One month to get your ticket to our Fate of Britain Convention

We’re getting close! There’s just four weeks until our Convention on the Fate of Britain, on Thursday 11th September at Conway Hall, London, 10am-330pm. Meet amazing people, individuals and organisations, all ready to do the joined-up, collaborative work needed to build a better world – and shape the plan for what comes next. There’s still time to get your ticket ✌️🎟️ – and there’s a range of options which hopefully means no one is unable to come because of financial barriers.

We’ve had some great calls with many of you to shape the Convention – and we’d be up for more. Here’s an overview of the day so far:

9:00am WELCOME 
Doors open, come and mingle, get coffee and refreshments, films, stories and futures – get ready to enter the better future!

10:00am CONNECT
Be warmed up by comedy from Will Sebag-Montefiore
What’s brought us all here from host Clare Farrell
Life Stories; finding connections and making them visible (aided by illustrator Josh Knowles) (Tea Break)

11:45am FOCUS
A panel on national identities and how we connect to our collective work
(Speakers to be announced)

12:30pm LUNCH (provided)

1:30pm EMPOWER
What is power and who gets it? Breakout sessions delivered by people in the room from the network, with Our House, Humanity Project, 1-2-1s, story power-mapping workshops, and more to be added.

3:00pm TRANSCEND
Your Words, by our Poet in Residence Maureen Onwunali
What we do next: shape the plan
Singing together, with two very special choir leaders (tba!)
Final connections from the team

We’re serious about making it worth everyone’s time to attend, to tease out entanglements that we’re facing, to find useful connections between those coming. We’d love you to complete a very short (3 mins) form so you can:

1. Let us know the breakout session for you, or suggest one
2. Propose someone to share their life story (perhaps your own)
3. Take other opportunities to be involved (help us shape the day, volunteer)

Enjoy the rest of the summer and we’ll see you soon.  

Elsewhere in Absurdity...

We’re writing this from rooms with all the curtains closed to keep out the extreme heat. While a lot of commentary still uses 1.5° or 2° degrees to describe this earth energy system shock, they don’t get at what overheating feels like. What can, perhaps, is that a 2° degree rise in average global temperature means a 17% rise right here. Imagine if the average UK summer was always 17% hotter than what it used to be... What once averaged out at, say, 25° degrees becomes 29.5° degrees. What would that fee– oh, hold on... Anyway, on that note:

• Last Saturday Alanna, Alex and other friends, including our dear allies Jeremy and Monique, and many more, sat in the scorching sun as part of the Lift the Ban protest at Parliament Square to counter the increasing authoritarianism of the UK government and their decision to proscribe Palestine Action in the face of irrefutable evidence of genocide and famine – Jeremy wrote a wonderful piece about it, The Tide is Rising.
• And on Friday Charlie went with some of our compadres such as the Bureau of Silly Ideas to ArtBomb Doncaster, where the locals are ready to deliberate on the Fête of Britain:

• David is currently lost in action doing ‘back to school’ shopping with his youngest. UPDATE: Lewisham is out of black skirts suitable for schools. M&S. H&M. Same. Reluctantly they tried Primark. “We only have beige school skirts.” If that’s not absurd, we don’t know what is.
• And a special mention for the launch of Hey! Festival, born out of the efforts of Monique Roffey, Alex others in Hard Art to bring together a bunch of performers, poets, fiction, nonfiction, and – gasp! – even literary writers, to get up off our asses and do something; it’s premiering at Doncaster’s ArtBomb.