Personal

I recently (2007-2008) spent a year living at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage (watch this four-minute introduction to DR) in Northeast Missouri. During my stay I wrote several columns on their behalf for the local newspaper, and a couple for the international Communities.

For nine years I played percussion for, and helped run, the UK's largest carnival arts organisation, Carnival Collective. We recorded three CDs of our unusual mix of drum'n'bass, breakbeat, reggae, ragga and Kraftwerk covers played on Samba instrumentation (plus bass, Hammond organ, theramin and a top-notch horn section) during that time; the band has since recorded a stonking new album. I also very occasionally played semi-professionally with an ad hoc assortment of local musicians in small, black-ceilinged, smoke-filled jazz clubs. Awesome. Sweat. Cough.

I also play trumpet, piano, acoustic guitar, and whistle (I even once joined in with some diddly-dee players in a pub in Edinburgh, Scotland), with varying degrees of success. I've composed and recorded a few pieces music (one of which was described by a friend as "just right as the theme for a holiday programme", and produced an episode of a podcast; something I'd like to do more of when I have the time.

I have an uncommonly strong dislike of dogs, but like picking blackberries. I write about these traits on Twitter.

With my wife Michelle Day, a social anthropologist and writer, I have a two-year-old son, Adam, who also enjoys picking blackberries, as well as attempting to throw himself off tall buildings: something I've so far succeeded admirably in ensuring he fails miserably.

I like the photo of Adam, above. I think it shows, as well as his love of fresh fruit, the efforts he goes to to figure out what's going on the world around him (here, he was watching a seagull), and why things are how they are. I hope one day he'll explain it all to me.

There are more photos of Adam, my family, and assorted dead fish on my Flickr account.