A year since I last posted and I am wondering where the time went. I was really getting into the swing of writing as ideas occurred to me, and enjoying the process of putting thoughts into words...and then I just lost focus for whatever reason. But as I was walking through cold wet Folkestone today and passed my friend Rachal (she sells all the lovely incense sticks, burners and other wonderfully evocotive items on her Saturday market stall) - I stopped for a chat.

Rachal was happy to stand and  listen to me chat on about a hundred different topics whilst she sold to her regular custumers and passers by. And I realised I was using poor Rachal to download several months worth of thoughts all jumbled up.

During our chat we covered just about everything from: goats cheese and red onion tarts made by Nick Todd and available in Googies and what an absolute culinary delight they are, spiritual teaching and my inability to articulate what that means in my life, psychic healing and psychic events that I am producing this year, creams and potions that do not contain lanolin (lanolin makes my skin fall off), relationships and how strange and frightening they can be, trust and what a wonderful thing it is when you find it, mind, body and spirit events I will produce which may also give an opportunity for local practitioners to showcase themselves, serendipity ...well I just like the word, management training and the potential to work with a German colleague in UK and Germany maybe, our children and their emotional needs, the weather..it was cold and wet and necessitated hot coffee drinking and blueberry muffin eating, discussion groups and how my new personal development support discussion group for therapists and practitioners is shaping up, psychotherapy and psychotherapists who despite being wonderful at helping folk with problems have their own journey of inner learning (as do we all), well made wooden toys and the potential online market for them, weddings (Zac and Heather are getting married...yayyy)....and by the time I had paused for breath Rachal had decided that due to the rain it was time to pack up and go home (she said it was the weather anyway). She didn't complain once about my barrage of words and disconnected ideas and offered to visit me in the week to give me a much needed head, shoulder and neck massage.

After our 'short' chat...I realised that it would be far kinder and easier on Rachals ears if I just started to write again...so here I am and I will start to regale your eyeballs and brain cells with new thoughts from the chaos inside my head.

For now though..I just want to say that in my opinion we do not talk enough - OK I perhaps overdid it this time so I take that point but for Rachal to spend the time listening to me was a wonderful gift of her time and patience and allowed me to sound out some thoughts on a number of significant things happening in my life.Just getting the words and ideas out there instead of occuping my headspace calmed me down.

Ok, I have done enough talking for one day...I am going to give myself the silent treatment now and will not be talking for 6 hours (easy to do actually because I am on my own this evening lol). I will soon be back with more words though..so until then bfn.

Information about Practitioners and Therapist Personal Development Support Discussion group 'Unstick Yourself' can be found here.

If you would like to know more about the above free and informal discussion group - with no obligation - please sign up here .

We may still not be sure what the Big Society means to us in our everyday lives - but some of our local businesses didn't sit wondering about this and together they made a real difference to homeless people in Folkestone throughout what has been an usually severe winter.

Way back in early December - at the start of the bad weather - it didn't take Di and Louie Burns long to start planning a series of events to raise the focus of the plight of the homeless so that people could donate items of warm clothing (gloves, coats, etc) and raise funds which would go directly to some of the homeless shelters in Folkestone.

If you don't know Di and Louie - you may know the local phenomenon known as Bluesky Pie [ http://www.blueskypie.co.uk ] whose tagline 'Regeneration and empowerment in communities through music' says it all.

On 10^th December Bluesky Pie staged two gigs, one at Googies Art Cafe and the other at Homeground – featuring comedy, musicians, rappers...all coming to play and give their time for free!! Raffles were run at both venues with goods donated from as far afield as Liverpool. With Googies and Homeground donating 10% of their bar takings and TESS donating his fee for playing at Homeground – together they raised a grand total of £575 for the Winter Shelter run by the 7 churches of Folkestone.

Louie Burns also created a film to raise awareness for the Folkestone homeless cause and to make people more sympathetic to those that find themselves on the streets, often through no fault of their own.

Colin the manager of the shelter had said that funding would run out mid February so to keep the shelter open Di and Louie decided to do more fundraising events. One in Stones featuring rock bands and local hip hop artists followed by 4 DJ’s who all played and performed for free. There was also an acoustic chilled out night in Googies featuring some wonderful performers and musicians who again performed for free. Googies has continued to fundraise between the last gig and now with Keith Holland handing over more monies that customers of Googies have donated since December 10^th.  Alongside this there was an appeal for toothpaste, flannels, food items, scarves  etc.  – all for the Rainbow Centre for the homeless and those in need. All of these events, activities and fundraising brilliantly co-ordinated by Bluesky Pie.

Di Burns said:

“To borrow a phrase from Tesco, 'Every little helps' and we feel privileged to know such lovely talented people who will play for free for such a worthwhile cause, in fact we were inundated with performers all willing to give of their time and felt that the homeless were a very worthy cause to raise funds for which shows the tremendous community spirit here in Folkestone, we feel we're just facilitators.”

I have said before that there is something magic about this part of Folkestone .. because there is definitely something very good going on down there - and with Bluesky Pies help the magic may just spread much further. 

Di Burns tells us a little more about Bluesky Pie:

The ethos behind Bluesky Pie is that little acts of random kindness can change the world. We reached a mid life crisis nearly two years ago where we realized we were giving nothing back into the community. We resolved to change this and started to do things for others, first staging a gig for Amnesty International and Greenpeace, we found a plethora of highly skilled musicians and bands who had nowhere to play. We started to put gigs on, maintaining a spirit of love. We started What's on Folkestone as we were sick of missing high quality gigs and events that no one knew were on, and were brilliant. Our idea behind that was to actively promote and share everyones events so that no one felt excluded.

We have tried to show people how incredible and amazing they are by offering them mentoring gigs, putting them on at small intimate venues and building confidence then by making the venues larger. We also have volunteers working in film, stage management, photography who work for free to get valuable experience in the industry. Many of the people that we have helped have then gone on to make a career,  got more confidence and started to put their own gigs on.

It has had an incredible impact on the local community with people joining together and making alliances when they didn't know each other before. Networking is a big key to this, this results in a more cohesive community that actively support each others events.

As a non for profit company we don't make any money from what we do, but we get enormous satisfaction from knowing that a random act of kindness we may have shown has then spread like a ripple effect on a pond to reach so many others.

It also acts in the law of attraction, through what we have done has brought like minded people to us like the charity 'Last night a DJ saved my life' who are of the same ethos as us but work in the global community, things just seem to be getting bigger and better bit like a snowball effect through a little effort of our own. It is a really happy place to be. =)

Bluesky Pie  | Googies Art Cafe | Homeground | Whats On Folkestone (FB)