The Book of Communicipalism and Associated Lore 

Prologue

Since it has been a long time since I started this blog without doing much with it I thought I'd better either do something with it now or delete it. Since becoming a regular Tweeter a few years ago I have abandoned blogging, which I did for about 10 years in one now defunct platform or another, in favour of tweeting.

I look upon tweeting like a form of Haiku or something with a structure in which sometimes complex messages are condensed down to 140 characters. Typing this is like being released from a virtual cell to roam free on the highways and byways of Blogger while typing with wild abandon. 

Blogging is a different sort of activity to tweeting. Twitter is the only social media I use. I have never liked Facebook for probably quite irrational reasons and I have paid the price, unable as I am to sign in with a FB account to a whole variety of stuff on the internet. A pet gripe that Twitter is often missing.

Not being on Facebook is a form of self-imposed exile I think and not having a television, nor hardly ever watching a tv is another. This cultural asceticism that turns its back upon large chunks of contemporary popular culture and its artefacts can be conversation stopper and sometimes a disadvantage in pub quizzes. But I think it can help to maintain the boundaries between the real and the surreal though, or put another way between sanity and post-truth politics created by weird government nerds.

Despite all that however, I stagger on with the sustaining support of Communicipalism, a sort of doctrine that comes from experience and paying attention to the world around us having been repeatedly tested in crisis situations over several decades now. 

I have worked in many different jobs in my time, I have now semi-retired. I set out when I left school with no academic qualifications having failed the only exam I'd ever taken (the 11-plus) to discover the world. I left home a week after I left school going to work on a farm distant from my inner-city urban upbringing first in the east, then in the north of Birmingham.

From that time until this I have been a perpetual student. 

I've worked in agriculture, horticulture, film processing and as a train guard, a railway signals & telecommunications technician, a railway signalman, a concrete technician, a pipefitters mate, a tyre factory worker: I built trains & buses (with some help) and became a self taught surveyor in the Middle East. I was a North Sea oil rig galley hand (Norway Sector), a mature student, a visiting tutor, researcher, community development worker, community volunteer, psychiatric nurse, crisis team manager/Approved Mental Health Professional, social work senior practitioner, company director and freelance social care consultant. I have made it now to my ultimate goal which is the same as when I was 15 a perpetual student, but now looking back rather than projecting forward.

I helped build Spaghetti Junction and various bits of the midland links motorway system in my youth and also slept rough at one point and stayed at a homeless hostel in my later teens.

From leaving school at the earliest opportunity, I set out to become a graduate of the university of life (which I'm still working at) but along the way became a graduate of Wolverhampton Polytechnic University of Warwick, University of Wales (Cardiff) with vocational qualifications from the University of Birmingham and a couple of other professional bodies.

So that's how I came to Communicipalism, by a convoluted route. 

I have done my bit on the front line of crisis resolution and risk assessment, 24/7 in secluded rural settings and inner-city patches in some big cities. I have been behind the facade at 3am with the police and ambulances, in custody or in A&E.. Communicipalism is not a purely theoretical doctrine it is a form of praxis or action and theory feedback loop.

My point here is I am not an 'outsider' to the system, I am not howling at the moon.

I set out aged 15 to discover the world on a journey that had me mopping floors at Butlin's Holiday Camps, laying out the dead in a Birmingham hospital, sending 'obstruction danger' bell-code signal as  railway signalman, camping out in the desert and lecturing in a theatre of more than a hundred students of social policy.
In the early part of my social work career after making the move from psychiatric nursing, I spent two years as self harm aftercare and suicide prevention practitioner at a general hospital in the heart of the industrial west midlands.

Sometimes although less often of late I like taking wobbly videos on my ageing little Sony Bloggie here's one I picked at random.