Some of you will remember Proost.

Perhaps you used some Proost resources, or have some Proost books on your bookshelf. Perhaps you used their labyrinth kit back in the day, or used Si Smith’s lent images to help with your journey towards easter. Perhaps you were a Greenbelt festival attendee, and participated in events that used resources only available from Proost- video, music, liturgy, poetry.

Proost was very important in my own creative journey. It was through the recognition and encouragement of Proost that I felt for the first time that what I wrote may have some value beyond my own need for self expression. In the end they published four (I think!) of my books, and also two poetry anthologies I curated. It felt as though we were gathering a community of poets, but the organisational requirements to formally network this community always remained just out of reach.

Then Proost withered and died. The reasons for this are not really mine to tell, but I think it had to do with the original innovators moving on to other things, and later attempts to continue coming up hard against the reality of just how much work is involved.

Then, a year or so ago, a bloke called Rob got in touch with lots of former Proost contributors/artists, asking questions about how many of us might be interested in a Proost #2.0. I have had a few previous contacts with Rob, who has been a faithful reader/encourager of many of us. He had greatly valued what Proost was and was wondering whether there was still a need for something like it. This began a series of conversations, not just between the two of us, but with a number of others. Eventually, it came down to this – yes, we think there is still a need for Proost 2.0, but we have no real idea how we might go about this… well that is not quite true. We have some clues, but lots more questions.

We decided that we needed to do this in a collaborative way, sharing the process with others. The hope is to build Proost as a community, with a series of ‘hubs’ relating to different disciplines, moving forward at the pace of the community we create, and with the resources that this community can provide to each other.

So, how do you create community and connection? For this, we need YOUR help in getting the word out through all those many social media and other sources that connect with people who might benefit from or have interest in a Proost 2.0.

We have started a Facebook page.

We also decided to do a lot of the discussion out in the open, via a podcast. The first one of these is below- we would love to know your thoughts…

In the meantime, welcome to that best part of any project- when it is full of wide open potential!

King Charles has cancer.

I wish him well, but in his age group (over 75s) cancer is a common experience. I was both glad, and at the same time disturbed, to hear an announcement from the palace that his cancer diagnosis would ‘shine a light on cancer, enabling better understanding of the condition’. Well, perhaps it will, but not necessarily in the way he would have meant, because it might show us that not all cancers are equal, and not all cancer sufferers benefit from the same treatment.

There was an article in the Mail online yesterday (I will not share the link because it is a rather despicable publication) with this headline;

How much would you pay for healthcare fit for a king? As Charles and Kate have medical treatment, all you need to know about private health insurance

It will come as little surprise to hear that the king was diagnosed, and will recieve treatment (within ten days of his diagnosis) at a private hospital. In other words, he will recieve healthcare fit for a king.

Meanwhile, reports up and down the country tell a rather different story for the healthcare being offered by our glorious National Health Service – that grand old flagship of the British Welfare State (more on this later) which promised care for us all from cradle to the grave.

Yesterday, it was announced that a woman had died huddled under her coat in a Nottingham Accident and Emergency department after waiting to be seen for seven hours. This appears to be far from an isolated incident, which should be no surprise, given this trend;

(table from here.)

There is a strange narrative in this country about the National Health Service. In the shadows, politicians describe it as the ‘national religion’, and like other religions, it contains an unhealthy amount of hypocrisy. After all, most of the elites in our country (including our politicians) use private health care.

There is also a common narrative which describes the worsening performance of the NHS as ‘not about money’. We spiral into anecdotes about ineficiency and waste, alongside carefully curated statistics and examples of beaurocratic idiocy. It is also true to say that even our slash-and-burn taxation and public spending current government, spending has increased, but the degree to which this increase is real is very complicated to pin down, with huge variations and almost deliberate confusion. This article spells out some of the problem.

Of course, part of the problem is that the NHS is a huge monolith that will always tend towards what Ivan Illich would describe as unconviviality, which is another way of saying that it is not on a human scale. The tool we have created then becomes more important than the people who are dependent on that tool. Our last bastion again this kind of unconviviality is always the staff who work in the NHS, and it is fairly safe to say that morale is not high.

Perhaps too, we often forget that the NHS is the end point of national health and welfare – the last resort – not the starting point. In other words, you can not improve the health and well-being of nation be only treating sickness. We know, through extensive research into the creation of wellbeing over decades and in all sorts of different societies, some of the things that help, and many of the things that hinder.

We know the relationship between inequality and mental wellbeing, spelled out well in this article.

We know the relationship between wellbeing and general health, including our immune systems, as this government document spells out.

We know to the immeasurable value of that complex web of small voluntary groups, societies, clubs, religious institutions, cultural events, arts and charities that bring us together and give life meaning. Many of these groups have lost previous sources of funding as local authority budgets have been cut and then cut again.

Those same cuts to the funding of local authorites has had a massive effect on social care provision. At a time when the national demographics have trended towards a big increase in very elderly people needing complex care, we have had over thirteen years of cuts to councils, who provide the bulk of the support to vulnerable people. Even where councils have performed fiscal alchemy to preserve funding for social care, it is not enough, because of the aforementioned demographics.

Perhaps we have deliberately forgotten that the number one way to improve health is through stable income. The infamous Black report in 1979, investigating inequalities in health outcomes, made this rather obvious point and as a result was buried.

Meanwhile the real terms value of benefits are at an all time low, and the punitive unemployment and sickness benefit processes has adopted an almost inhuman cruelty – which has in part achieved its purpose of forcing people into work. This work however, tends to have certain characteristics– low paid, insecure with little or no hope of progression. In other words, the very kind of work that makes profit for others at the cost of worker wellbeing.

So, what is happening here, and what can we do about it? Or rather, what COULD we do about it if we voted in a government that was prepared to bring about the radical changes that appear to be required?

I would suggest that in order to look forward, we also need to look backwards, in this case towards an old idea known as the ‘welfare economy’ (a society which benefits as a whole because its citizens are being taken care of), which here in Britain, was known as ‘The welfare state’.

It was the coming of the welfare state in the wake of the second world war that promised a different kind of society. No more would the citizens of post war Britain be subject to the boom-and-bust uncertainties of capitalist industrial barons. Neither would the poor laws any more be an acceptable model of managing the welfare of the most vulnerable. In fact, means-testing itself was to be abandoned in favour of ‘national insurance’, paid by workers in good times to ensure their survival through the hard times.

Oh, and the welfare state also included a health system known as the National Health Service. Arguably it is only this part that has survived relatively unscathed. The rest has been systematically attacked and villified by news and media outlets (owned and funded by billionaires) to the point where the very word ‘welfare’ has become a synonym for ‘scrounger’ or ‘waster’.

The inverted logic of neo-liberalism has held sway for decades now, telling us that a healthy society has to be moderated by the insatiable belch of the free market. It is only (we have been told) through shrinking down the previous excesses of the welfare state and allowing the self regulation of pure market forces that we can know prosperity.

To be fair, it has worked for some.

(But not for the many.)

Is there hope yet for a welfare society?

Can we wind back time to what we once aspired to? If not, what might such a society look like under the harsh pressing reality of climate injustice as well as economic injustice?

It is these questions I am intending to ponder in the next wee while.

(To be continued…)

Over the last few months, I have started to become a potter.

That may seem an odd statement from someone who has made a living from a ceramics business for close to a decade, but until recently, I messed around at the edges of the actual potting. The hands-on-clay stuff has been Michaela’s passion, and I have been her helper, provider of words and maker of frames. I always made things and have done a lot of glazing, but it was not really my thing- but this has changed, to the surprise of many, including myself!

What changed? Well, I have been working on a new collection of ceramics, which we are calling ‘seatree elemental’.  Here is the blurb.

‘Seatree elemental’ refers to a range of ceramics using rough clays and alternative firing techniques, such as pit firing or raku firing. All pieces are hand built and unique, each one is different and one-of-a-kind.

Although they utilise original poetry – just like other seatree work – you may have to work harder to read it, as we are  sometimes happy to let the words be absorbed into the piece itself, as if they form part of the fabric. In this way we try to allow the different firing methods to shape the words too.

Why are we doing this? 

Well, it was necessary for our work to grow, to experiment and find new expression. I love the new rough clay, as it offers many redeeming features in its plasticity and drying qualities. Michaela hates it though, as she has a wierd intolerance of the scratchy rough texture and likes her surfaces to be much more smooth.

I am also loving the alternative firings, and how the organic shapes of the new work are transformed by the elemental nature of fire and heat, as if emerging from the very place they (and we) are planted.

Much of this process is rather hit-and-miss, with as many failures as successes. Partly this is because of our learning curve (which shows no sign of levelling off!) but also the very nature of firing large pieces like this one is challenging!

The poems chosen for seatree elemental are often more challenging in nature, as this work has emerged as a way for us to explore our relationship to all that is broken and all that is beautiful in this world shadowed by climate injustice. Just like our other work, you will see a colour spectrum inspired by the wild western fringe of Scotland.

A lot of these pieces use a firing process known as raku (which our Japan-based friend tells us means ‘easy’ in Japanese – something I feel might be intended as irony!) Raku is a process by which a pot is heated quickly to around 1000 degrees using a gas burner, then it is placed in a reduction bin (a sealed metal bin containing combustable material.) By controlling the amount of oxygen reaching the glazes, the potter can produce a range of different colours  (although much of this is also down to chance for relative beginners such as ourselves.)

Slowly, firing by firing – sometimes by firing pieces a number of times – I am starting to get the colours that thrill me. It is mesmeric.

We mentioned earlier that this work is in part a response to climate change and mass extinction, and we hope to pull together an exhibition of our work in the future, but for now, we have uploaded a small selection of our work in to our shop, which you can see here. 

Here are a few more images of recent seatree elemental work. Most are not in our shop, but if you see something you like, feel free to drop us a line…