Wildewire

I did get an apology from my godson's dad about his behaviour on Sunday- he was having a bad day apparently. But I have been preoccupied with how unhappy I am about the situation as carer for a bright kid who wilfully refuses to do... anything it seems to me, that doesn't involve playing and communicating on his computer. He is of above average intelligence his teachers say (mind you, they seem to think that because he reads for his own pleasure) but he does speak three languages after the various accidents of his upbringing to date. But he gets below average marks at school mainly because he is " demotivated by school " because " the best it can offer will be 40 years of a job I'm going to hate ". I did laugh when he said that: the idea of securing a job that would keep one for 40 years is at best naive and I tried to explain that the sure way of getting an unsatisfactory future is to mess up his time at school. Of course it is crap to get people to m...

I was really impressed with Northern Pride. Newcastle's "Pride" event has come a LONG way from the cliquey closed and dull affair it was when I first came here. At one point the organisation that was allegedly running the festival got a grant from the local council for an office but didn't actually produce the event for two years and couldn't or actually wouldn't say what they HAD been doing. Of course there were gripes on facebook et al about it becoming "corporate", it pisses me off when people equate the badly-organised, poorly advertised and completely uninspiring with "community" and the opposite as "corporate". One of the group told me the festival- now over a week, will be costing £250,000, the grant its predecessor received 10 years ago was £2,500. I was there yesterday with my colleagues to promote our main project. After almost three weeks of surprising sunshine tantamount to a real summer, the forecast was dire. Luc...

The company two friends and me are building is based on the skills, experience, passions, energies and contacts of the people involved, yet in these first two weeks of operation it has been tragicomic how easily our shoestring budget has worn holes in the fabric of what we're trying to achieve and tempt us to wonder if this "new approach" hasn't been tried before is because it just doesn't work? The one certainty is that if any of the established institutions might contemplate what we're trying to do, they would set their budgets at twice, if not three times the amount for which we're trying to do it. Through luck and a promise of collaboration  we've landed offices in the city centre,  for twelve months,  a minute from its central rail terminal, for the same cost as the "Hot Desk" budgeted for in the funding application for our main project. On paper, this central base will help to attract and connect with clients and it positions us clo...

  I am NOT one of those who will slag London off just because I no longer live there, I think London is a fantastic city, I just began to find it a very difficult place in which to actually live. This is my eleventh year in Newcastle and I have NOT regretted moving, in fact I regularly give myself a silent congratulation when I experience something that is very different to the experiences I had in London. I love being able to saunter across the city in under an hour, I love the pace, I love the scale. More people use London's Charing Cross station in the 'Rush Hour' every week day than live in the cities of Newcastle and Gateshead combined. 2.5 million people live in North East England, there are just 2 people per square kilometer living in Northumberland... I have had some hard times, since 2011 in particular, but I am convinced that the effects of redundancy and clawing myself back would have been MUCH more difficult in London. I remember seven lean years I spent i...

I'd give the first week in the new office for our community interest company C-! At one point I was so frustrated I wanted to KILL! Despite all the planning we weren't quite ready- the lack of internet access was the biggest blow; the 'landlords' won't have it installed for up to 6 weeks. I thought I'd be able to prepare at the office and send stuff via internet at home or a nearby cafe etc but my problems were compounded by my home computer being repaired but losing access to microsoft office and me being unable to find the product key and being confronted with the prospect of paying microsoft again- until I sorted that one out I wasn't able to do the work at home. Part one of the solution came with purchasing a handy gizmo that creates my own personal mobile internet hotspot. My relief was palpable. Another problem is our main establishment partner hasn't been returning calls, messages or texts. They're to get £1,000 for delivering 40 hours o...