The tracks on the new album are not so much songs as poems set to music, with Aidan’s partner Lucie Rejchrtova on piano/keyboards. I had already heard most of the material performed live at the German Gymnasium in a series of events called “Winged Thoughts, Words and Music” which I mentioned in an earlier post, Poets at the Gym. It was great to hear it all together in a studio album and after a couple of listenings I would say my favourite tracks are “Son of Erin”, “Manchild” and “Fierce Moon” – but it is all good stuff.

You can preview the tracks here on cdbaby, and if you like what you hear please consider buying the album. Aidan is an uncompromising and visionary artist who is unlikely to achieve great commercial success so every download will be much appreciated.

Lunch at Dalehead Tarn

On the 30th I decided to have a rest day so I went back to bed for a while after breakfast. When I eventually got up I cleared the remaining breakfast stuff and had a bit of a tidy up before putting on my waterproofs to walk to Keswick in the drizzle. I had a look round The Puzzling Place, bought a Ben Elton book in the Oxfam Shop and sat for a while with a coffee in The Square Orange cafe bar before walking back. Whilst I was dossing a group went out and reached the summit of Skiddaw in relatively calm conditions. This was probably the only day where it was below freezing on the tops and there were reports of significant accumulations of snow.

Having had a rest day I was looking forward to getting out on the 31st so I joined a group planning to climb Sail. In fact, due to inclement weather most of them turned back after Scar Crags leaving me and five fellow masochists to carry on. Despite high winds and constant driving rain we reached Sail and carried on over Crag Hill to Grasmoor where there was a geocache to locate – any snow from the previous day had melted so with six of us it didn’t take long to find. We dropped down to Coledale Hause where, despite wet feet and no let-up in the weather, we all agreed to do Grisedale Pike. There were three reasons for this; to avoid a boring slog down the valley, to complete the Coledale Round (though we cheated by missing out Hopegill Head), and because there was another geocache to locate. Anyway, I always do the Coledale Round when I stay at Hawes End (see for example my report from two years ago), just like I always climb the Old Man of Coniston when I stay in Coniston. We found the geocache on Grisedale Pike and descended to Braithwaite, arriving just as it turned properly dark. I did the final two miles of road walking on autopilot, dreaming about being dry.

Crag Hill in the Rain

New Year’s Eve dinner featured Cumberland sausage as usual. After the main course the kids treated us to a performance of their own abridged versions of the first four Harry Potter films. I think I was the only person in the audience who had not read any of the books or watched any of the films, but that didn’t seem to matter too much. There was then desert, cheese and a quiz before seeing in the New Year with fireworks.

On New Year’s Day someone asked if I wanted to go for a run. I used to run a lot and had been meaning to start again so I agreed. We started off up Cat Bells but neither of us was really fit enough to run uphill so we just walked quickly and reached the top in about half an hour. We carried on to Maiden Moor and High Spy, running when we could, then it was then back down towards Dalehead Tarn to pick up the same return route as on my walk a few days earlier. Running back along by Derwent Water I got into my stride but was glad to get back to the centre for a shower and a cup of tea. The following day I was aching as I drove home but what a great way to start the year.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,300 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 22 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

No really big changes for me this year. I am still living in the same house with the same lodger and doing much the same sort of work. I suppose the biggest change is that after a couple of years of searching and false starts I finally bought some woodland in Hertfordshire – if you are interested in that then you can check out my new blog called Ware Park Wood.

Lunch at the summit of Cadair Idris

I will just mention a few other highlights of my year. I started 2011 in Wales where I climbed Cadair Idris on New Year’s Day – and again on Jan 2nd! In March I travelled to Riga with my parents and sister. In April I provided the soundsystem at London 420 in Hyde Park and in June I experienced my first Glastonbury Festival, working with Bicycology in The Green Fields. In July I went to my uncle’s Golden Wedding Anniversary in Devon then stayed on a boat in Exeter and went for a sail to the Mewstone with my friend Al, stopping for the night in Brixham and then Torquay. Finally in September I stayed a couple of days in the Kielder Forest and did some mountain biking. After Christmas I will be going up to the Lake District and joining a large group for some energetic hill walking. I plan to maintain my tradition of climbing a mountain on New Year’s Day.

Mountain Biking in the Kielder Forest

In terms of work I am still self-employed and basically doing odd jobs (dog walking, gardening, tree work, occasional house sitting) but I probably spend more time doing unpaid than paid work. I am still a member of Bicycology but I have been getting more involved in local cycle campaigning too, both with the Welwyn Hatfield Cycling Forum and a new all-Hertfordshire organisation called CycleHerts. I am also now a member of the Hertfordshire Local Access Forum. Veolia has finally, and in the face of intense local opposition, submitted its planning application for a giant waste incinerator in Hatfield. I have been helping Hatfield Against Incineration by delivering leaflets to local residents and I used my mobile soundsystem on a couple of protests. I was also invited to take the soundsystem along to a festival in Letchworth.

My Mobile Soundsystem

I had big crop of apples this year and made numerous apple crumbles. I also picked a lot of wild plums to make jam and my grape vine yielded about 10 litres of juice which I have frozen in plastic bottles for the summer. Out at the front I planted a Heavenly Blue morning glory which flowered spectacularly for many weeks.

New Flowers Every Morning

That is probably more than enough information for now. As well as this blog you can also find me on Facebook and Google+ (and a lot of other places if you look hard enough). I hope you have had a good year and best wishes for 2012.

Facebook was launched in 2004 (six years later than Google) and has always been a single integrated service. It wasn’t long before it reached a critical mass of users which resulted in huge growth. I started getting Facebook invites around 2006 but I held out until October 2008 when an old friend from the U.S. visited and mentioned various mutual friends who I would be able to re-connect with if I was on Facebook. By December 2009 I had about 150 Facebook friends and today I have just under 200 (I have a policy of only sending friend requests to, or accepting them from real people who I have met in real life, otherwise I might have had a lot more). All my Facebook friends are also in my Mac OS X address book, where I have about 470 contacts altogether, so at least 40% of people I know are on Facebook! This massive user base gives Facebook a huge advantage over any new rival services due to the Network Effect. However, Google+ does seem to be getting traction, specially in the U.S. where over 13% of adults have apparently signed up.

I don’t necessarily want to switch from Facebook to Google+ but I will try to find more friends who use it and add them to my circles. I may even start posting a bit, but then I don’t post much on Facebook anyway (if it’s just a few words then I will tweet it and if it’s fairly substantial I will post an entry here on this blog). Getting back to Google Reader though, I do “like” a lot of feed items and presumably after the change that will be done through G+ using a +1 button. In the meantime, to make sure everything goes as smoothly as possible I followed the instructions on Google+ for deleting my Buzz account. I will probably also post something on Facebook asking friends who use Google+ to add me to one of their circles. Oh and here is my Google+ Profile.

At 4pm Steve Ash of the London Anarchist Forum (LAF) introduced a session called “A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Forum”. The LAF used to meet regularly and the first meeting I attended was in 2004 at Conway Hall when Ron Heisler gave a fascinating talk entitled “Has the Anarchist Movement Been Infiltrated By Freemasonry?”. After that I was a regular attendee but numbers declined and the forum has been essentially dormant for a couple of years (though there has been some activity on an associated Facebook group). This meeting was intended to be a relaunch event but unfortunately it wasn’t well attended. Steve talked about his recent publication “Unstructured Anarchy”, which is basically a critique of The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman. There was good discussion amongst the few people present but I can’t see it leading to a LAF revival (I would like to be proved wrong on that).

I stayed in the same room for a 5pm session with Paul Cudenec who who gave a talk based on the themes that inspired his booklet “We Anarchangels of Creative Destruction”. He started out talking about “traditional values”. As you might expect, these are not the so called “traditional values” that Tories typically harp on about, things like empire, nationalism, respect for the church, the monarchy, money etc. He was talking about much older and more universal, natural, human, and “spiritual” values that can be found in pagan folklore, gnostic scriptures and indigenous wisdom. He talked a lot about Perennial Philosophy, which (according to Wikipedia) is “the notion of the universal recurrence of philosophical insight independent of epoch or culture, including universal truths on the nature of reality, humanity or consciousness (anthropological universals)”. He argued that these “universal” values are similar to those of collectivist anarchists and that anarchists would benefit from less hostility towards spirituality. He also argued that we each need to follow what is essentially a spiritual path to rid ourselves of ego and then come back down to earth to effect change. This lead to his second thread, which was that the “system” is now so broken and power so entrenched that it can not be reformed but must essentially be destroyed to make way for the new (which many anarchists would accept). He mentioned the ancient Upanishads which tell of a gradual descent from the Golden Age (Satya Yuga) to the Dark Age (Kali Yuga), which will end in destruction, followed by the dawning of a new Satya Yuga. Hence the anarchangels of creative destruction. Lively debate ensued.

After these two meetings it was nice to get outside, where a 19 strong French anarchist brass band called Les Judas were still rocking out. When they finished their set I got on my bike and headed back to Kings Cross, stopping briefly at Freedom Bookshop where people were starting to arrive for the traditional post-bookfair gathering. Despite missing most of the day it was still well worth the trip to London and I expect I will be back again next year.

For most of the conference there were numerous parallel sessions but on Saturday morning everyone was together (or in an overflow hall with a video link) for the keynote speaker, Noam Chomsky. I was of course aware of Chomsky’s formidable reputation but I had never actually read any of his books or seen him in person. He clearly has many ardent followers though and I even overheard someone excitedly telling their friend that they had been waiting their whole life for this moment! They had to wait a little longer though while Milan Rai of Peace News welcomed people to the conference and introduced the session, which was called “Radical Media, Radical Priorities”. Chomsky was then introduced by long-time friend and colleague Michael Albert of Z Communications. Chomsky (perhaps predictably) chose to talk about Occupy Wall Street and it was interesting to hear his perspective on it. He argued that some of the more concrete demands of the protest are not very radical at all, while some of the more radical ones (an end to capitalism) are clearly unachievable, at least without the backing of a strong and organised labour movement which no longer exists in the United States. He then took a fair number of questions and provided generally sensible answers. Perhaps you can tell that I was not overly impressed, but then he does have the sort of reputation that must be very hard to live up to.

For lunch I lead a small group to nearby Planet Organic where we got food to take away and eat in Gordon Square. After lunch I attended the session called “Whose Internet is it? Are We Loosing the War?” with a panel of experts including Hamish Campbell of visionOntv, Becky Hogge (former excecutive director of the Open Rights Group and author of “Barefoot into Cyberspace: Adventures in search of techno-Utopia”) and Bill Thompson (veteran Internet and technology commentator/journalist/critic). Douglas Rushkoff who teaches media studies at New York University was supposed to be appearing remotely but in the end we just got to see video which he recorded specifically for the conference. The session was OK but I knew a lot of the stuff already and in retrospect I should have gone to something else.

For the final session on Saturday I chose to attend “War and the Media” and was glad I did because there were three excellent speakers. The first was Mark Curtis, author of “Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam”, who spoke about how the UK supports autocratic regimes in the Middle East. He also said you have to be careful about what you read on the Internet and ridiculed a few conspiracy theories, including the one that “9/11 was an inside job”. In the question and answer session he was challenged by a woman who said that she does believe that particular conspiracy theory and was offended by his off-handed dismissal of it. She got some applause but Mark got a lot more when he stuck to his guns and called it a ludicrous theory with no supporting evidence. The second speaker was Greg Philo of the Glasgow Media Group who spoke about how mainstream journalists (particularly in the BBC) are afraid to report truthfully on the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The final speaker of the session was the renowned journalist John Pilger, author of “The War You Don’t See”, who talked about how the mainstream media fails to report wars objectively. He impressed me more than Chomsky.

On Sunday morning I arrived a bit late and joined the session called “Escaping the Hamster Cage: Practical Alternatives to the Corporate Net”. It was advertised as a geek-friendly session, aimed at geeks and the geek-interested rather than a general audience. There were a couple of people who seemed to be leading the session but basically it was an open discussion and there were a few people present who I knew through the Internet but had never met before in person. Hamish from visionOntv was using his laptop to make notes on the Rebellious Media Interactive website that he had set up – if I make any more notes on the session I will do so over there. This was undoubtedly the most useful session I attended and I came away with a copy of Tech Tools For Activists.

After the morning break I attended “Open Data: Information for Activists” facilitated by Javier Ruiz of the Open Rights Group. There were three good speakers; Martin Keegan of the Open Knowledge Foundation, Chris Taggart who spoke about OpenCorporates, and Judith Towend of Hacks/Hackers who talked about what can be achieved when you get journalists and open data hackers together to work on projects. It was interesting stuff but by this point I was suffering from information overload and couldn’t take it all in properly.

I loitered around for a while, got some food from the Veggies vegan catering stall out back, chatted to a few people and then decided to head home. It seemed to me that the conference was a great success and certainly gave me lots to think about.

My question was answered by a May 2009 Debian Administration blog entry posted in response to the announcement of a fairly serious attack against the SHA-1 digest algorithm. The advice was to phase out use of 1024 bit DSA keys and the blog author presented a useful set of steps for transitioning to a new key. The question of setting an expiry date was not covered but I found a useful article about changing the expiry date which explained the reasons for setting one in the first place. In summary I decided to generate a new 4096 bit RSA key set to expire after 3 years (if I am still using the key in 2014 I can extend it before it expires).

Once I had created the new key I signed it with my old key and uploaded it to a key server. Then I wrote a brief transition statement, signed it with both keys and uploaded it to my website. If you are one of the two people who signed my old key then this should give you enough confidence to sign the new one knowing that it is controlled by the same person.

Ready for Winter

The second photo is of grapes ripening on the vine. Last year my grapes and potatoes got hit hard by a late frost but this year conditions have been favourable. I will wait a while longer before harvesting and juicing them. They taste fine straight off the vine but they are small and seedy so I prefer turning them into juice. I just put them in a big stainless steel pan or clean plastic bucket and mash them with a potato masher. Once they are all mushed up I pour the pulp into a large stainless steel colander, pressing down to get as much of the juice through as I can, and then leave it to settle before decanting into plastic bottles. I am not interested in making wine because it is apparently easy to end up with something almost undrinkable and I am not really into alcohol anyway. The juice on the other hand is amazing – almost like a syrup. I expect to end up with about a dozen litres of the stuff so the question of storage arises. I could pasteurise it by boiling but I feel that would somehow diminish its powers so I plan to freeze most of it.

Bunches of Grapes

To call for extra-judicial action by the NTC at this point, when Libyans are still being gunned down by snipers and struggling to establish essential services is insensitive to say the least. In fact it is worse than that. Handing over any Libyan citizen to a foreign power could prove deeply divisive and may lead to a power struggle and factional fighting amongst the disparate rebel groups. Unity is what is needed right now and any attempt to force the NTC into taking such premature action would be highly irresponsible. How many more families must loose their loved ones in the name of justice?