I live in Southall, west London, and this is the place where the various bits of my online life meet: writing, local investigations, community work, music, football worlds, photographs and small web projects that seemed like a good idea at the time.

What I do

A lot of my current writing is about local democracy, development, environment and community power in Southall and Ealing. My main home for that work is Southall Stories, with Ealing Civic Commons gathering useful civic information and sources in one place.

By day I work in charity administration and project development at The Kings Centre Southall.

I also build and maintain online communities and small web tools. That includes the long-running Top 100 multiplayer football-management world and Helping Hand, a collection of human-first publishing tools for getting material from paper, tablets and local files onto the web with as little machinery in the way as possible.

And, after a break of roughly thirty years, I am once again making music with HOVERCRAFT, the punk band I helped form in Grimsby in the mid-1990s.

This site

This site is the personal bit.

The blog is where I put notes, observations, longer pieces, family life, politics, music, technology, football and whatever else has caught my attention. Favourite Photos is a deliberately small selection from the much larger photo archive, and the Library records what I’ve been reading.

If you are looking for something older, the Archive is the complete chronological record.

I’ve been publishing things on the web for a long time. Part of the point of keeping this site is simply that the web is better when people own a little corner of it themselves.

Elsewhere

You can also find my code and experiments on GitHub, or subscribe to the site through Micro.blog or RSS.

This is my personal website. The views, writing and projects here are my own unless explicitly stated otherwise.