Ownership, this space here is ours.
This website holds spaces for creatives, story tellers, and those of us who would appreciate having secure access to a not for profit, free website.
Since 2011 I used this website for my community facilitation work and formally retired back in 2023.
When the message came through a few months ago that the domain was coming to an end I thought about how I could use the website now.
So I renewed the domain, set up a hosting account and I am offering some of the space here to those who are curious about arts and crafts and story telling as advocating for global justice via system change.
Creative Living
Get in touch if you could use an online space to find out how this works.
I will make it as easy as possible for you to set up a page and posts.
All I need for that is your email, (create a new one if you want to keep this separate to your other online stuff).
You can then add posts as often as you wish and manage those via your page.
There is no charge for this. I am happy to offer it for free and play a small part in taking back our shared spaces that are the source and core of our online and in person alt communities.
The Thisness of This
This is my email;
mark@markthis.co.uk
This website is where I share some of my stories and I am happy for you to share your stories here too.
The space here does not involve money, I pay a small amount for the domain and the hosting, but can cover that with my own income for now.
So, if you have anything you feel like sharing, you can share it here, for free, and you can add your name, or tag, or whatever, or be nameless.
It’s up to you how you use this space here.
What’s important to you…and me?
As a bit of an intro, I’ll share how I got here, as simply as I can.
As a kid I liked the odd, new, least acknowledged, quirky stuff. That was always more engaging than the stuff considered important by many.
I left school at sixteen and worked in a hairdressing salon in Manchester in 1972.
1973 I moved to London and worked in a salon just off Oxford street. Went to nightclubs, gigs, galleries and cinemas and hung out with people who were odd, new, and beautiful, in both traditional and primal ways.
The people who employed me wanted me to be really good at cutting hair. I wanted to be good at cutting hair, and they encouraged me to work out what I felt really good looked like.
So I did.
I liked having that encouragement and the freedom of expression.
While pushing that freedom as far as a I could, I found my thing and set up my own team in my own space in Saville Row in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1976 and filled it with people I liked working alongside.
That team became a community, it included all those involved in creating a good place to work, and we worked with and for people we liked and understood.
I have more or less always worked with people I like and respect and learn from. I’m not sure why I would ever not do that. I still do that now.
By the late nineties, I had pretty much peaked in terms of my own hair cutting skills and felt the need to move on.
I completed a degree in environmental science, specialising in soil science, and spent a year, on and off, working with farmers in Bangladesh and bringing their soils home to measure in a lab in Newcastle Uni.
I liked meeting the farmers and their families and also bumped into some nomadic indigenous people who didn’t see themselves as belonging to any bordered country and had developed their own principles based around a pantheist understanding of self and nature.
Spending just a little time with them taught me much more than I ever learned in uni. I think uni made me less intelligent, less imaginative, and limited my story telling skills.
And maybe I had to learn that?
I love learning, but maybe formal education and learning are not that closely connected?
By the early noughties I got involved with a few charities, mainly ones that offered support to people looking to get satisfaction and meaning from their work and life.
Around that time I also bumped into someone and she helped me recognise that we gain the confidence to trust ourselves when we feel safe enough with someone to share our desires and hopes.
She spent a couple of years helping me develop the skills needed to support creatives and encourage them to use their skills as a contribution to their communities.
I went on to do that work as an independent in my own spaces and occasionally as an employee now and again.
The common thread in all my work is that I meet loads of interesting people and each one of them has stories that I want to hear.
And that is how I got here, retired, living in an old house in Clerkenwell, and still doing what I love to do.
I am currently experimenting with story telling via dance, theatre, music, writing, nonviolence and de-escalation.
Get in touch if you want to use this space to share your stories.