2026-24

I went to Piehouse in Deptford on Thursday for an event about music co-operatives organised by academics from Goldsmith, Leeds and Huddersfield Universities. I was representing jam.coop, the online record store we’ve been building as a side project. I also met some lovely creative folks including (those that I have URLs for) Roberta and LLK from Mirlo, Ella from PVA, Finn from grassroots events london (gel) and Toby from leather.head. There were around 20 participants in all, good food from Beirut Canteen and a couple of pints afterwards at the (excellent) Dog & Bell.

I’m not sure what comes next, but it felt good to be in a room talking about DIY music projects and things we can do online. It reminded me a little of some of the music hackday events I went to when I first moved to London in the early 2010s. Lots of talk about open data, inter-operating music projects and supporting small indie artists. But with quite a bit more existential dread after 15-odd years of gesticulates at world.

We took N- and some of his school friends to Go Ape at Alexandra Palace on Sunday. I was touched by how supportive our group of kids were to each other - encouraging when their friends were nervous and cheering when they achieved something, and it’s something I noticed other groups doing too. My memories of being a kid are not really like that. Maybe we’ll be OK.

I’ve been enjoying playing Ironsworn, a solo RPG. It uses a bunch of random tables and simple mechanics to prompt you to think of situations your character is in. I like how I can use that as a starting point for some sketching or creative writing, or just have the imaginary world to dip into in my mind while I’m doing other things.