get Gayle away from the computer the weekend before Greenbelt! Beautiful Days is a festival set up by the Levellers and the festival is a mixture of music: ska, punk, folk and reggae and a few other genres thrown in for luck and art including sculptures made out of exhaust pipes and good ale!
I have uploaded some pictures on flicker

Last weekend i revisited my youth

Last weekend I revisited my youth, not as you might expect by drinking and clubbing but going on demos!! Friday, Gayle dragged me along to a demo in the city centre organised by the Unions to protest against the attack that had happened on Christopher Kasozi was severely injured in an unprovoked racially motivated attack in the city centre. With about 80 people there at short notice, it was good to make a stand and say Bristol will not tolerate racism. It was also good to meet up with old friends who I use to go to many a demo with and was then persuaded to go on a march the following day against the war in Lebanon and our governments lack of intervention. I know it is easy to have a simplistic view of these situations but I think many of us feel there is a real injustice at work and that the west seems to be happy to let Israel carry on killing innocent people. The demo on Saturday started with about 100 or so people leaving castle park and as we marched through town and up to the top of the Park St we were joined as we went along by people out for Saturday shopping, by the time we reached the top we had several hundred people following us. We had an interesting interaction with the police on the way past college green as there was another protest going on in support of Israel. The police were quite concerned that there was going to be a clash. I guess it was people exercising their right to freedom of speech. The change for me was that in earlier days myself and friends would have got involved in a fight -maybe we are too old for that now or perhaps just a bit wiser.
Have a look on flicker for some pictures