Homeward Bound (including The Great Humbling)

Introducing ‘A World Turned Upside Down’ , an old english ballad ‘a brief description of the ridiculous fashions of these distracted times’. ..coined in protest at Parliament’s attempts to make Christmas a solemn occasion (not a traditionally english raucous one) David Fell - The Economics of Enough - and his piece: Eleven Things So Far – manages to be the most random and one of the most thoughtfu...

  In this episode Dougald and Ed explore the ‘bestiary’ of metaphors stalking this time, the creatures of our imaginations, we are walking with beasts – black elephants, green swans, impossible hamsters – and nightingales. ‘Will there be singing in the dark times. Yes, there will be singing about the dark times’ Bertolt Brecht 1939 We begin by revisiting a quote from Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees...

  In this episode we explore the framing of a potential 'language of longing', beginning with the usual reviews of our recent relevant reading: 'Eco-Anxiety' by Anouschka Grose (which explores pertinent themes:  anxiety, trauma, grief, immortality systems and death denial - as well as their counter-points joy, wonder, awe, imagination, wild generosity and radical friendliness) for Ed, as well as M...

  You can hear the rising chatter: the bubbling of ‘back to normal’, the stimulus packages, the business resurrection plans, the recovery that everyone is longing for, and at the heart of it the sense that economic growth is the answer. But is it? Perhaps the biggest sacred cow, so deeply embedded culturally as to be unquestionable, is ready to be de-pedestalled?  In this second episode Dougald an...

  How will they look in hindsight, these times we're living through? Is this a midlife crisis on the road to the Star Trek future, or the point at which that story of the future unravelled and we came to see how much it had left out? What if our current crises are neither an obstacle to be overcome, nor the end of the world, but a necessary humbling? With Covid-19 calling into question the ways we...