Wildewire

-And "yes" I DO class myself in the first category! I have met few people up here with the community arts and development skills and experience I possess. Its too hard not to moan when I see so much I can't change and I am very aware that my (bad) reputation precedes me- with some justification as I have locked horns with bored Boards and flounced off into the distance more than once. ANOTHER friend shared the horrors of working for inadequate managers recently, seemingly incapable of addressing obvious issues out of fear and obvious inability. The common theme is that if you're the sort of person who won't rock any boats, frighten any live stock and maintain the status quo; you're in!- Brown-nosing is a  creative sector  core skill. Beware the person who is everyone's (professional) friend: you can wager they're sharing information about you both real and invented with your enemies and will end up well funded whilst you fall from favour. There is a ...

Sad to say that I was right to maintain my cynicism concerning the idea that a buff, young, body-building Ukrainian would actually commit himself to living with an ancient, cantankerous queen of questionable fitness like me! As much as I thoroughly enjoyed the five month experience, I maintained a modicum of awareness throughout, to enjoy it like a sort of active novella or computer-generated alternative reality game.  Even after I contacted my supposed suitor three days before Arrival Day (oooh!) to make sure he was actually going to be there before I splashed cash on trains and accommodation, he left it until Arrival Day (oooh!) -1 to concoct a tale of incapacitation as the result of a serious road accident. I wrote back that I was of course horrified, but I had to go as I had just noticed a 500lb pig flying around my garden and I wanted to get a picture of it. No further contact after daily missives and conversations without fail for the last three months. You gotta...

OK so I still reserve a LITTLE piece of cynicism in case it turns out to be a scam, but my beau tells me he has booked a ticket to arrive in London on May 1st and stay with me until the end of September. The logic is to find out if daily correspondence can actually turn into a real, committed relationship. I am confident enough in my own deductive skills (as an experience Director and trainer of actors!) to know pretty quickly if its just a ruse to get a gullible UK citizen to make the arrangements to get him out of a country where he will have few real prospects or that he is everything he has said that he is. Of course even then we might not hit it off. I would still help him to stay here as long as I believed he wasn't trying to scam me. So, I'm planning a long week end in London doing the tourist things and hitting at least one big gay club before coming home on the Sunday evening. This will be a complicated undertaking as several friends who live at opposite ends of th...

I am committed to the work of the cic I formed in 2012, but two jobs for organisations I have worked with before and where feel I could do well happen to be being advertised at the moment, it would be foolish not to apply. They pay well but although I would be happy to land either of them, I will be just as content to continue what I am doing now. My main problem is knowing whether I could actually work for those people. I have had such bad luck with bosses! The LLGC fools turned down an opportunity that was "licensed to print cash" as one of my friends described it at the time, in favour of trying to gentrify the centre which alienated its core users (as I told them it would), ended the only period of profitability the organisation had ever experienced and caused its closure three years later. I had predicted everything that happened accurately except I thought it would take 18 months for them collapse, they borrowed against their houses to extend the farce for an extra ...

OK so: I HAVE been getting back into the work flow; I'm on the trail of some "partnership funding" for a project for which I got HLF funding last year but failed to secure the required additional bit to release the grant. My brief stint in Blyth put the project on the back burner but HLF confirmed they'd be willing to grant an extension (better than letting the cash go back to London!) so I'm back on the hunt. This time, two of my colleagues find themselves in similar situations re work and are more actively involved so it feels like we can really do it this time. I've also won a commission to write some funding applications for an LGBT organisation in Darlington, so things are looking... OK. The thing is that my Love Life has intruded on my work life. I don't really have much of a "love life" these days, though, as a single gay around town I'm not celibate! But I am an old fashioned sort who wants what he has wanted from the acceptance o...

I suppose you might call it "Post Vacation Inertia" but it has been a bit of struggle getting back into a rhythm of even thinking about work. Not having a job to go to is part of it though my first action this last week was to submit an application for a job I had taken with me on holiday and looked at once, for ten minutes. At least I got it submitted by the deadline, but as they've not got back to me, perhaps it wasn't my best work as I haven't heard back from them. In all honesty; I wasn't excited by the job which isn't a good sign, I just know I could do it. It is increasingly true that job descriptions are getting bigger as the salaries offered diminish, I'm sure this job would have offered at least five to eight thousand pounds more a couple of years ago. The first day back was a glorious spring day, since then, this corner of the country has been clouded in gloom while most of the rest has been basking in sun. I did have a meeting with one...

I'm a little worried about getting used to this holiday lark. Here I am in Menton with my old friend and father of my god daughter. He's concierge of an apartment building 200m from the beach and I've got a flat to myself which is cool. When I first came here, my friend was single, footloose and fancy-free, now he is a dad whose wife works six days a week so on top of his concierge duties he hardly gets a spare moment- not that he doesn't love it! I usually get 'antsy' sitting about doing nothing, but its as if the recent tensions in my life are just seeping out of me as I troll around the town or just sit about catching the rays. Not that my recent troubles haven't been completely forgotten: I deleted all files relating to the failed experiment of my time in Blyth from my laptop, but had forgotten that I'd copied them to my tablet, I found myself re-reading the job description at a bar earlier and burst out laughing- clearly people will say anything...