I am a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures & Commerce, to give it its full title, more commonly known as the RSA.  Headquartered in London this body has an active network in Scotland and around the world.  It allows people from all walks of life and all ages to meet and discuss and learn about important topics for our times and to help shape the future.  A great place for meeting intelligent observers of life especially as regards creativity and work.

If you’re eighteen to forty I do recommend Edinburgh Junior Chamber or any of the other JCI organisations (there are 600 of them around the world).  Great opportunities to socialise, learn and improve your skills, whilst benefitting your local community.

The worldwide Permaculture network is a great source of inspiration for planet care issues.  Practitioners are committed to life long learning and practice around a design methodology that asks all the right questions to get answers to creating a life enhancing and sustainable future.  The Permaculture UK site gives links on to a worldwide network.

For practising business people the Chambers of Commerce network is a good link into B2B contacts, knowledge, skills and business support.  I am a member of Scottish Borders Chamber of Commerce, count Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce and Scottish Chambers of Commerce amongst my clients and and am actively engaged wth British Chambers of Commerce.  It’s like the layers of an onion – and may for all I know stretch out into the galaxy.  Meanwhile I feel I’m busy enough networking on one planet!

This site gives you the opportunity to network through mycelium.  Communicate, support and get support from other like-minded people, who see work as more than a job.

There are countless other networking opportunities.  I suggest people find the ones that work for them and grow their contacts, knowledge and understanding through active involvement.  Expect to give something back along the way!

Recommend a network through mycelium

BOOKS

Books have been a hugely important part of my life, for enjoyment, for learning, for having my imagination fired up – even for giving me something to write.  This small selection of books are about ideas that I find most rewarding.  As this site grows I’ll add subject specific recommendations in appropriate places.

BOOKS ON DESIGN & THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

Nothing delights me more than to read Christopher Alexander.  His second book, The Timeless Way of Building (Oxford University Press New York 1979) and his first, A Pattern Language written with Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein and others (OUP 1977) are exquisite essays in poetic definition and black and white photography of what constitutes the essence of design.  Hugely expensive (hey let the library kick in) and worth every penny.  I recommend Jan Martin Bang’s Ecovillages – A Practical Guide to Sustainable Communities (Floris Books Edinburgh, 2005).  Jan speaks from a lifetime of commitment to and practical involvement in developing sustainable community through the Kibbutz movement in Israel and the Steiner movement in Norway after years of developing his ideas and knowledge in rural Lincolnshire.

BOOKS ON LANGUAGE

Are important for anyone who wishes to communicate, enjoys words in all their forms and sees the importance of history and place in creating our present culture

I recommend:

The Adventure of English the Biography of a Language Melvyn Bragg Sceptre (an imprint of Hodder and Stoughton) 2003.
David Crystal is one of the best modern writers on Linguistics.  His classic of that name (my copy is Penguin Books 1971), which I still enjoy, is but one of many.
A Dictionary Of Ryming Slang Julian Franklin Routledge & Kegan Paul (my copy is from 1975).
Lynne Truss’s Eats Shoots & Leaves is a Modern Classic (Profile Books 2003). One of the most common books that people have failed to finish (apparently).  Whilst I don’t agree with everything in it, I think it’s a good read and makes some great points.  And hey!  Have you voted in the apostrophe poll yet?
My brother gave me a copy of the incomparable Hobson-Jobson by Colonel Henry Yule and A.C.Burnell from Rupa & Co 1986, a new edition edited by William Crooke.  The original was written in 1886 and is a masterpiece studying the Anglo-Indian language.  Possibly not easily obtainable outside India!
David Abercrombie’s Elements of General Phonetics (Edinburgh University Press 1967)is an exhaustive study of how we produce and can notate different sounds.

BOOKS ON THINKING

The Scottish Enlightenment – The Scots’ Invention of the Modern World by Arthur Herman Fourth Estate 2003.  Originally published in the USA as How the Scots Invented Everything.  Great read.

BOOKS ON THE ARTS

I am passionately fond of Frederico Garcia Lorca’s essay Theory and Function of the Duende.  The link is to a web version, but it’s also easily available in the Penguin Books selected Lorca originally publishe din 1960 ed. J.L.Gill.  This marvellous Andalucian word is really untranslatable, but is key to what m,akes art great.

FILMS

Film is a fantastic medium.  It conveys ‘life’ in a way we can see as ‘real’, as the quote goes “the difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to be believable.” The beauty of film is that it can both entertain and challenge us.  I’m more likely to touch on under-recognised films here, but I have many mainstream favourites.  There’s an issue about longevity – not all film endures equally well.  For example, when they came out I thought Alice’s Restaurant and Easy Rider were equally good.  After many years Arlo Guthrie’s tall tale endures for me, but Peter Fonda’s classic now seems rather thin.  Personal taste perhaps… Some of my favourites:

Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers: Les Blank is an obsessive Director who continually returns to themes that haunt him (much as Kurt Vonnegut does in literature).  Naked flesh, blood, music, humour, garlic recur in his work.  I just enjoy this film.

This Sporting Life is a 1963 classic of ‘Kitchen Sink drama’ featuring the acting of the incomparable  Richard Harris and the direction of Lindsay Anderson.  I think it endures, and one of the reasons is its celebration of working class values from the era.  Mining, rugby league, highs and lows of the human condition, the value of love and the pressures against it.  Black and white film conveys the awfulness of the dilemmas faced by the characters, and the rawness of their emotions.  Well worth a viewing.

David Attenborough’s made for television Blue Planet (8 x 50 minutes) has to be the most astonishing and vibrant wildlife film ever made.  If anyone was ever immune to the beauty and wonder of our natural world, they could not avoid being changed by this fantastic work.

MUSIC

“If music be the food of love, play on.”  Good old Shakeseare, eh?  The food of love, rhythm, dance, emotion – a branch of mathematics, an avenue to the core of the human soul.  Yes – music is all these things.

There are three people required for a musical performance: a composer, a musician and an audience.  Teenagers jamming on the guitar sitting in their bedrooms have the capacity to be all three.  The experience is multiplied with larger numbers of people in any category.  The sublime joy of music partly stems from the fact that its beauty and meaning cannot be explained.

Personally I play double bass, guitar (but not much these days) and enjoy singing.

I play with my son, Sandy in the Small Hall Band – a couple of dozen young people and parents who make Scots/Irish Ceilidh music together.  Generally speaking this involves the parents getting a tiny bit better and the kids whizzing past us at about 14-16 years old, as witness the numbers of them who have now got music degrees after leaving us old folks behind.

Every May bank holiday we have a music festival in Coldstream (where I live) called the Border Gaitherin. I recommend you apply now.
WEBSITES

Allotments UK is a great website on growing your own food.
It’s Not Easy Being Green is another website which has masses of practical solutions on all aspects of sustainable living