people

I’ve just had a shock! This is my first blog as a Social Reporter and what’s been suggested as the topic? Elders! Okay – so I was 60 in May, I’m retired – well, sort of, have a grey beard and don’t tuck T-shirts in any more. But am I really an Elder?

London, it has energy, infinite variety, endless connections to a wide, wide world beyond our shores.  There’s culture and entertainment,  beautiful places, people and things to see.  So I’m wondering why it’s getting harder and harder to face the experience of my home town.

Lancaster must be a city – it’s got a cathedral and a market and a city council.  Proof enough!  But of a Saturday we all go "into town” and every seeming stranger that we meet there,  knows someone who knows someone that you know.

Something about wood construction fascinates me and always has done.  As a child I coveted my brothers’ balsa wood kits and got into trouble for stealing the tools and little blocks and planks to fashion sheds for toy farm animals.  As I got older, my education took me even further from wood – while my brothers went to after school classes and made stools and benches that we sat on fo

The British love their woodlands; if there was ever any doubt about that, the outraged protests when this tory government suggested selling off publicly owned forests, made this very clear. But how these woods are valued today is very different to how they were valued in the past.

This is the story of the first year of the Transition Dartmouth Park community garden, based at Highgate Newtown Community Centre (HNCC), and of the people who created it.

The current job market is not particularly enticing for young, enthusiastic, inexperienced and transition-minded individuals. Young people across the country are struggling to get any kind of job, let alone a meaningful one, and once you do get a job there are no guarantees you are going to get to keep it.

As I mentioned back in April, I live 25 miles from Edinburgh and am a transitioner-without-initiative. But I've made it through the ranks of Guest Blogger and am going to try my best to keep you updated on what's happening with me and my initiative.

Paddington station feels like the Blitz. It's two days before the Olympic opening ceremony, and everyone with a choice is evacuating fast, escaping a million extra people in London and the fear of transport chaos. I struggle through the crowds with our bags in the heat, and collapse with relief onto the cool train.

Ah Scotland, the land of haggis, whisky, bagpipes and Robbie Burns.