I went to a conference all about Community Radio this weekend. It was held at Urbis, the landmark glass wedge shaped Manchester Museum that looks a cross between a futuristic ship and the lid for a cheese board. I’ve been to Urbis a couple of times now and have mixed feelings about it as a space. For all the dramatic styling, it is also rather bland internally with its plain white finishes & shopping centre ironmongery once you grow accustomed to the scale and layout. I much prefer the Lowry Centre with vibrant use of colour and the fact that it is performance space, which I always find more exciting than display space. Not that I am decrying the Urbis museum aspects- the City displays are fascinating on the various levels through the building and it is currently free as well so definitely worth at least one visit. They do encourage you to visit the first floor gallery (that isn’t free) and the motivation for that has to be the contents. It is currently photos and artefacts of the rock scene by a photographer called Nick Rock and only time prevented me on this occasion as the teasers looked very interesting.

Urbis has a conference suite on the ground floor and this was the main venue for CommunityFM 2005. However, the event was targeted at a number of different streams of community radio activists, from complete beginners all the way up to fully fledged existing stations looking to increase their sustainability, so there were a number of parallel sessions billed as workshops. To accommodate this, the nearby Cathedral visitors centre was pressed into use which had four meeting rooms of various sizes. It was a short stroll away from Urbis, close enough to be convenient but far enough to become tedious traipsing back and forth for coffee breaks and the like.

What were my overall impressions of the event? A curious mixture of both elation and despair. Elation, because I met a number of people who I found highly motivating. Despair, because the mindset from the attendees mainly seemed to revolve around collectivism rather than individualism. A session on funding talked at length about various sources but most of them were government agencies or quangos who redistributed taxation according to perceived merit (generally driven by flavour of the month). A strong element of getting a community radio license is demonstrating something called “social gain” but the more you scrape away at the surface of this the more it looks to me like “social engineering.” One session on programming put up a list of people that should be included in Community Radio, which looked like a local authority political correctness sensitivity training course. My flippant comment that we therefore exclude everyone else not listed got a big laugh but some thoughtful looks as well. There was an unchallenged assumption that the private sector were big bad bogeymen out to derail anything the community sector did. Something else I gradually became aware of was that many of the attendees got their take-home pay from the community sector rather than being unpaid enthusiasts and that the volunteers weren’t really in the driving seat.

All is not lost, however. A toolkit was launched with some very sensible advice in it about not getting sucked into the requirements of the various social agencies and turning output into some horrible manifestation of Town hall FM. I met at least one individual who recognised that the cap in hand model to the government wasn’t sustainable and that they would concentrate on fund raising across a range of different approaches. I found out buckets of information about things I hadn’t appreciated or investigated, not all of it what I wanted to hear…

I’ll be taking a blogging break for a few days, more of the conference and other matters in due course.

I took the motor into an ATS to get the burst one replaced, which was stinking out the boot with cold burnt rubber. (Why do I think of Billy Connolly? Oh yes, his stated objections to Condoms) You will put the new one on front offside, worn one in the boot and check the torque on the wheel I changed? Yes sir, of course Sir. …By the way, the front offside is wearing down, it is still comfortably legal but you should be aware of it. OK, I’m not too bothered if it is the spare. Yes, we’ll see to that…

later, it struck me that the new tyre didn’t look particularly new. There was a good reason for that, it was because it was actually in the tyre well in the boot. Now I wonder, did they even check the torque on the front nearside or just put the hub cap back on?

I had a high speed blowout tonight on the motorway. Not a crash & burn one, more a bang!- what was that- it can’t be the tyres, the handling hasn’t changed but I’ll ease off anyway hmm, getting a little lumpy! type of blowout.

I was close enough to my exit junction to slowly exit on the hard shoulder with hazards going, but by a few hundred yards I needed to pull in. After having a look (front nearside, I had assumed it was back nearside due to keeping control) I rang the AA & as they said no more than 75 minutes, had a go at changing the wheel myself. Last time I tried I couldn’t get the nuts off, but that was alloy wheels, these were more straight-forward. The AA man then rang me as his directions weren’t clear, but I was able to tell him he wasn’t needed any more. The local tyre change garages were all closing, so it looks like a job for tomorrow.

I can highly recommend the exhibition at the Imperial War museum North which looks at war from a local (i.e. Northern England) perspective.

Their own description sums it up:

Focusing on the highs and lows of the Home Front, The North at War explores the impact of both world wars on men, women and children living in the north of England. The exhibition starts with celebration and moves on to examine experiences of loss, pain and threat, culminating in the hopes and aspirations felt by many as war ends and peace begins. With an engaging mix of objects and personal stories, this will be one of the highlights in the 60th anniversary commemorations of the end of the Second World War.

The Special Exhibitions Gallery is an extraordinary and compelling space, unrivalled in the UK. One of the largest temporary exhibition galleries outside of London, its unique design provides a powerful setting for a diverse range of major national and international exhibitions.

Of particular poigniancy are the visitor comments written on an old style “clock card” and tied to a frame for all to read. We have added one, it turns out that my Mum in Law brought an unexploded incendiary device into the house from the garden & put it in a drawer…

One downer today- the lift up to the viewing platform on the “air shard” was out of order today, 161 steps up, my thighs still ache!

…Coppersblog, that has gone off the air other than a holding page, after massive exposure in the Mail on Sunday last week.

I don’t know if the grief is from his ISP, his Bosses or the secret squirrels, but he was bound to be rumbled eventually.

His blog banner says: A Journey into the mad, mad world of the British underclass and the Public sector, where nothing is too insane for it to be written down and copied in triplicate. VIEWS EXPRESSED PROBABLY DON’T REFLECT OFFICIAL POLICY. “This blog will do more to put people off calling the police than anything, other than actually calling the police.”

He painted a picture of policing for the dull reality it probably is.. very frustrating at times, careful what you say for all the professional victims, endless form filling, echelons of non-jobs and knee jerk initiatives to jump on Government bandwagons etc.

His closedown will cause waves in the blogosphere, 131 comments on his holding post and counting…