what if money was no object?
Well the truth is money is no object it is a means to an end at best and the pursuit of it can easily divert us from doing the things that we really want to do. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siu6JYqOZ0g]
one man spreading a little happiness
I love stories of people who live simple lives yet make a positive difference to the world. Our lives today seem to end up so complicated and yet it seems so hard to make a difference. Well today I am taking a bit of inspiration from a homeless man called Simon who spends his time between Bath, Oxford, Cambridge and…
do what you love every day
Today’s blog post is a group of inspirational places, first North Bennet Street School, an amazing place that has been teaching the highest quality of craft skills since 1885 [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlmqOXExe1g?rel=0] Another inspirational place is North House Folk School, I am hugely impressed by their work. See the website here In Sweden the national folk craft school at Sateglantan is a…
personal philosophy
A few bits of personal philosophy, feel free to share if you like them. like my facebook page if you’d like more of this
is your life a success?
My mate Barn is with me this week and as always we have interesting discussions on all sorts of topics. Today we are thinking about success. I guess we all have an inner feeling of whether we have made it or not, many of us will feel maybe we aren’t quite what our parents might have hoped for. Maybe we…
mindboggling woodworking video
What can I say? just watched this and am blown away. “When I am working I am fully focused” [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/23095780 w=398&h=224]
can we define what craft is?
Yesterday I was a meeting in London of the steering group for a major piece of government funded research into the state of heritage crafts in England. The first and perhaps most difficult task is to define very precisely what heritage crafts are in such a way as the research company can go away and start counting and measuring. Crafts…
life is a gym for head, hand and heart.
It seems to me that the life many people aspire to at the moment involves spending the working day in important meetings or at a computer or doing similar cerebral work, then in the morning or evening jogging or pumping iron at the gym to get that perfect body. These gyms seem bizarre places to me, I have walked past…
raising the status of art and craft?
How do we raise the status of studying artistic rather than pure academic subjects? There has been much discussion recently about how society values academic vs tacit knowledge, skills minister John Hayes said “In my view, the skills of a bricklayer are in no way less admirable and certainly no less hard-won than those of a stockbroker. Matt Crawford’s book…
quality goes a long way
I have no doubt dear blog readers that you have a good appreciation of quality, probably far more so that the average person in the street for whom quantity seems more important. Does quality have to cost though? Are we just the fortunate few to enjoy quality? A few weeks ago I had to say goodbye to this pair of…