Welcome One and All

Hello there! A happy Summer Solstice to those of you in the Northern hemisphere. And a happy Litha to all my Pagan and Wiccan chums. Oh, and a very happy Golowan and Mazey Day week to the friends I still have in Penzance, Cornwall - one of the towns in which I grew up.

And, to all of you, welcome to my new blog.

The Solstice seems like a pretty good point in the calendar to make a fresh start.

'But why a new blog?' I hear you cry. 'What happened to your old blogs?' 

What happened was threat of litigation.

Sadly, now that they've run out of accidents at work, PPI and road collision claims to pursue, the seedier end of the legal world has started to pick on the bloggers. Yes indeed, even though my previous blogs were created to promote the work of other artists, the ambulance chasers have started checking whether you have permission from an artist to feature their work and, if you haven't, you get hit with absurd claims over and above £750 per image. The days of 'remove the image or credit the artist' are gone. Now it's straight in with the knives. It's happened to friends of mine and they had no defence. If you don't have permission to use an image you shouldn't use it, even if it is obtained innocently online or is promoting the person who created it. 

Imagine you were the owner of an image and one of these firms approached you and said, 'Would you like £750 for no effort?' 

Would you turn it down? Of course not.

Well, I didn't want that to happen to me. So all of my blogs have been deleted - at least 15 years worth of effort (though I have made an offline copy of them all so the content isn't completely lost) - and I've started over. This new blog will only feature work by me and images that I have permission to use. 

I'm seeing this as an opportunity for a fresh start. Which is fitting.

The Coronavirus pandemic - and in particular the lockdowns - has marked a major turning point in my life. 

I'd spent 30 years working as a police officer and then a decade as a freelance writer, artist and speaker. I wrote for TV - mainly for the BBC show QI - and radio. And we won a few awards. I also penned a new book every year and, in the gaps between writing jobs, I went on the road. 

I've given two TEDx talks, and performed on stage at the Edinburgh Fringe and the Hay Festival. I've been a guest speaker at hundreds of events all over the UK and overseas in places like the USA, Germany and Malaysia. I've done three UK tours with comedy science talks - I reckon I've visited every large town in the UK now - and I've appeared on many podcasts and radio shows as a guest. including some of the biggies like No Such Thing as a Fish, Freakonomics, and Josie Long's Shortcuts. I've given numerous corporate talks and run training days. I even did the occasional bit of after-dinner speaking and found time to teach art, do some illustration work, and play a few folk gigs. Life was rich and busy, if occasionally exhausting. Oh, and I also got elected into the Eccentric Club (est. 1781) of Great Britain and am now on the club's committee.

Life was busy, exciting and endlessly varied.

But then it all stopped.

No work. No gigs. No travelling.

The pandemic took away my livelihood.

But, in adversity there is often opportunity. I suddenly found myself with a lot more time on my hands and, with the world on standby, I was presented with a rare opportunity to take stock. Ironically, I’d done a fair bit of life coaching in the past - I’ve helped a lot of people get their life on track - but I’d never self-diagnosed my own problems before. 

Was I living the best life I could be living?

No, I wasn't. 

While I loved my work, I was also a 59 year old man who was very overweight and unfit. My diet was terrible and I had given myself type 2 diabetes. I was on medication because my blood pressure and cholesterol were both too high and I had constant indigestion. I was also so tired that I'd frequently fall asleep after the evening meal. 

I needed to do something about all of that.

I was also a grumpy old man, constantly moaning about the state of the world. I was cross so often I had to take occasional breaks from social media just to calm down. 

I needed to fix that too.

To add to my problems, I was also in an area of work (at that time) that didn’t get furlough-style support. 

So, I wondered, could I use lockdown to get fitter and healthier? Could I find ways to reduce my exposure to bad news? Could I become more self-reliant so I didn't need to work so hard? And could I perhaps do things to benefit me, my community, and maybe even the world without compromising anybody’s health? And, as the money got tighter, I wondered how much of this I could do on the cheap, or even for free. 

So I created a plan and applied a kind of ‘physician heal thyself’ approach to those areas of my life that needed improving.

And it worked.

Two years later, I'm slimmer and fitter than I've been in decades. I've put my diabetes into remission and my blood pressure and cholesterol are under control. Just as importantly, I'm much happier. I've substantially reduced my exposure to constant doom and gloom by ditching newspapers and by not watching TV news or current affairs shows. I've also blocked and filtered out negative people on my various social media accounts (though Twitter still annoys me and may have to go). I still know what's going on in the world but the volume has been turned right down - after all, we coped fine before the advent of the internet and 24 hour news media, didn't we? 

And on the money side of things, I've found work locally that doesn't involve so much travelling but does provide me with an adequate regular wage. We've got rid of one of our cars - one is quite enough now - and I've become a canny shopper. I buy local fresh food, grow some of my own fruit and veg, and forage for wild free foodstuffs. I cook healthy delicious meals but, that said, I'm not denying myself the pleasures of cakes, chocolate and good ale. They've simply become treats instead of staples so I have them less often and, as the result, enjoy them more when I do. And since I've broken my 'addiction' to bad carbs, I haven't craved them as much either. 

I've also got much more involved with what is going on in my neighbourhood and the wider community - things that impact much more on my life than what's in the news headlines. Much of my anger and frustration was based on the knowledge that politicians and the like were doing things I had no power to change (except with my right to vote). But, at a local level, I could make a difference. I've taken more interest in local politics. I've volunteered to help local charities and I've taken part in events to support the Wycombe Food Hub, which stops 50 tons of perfectly good food being thrown away by supermarkets every week and makes it available to the community. 

I've returned to my great love of art (which I write about here) and I'm painting, drawing and sculpting much more. I created the Monster Zoo project (see here) to help local families get through lockdown and it got national recognition by appearing on Channel 4's Grayson's Art Club. 

And I've reconnected with nature and the seasons. I'm a Cornishman and a country lad at heart and I'd forgotten how important that connection was to me. Long walks over the Chiltern Hills became a major component of fixing myself, both physically and mentally. I had a fair bit of country knowledge thanks to my childhood - my Dad and maternal Grandad had a wealth of lore and foraging skills to share. But I've topped it up by setting myself the task of learning to identify every type of tree, every bird, every edible plant and fungus. It's an ongoing project. But a delicious and rewarding one.

Nothing now gives me greater pleasure than watching the red kites soaring, the jays and squirrels raiding the wild larder, and listening to the sky larks and the fizzing buzz of grasshoppers and crickets. And there are those occasional magical moments when I encounter fox cubs playing in the late summer evening sun, or muntjac and roe deer grazing among the rabbits. And all of this against an ever-changing backdrop of colours in the sky, the trees, the wild flowers. 

Our ancestors knew that a connection to Nature was good for us. Science has now caught up. I've become particularly interested in the work of people like Rachel and Stephen Kaplan from the University of Michigan who have discovered an effect they call ‘Soft Fascination.’ When you watch a sunset, or see a field of vibrant wild flowers alive with butterflies and bees, or watch the sea lapping on a shore, your brain’s attention is being grabbed ... but you don’t have to do anything as the result. There’s no task to perform. All you have to do is let your senses soak it all up and enjoy it. The Japanese call it Boketto or ‘gazing absent-mindedly into the middle distance without thinking about anything in particular’. And it's good for us. Walking or just sitting in beautiful spaces creates physical changes in our bodies - the levels of our stress hormones drop, our blood pressure is lowered, and the production of disease-fighting cells increases. There's no woo-woo here - these are measurable effects that have been observed in many experiments around the world. 

A meme circulated recently that made me smile. I don't know who made this but it does sum up how I've been feeling recently:

Staying local. 

Engaging with community. 

Disconnecting from negative media.

Reconnecting with Nature. 

I've become a JOMO practitioner.

This blog grew out of my 'renaissance'. I'll be using it to share stuff that I know (or have learned) about this fantastic country we live in - the folk customs and festivals, the wildlife, the plants we can forage, the landscape, our wonderful traditions. I might even share a few recipes and menus and talk about art too (though I'll be careful with the whole copyright thing). And I'll drop the occasional short essay on subjects that interest me.

So welcome to the new Colganology blog - Colganology2.

Take from it as little or as much as it pleases you to.