Working like a Trojan

I’ve been working like a Trojan for the Good Faith Partnership and doing some freelance for Winchester Cathedral.

It’s a really busy autumn with, this week, trips to Winchester, Reading and Bristol and next week a day in Winchester celebrating Jane Austen who is buried in Winchester Cathedral and who was born 250 years ago this year. There will be a special service honouring Austen and a statue of her will be unveiled, by the artist Martin Jennings who has just been commissioned to create a sculpture of the late Queen Elizabeth II to stand in St James Park in London.

Meanwhile with Good Faith’s Warm Welcome Campaign, life is busy preparing for a launch event when we help Warm Welcome Spaces get ready for winter with some exciting news about a new partner for the campaign who we hope can unlock valuable resources for Spaces, including much needed tea and coffee supplies. We’re also deep in planning with Warm Welcome Campaign partners including Co-op and National Grid.

Community is at the heart of the Warm Welcome Campaign, just as community is at the heart of a more hopeful vision of the future in these otherwise bleak times in the world. Community action and support gives us much-needed hope in a world of ongoing violence in Gaza, the horrific events in Manchester the other week, and a UK society where flags with malintent and racism are rearing their heads.

For these reasons, several short films from my friend and Mirror columnist Ros Wynne-Jones and others are hugely encouraging – this one about Rotherham, so often the butt of prejudicial ideas and assumptions from those of us who live down south – is worth watching.

In other news

Here, in a nutshell, is the reason my older daughter hates Keir Starmer and will not vote Labour; she’d rather vote Communist, if she had the option. It’s also a stark warning for Labour – the cost of living is THE most pressing issue for many, many people up and down the country.  Not immigration. This article mentions that 33,000 people have crossed the channel so far this year, compared to more than 1 million households (households, not people) already in the red on their fuel bills – and that was before the 1 October increase in the cost of energy.

I didn’t know whether to add this but, in the spirit that I’ve used in blogging since 2008, I want to be transparent. I have a fairly decent main salary, but I’m a single parent with one adult daughter at home full-time and another at university and I am getting by currently by also taking on freelance work.

This is another story that would have my older daughter spitting into her veggie bao buns: the news that universities offered to monitor students’ social media accounts for an arms company, among others. All to mitigate protest and dissent. Arguably, protest and dissent are a key part of what students are at university for. I say this as someone who went on a Poll Tax demo back in whenever it was – 1990? – albeit I went to Manchester, rather than London where the riots happened. I’m not a total fool.

This was interesting from Press Gazette, showing the FT now only sells 10,000 copies of the paper every day. I remember when the broadsheets sold around 300,000 copies a day. Press Gazette says it’s not hard to see a future when the FT only publishes a Saturday edition of the paper, with most people reading online.

I fear the same for The Guardian, but I value the paper edition of the Saturday Guardian so highly – and it just wouldn’t be the same if reading on a tablet or phone. The sensory experience of doing the crossword, or of reading Tim Dowling’s column or any of the Saturday magazine on paper would be totally lost, and I’m sure I would read a lot less than I currently do.

This is also fascinating and worrying, again from Press Gazette, about dubious PR agencies bombarding journalists with fake content. It’s concerning that this is happening. Always check your sources, people.

That’s it for this month. I wrote most of this while sitting at Basingstoke (Amazingstoke) station, en route to Reading for an in-person day. At the end of the day today, Friday, I will be heading off to Dorset for some much-needed R&R. I hope you get some too.

TTFN.