Brain dump – from the random ideas saved on my phone, normally at 3am

Because my brain doesn’t seem to switch off, and I otherwise forget things by the morning.

Earlier this year, one of the people at the Queen Edith’s Food Hub community cafe (that happens at the same time as the Saturday food hubs – which provide free food packages for anyone that needs it) asked me if I had ADHD. They said they had been diagnosed with it and noticed similar traits in me through observation.

“Some specialists have suggested the following as a list of symptoms associated with ADHD in adults:” [NHS on ADHD]

Above – the list of possible symptoms in adults from the NHS webpage on ADHD

When I went away to look up the possible symptoms, I was struck by how many sounded ever so familiar and for such a long time (including going back into childhood). The one thing I definitely don’t do is take risks. I’m risk-averse by disposition – perhaps exacerbated by the fear of consequences instilled by religion amongst other things. One of the reasons the untimely passing of Sinead O’Connor seems to have hit me a little harder than the news of the passing of other public figures in the public eye is because of her fight with the church, and the courage she showed in speaking out. It was only after I left Cambridge that I felt enough courage to walk away from it – but by then the damage had been done, the consequences of which I will always live with – and ones I’m still reluctant to talk about.

Further along the NHS’s ADHD pages in the diagnosis section it states:

“For an adult to be diagnosed with ADHD, their symptoms should also have a moderate effect on different areas of their life, such as:

• underachieving at work or in education
• driving dangerously
• difficulty making or keeping friends
• difficulty in relationships with partners

I passed my driving test in 1997 and bar a single motorway lesson, I’ve not driven since. I’ve never been compelled to by work, and in the cities that I’ve lived in maintaining a car is more of a burden than a freedom. I still don’t know how many people can afford to maintain a house and a car in the present cost-of-living crisis. That aside, all of the three have applied to me for decades – although as with all, I’ve assumed that other large factors were at play – including the annual accommodation crises at university in the early 2000s! (The fallout of universities expanding student numbers too quickly without accounting for the local rental market’s capacity to absorb that many students without having a knock-on effect on local working class residents turfed out into the private rented sector due. to council housing sales and cuts.)

So at some stage I’ve got to go back to my GP and ask for an assessment/referral to the ADHD Clinic (That we’re lucky to have just outside Cambridge). My worry is the wider problems with the CPFT finances (of which I was a patient governor until a couple of years ago – the issues in this news item wasn’t apparent at the time but reflects in my opinion the under-funding by the Government leaving little that governors could do to help manage it, one of the big reasons I resigned as I could not see what positive impact I was having).

“What’s this got to do with a ‘brain dump’?”

A hyperactive brain that never seems to switch off – and has never been able to switch off for as long as I can remember. I guess as with my longstanding issues with depression and anxiety over the decades, I assumed it was the way things were until someone in a position of authority outside the immediate group of adults at the time told me otherwise.

“What does the list say?”

• “PQ for Addenbrooke’s AGM 27 Sept 2023 – Temporary care home for patients waiting to be transferred, and follow-up key-worker housing.” This was following a point made at one of the public consultations on the new large developments where I asked about key-worker housing, and the consultants said Cambridge City Council were not interested, preferring to focus on the greater need for those council housing & social housing waiting lists. So this was something I thought it was worth asking if the Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust were aware of, and whether city councillors were aware of.
• “Ask someone to table a PQ re citizenship evening classes (incl GCSE Citizenship) for adults” Covered in this blogpost, but because I already have a PQ lined up for the Combined Authority’s Skills and Employment Committee on 04 September 2023 about lifelong learning centres in Cambridge, I need to find someone else to ask this one for me!
• “Citizenship teachers’ meeting re evening classes” – can we get advice from existing citizenship teachers on how to establish suitable activities, workshops and courses aimed at adults who never covered this content at school?
• “Cambridge GovCamp on revamping how city and county are governed.” An extension of this but asking whether we’ve reached a stage where we could do with the equivalent of a UKGovCamp for Cambridge involving not just anyone who works for the public sector or who is in politics in/around Cambridge, but also bringing in the pioneers from other parts of local and central government and beyond to see if they can help us crack the ‘too difficult to deal with’ problems of our city’s & county’s governance.
• “Lost Cambridge list of potential extended projects” – I’ve long passed the stage where I can keep this going myself, and need to get to a point where research on our local ‘town’ history of Cambridge is co-ordinated by a group of people who have the competence, authority, and desire to do it. In the meantime, I need to list the lines of research and potential projects that could be done by children, teenagers, and students for schools, colleges, and universities – with outputs presented at civic events, and their publications digitised, published, and properly archived.
• “Pop-up reading rooms on the future of Cambridge” – Whether at The Grafton Centre or church halls in the centre of town – or even neighbourhood centres, the principle is to bring along a series of magazines or paper copies of reports past and present for people to browse through in a relaxed and informal atmosphere as a means of collective learning about possible solutions to our city’s problems. This includes specialist magazines (eg on transport such as buses, trains, and light rail) that feature reports on Cambridge, and solutions successful elsewhere. Furthermore it can also include expensively-commissioned reports for the local planning process of which there is a ***huge public interest*** in having them publicised and shared much more widely, but which little is known about them.
• “Community and campaign group posters in libraries and community notice boards” – especially in supermarkets. I’ve given up asking local government to do this. You’ve seen the empty posterboards at Drummer Street bus station that had nothing encouraging people to respond to the big consultations – in particular from the GCP and CPCA.
• Restart the Connected Conversations series, but rotate venues and get the recently-formed networks (See Cambridge Resilience Web which effectively maps the activist groups in town and gown) – and with a routine request of inviting people to commit to one small one-off action or one small behaviour change as a result of participation. It matters even more now that with the large sci-tech-park developments and Gove’s proposals that we do this as we are no longer dealing with abstract issues. Furthermore, the climate emergency is here. Think of an autumn programme:
  • September 2023: Cambridge – map our communities, map our city, and map the barriers that prevent us from solving chronic problems
  • October 2023: Cambridge people – our relationships with the institutions. -including a local history crash course as well as looking at the publications and existing outreach institutions currently put out. What needs to be improved, how and why?
  • November 2023: Urban planning: How we got to here, where we are going if we do nothing, and how we might change things for the better. This should cover learning about processes (eg what counts as a valid objection to a planning application) as much as outcomes (how can we get ‘better buildings’ that have the support of the people *and* be both designed *and* built to much higher standards than of late – in particular housing).
  • December 2023: Recap the barriers, our relationship with the state, and preparing the ground for the generation election in terms of where to find information about the candidates, how to research questions, and coming up with questions that can be put to all candidates enabling voters to compare answers much more easily.
• Invite the Community Union (trade union) to run outreach events in Cambridge to our freelancers – of which there are ***lots*** given the new shared space facilities that are popping up all over the place.
• Ask the Cambridgeshire Association for Local History what a CPD in local history might be like for our city’s primary and secondary school teachers (see history CPD from the historical association). I’m on the committee of the CALH (you can join from £8 per year) and there is a new series of monthly talks at St John the Evangelist Church Hall on Hills Road (opposite Homerton College) which start in October 2023. Can we get more teachers involved? What do they need that they currently do not have?) What materials do they need that the CALH might be able to co-fund? Generally how can the local history community make things easier for them to educate new generations – in particular given recent finds and re-discoveries?
• Rail Future workshop at Cherry Hinton Library for its May 2024 re-opening – this is on the back of opportunities to upgrade the railway line that passes through the village in the face of new sci-tech park developments at both the Beehive Centre & the land south of Coldham’s Lane. The library there is being overhauled and will reopen in late spring. Alternatively the Village Centre’s community room next door is a suitable alternative. Essentially it’s an opportunity to introduce local residents to Rail Future and its campaign to improve significantly the rail infrastructure and services in and around Cambridge. If it works there, similar workshops could be organised for other parts of the city – mindful of the looming general election and the opportunity to inform the public (especially commuters into and out of the city) on the research that has been done on issues that affect them on a day-to-day basis.
• “Bring your old photos in” day with the Museum of Cambridge and the Cambridgeshire Collection. You can join the Friends of the Museum of Cambridge here. This is an event I’ve wanted to do for years but never got round to making it happen. (See the point above about starting new things before finishing old ones?) In a nutshell it’s a chance for the photo archives of both to be refreshed, covering both recent history as well as any potential gems from more distant decades, while at the same time ensuring that the essential information for future generations can be recorded at the same time.
• Follow-up the debate on opening up the guildhall on how to make school and community tours to/of the guildhall and nearby civic buildings a routine activity requiring the minimal of activity in terms of organising. Could be incorporated into school curricula so councillors would need to negotiate with head teachers, so that they could identify at what point would such visits have the most positive impact on children/teenagers, and what activities should be incorporated? Eg solving a planning application and looking at large-scale drawings and plans – with presentations from volunteer professionals.

There are several pages more of things but I hope it gives some idea of what it can be like having a mind that seldom sleeps, and where every morning I wake up as fatigued as when I went to sleep – sometimes even more.

But I hope it gives the reader (you!) some idea why I come across as quite an ‘intense’ person much of the time. (Maybe politics in general attracts people with intense dispositions – I don’t know). I’m not pretending I’m the only person struggling with such issues. As I said to someone last month when asked what would I be doing if I gave all of this up, I responded that I *would cease to be me*, and I could not comprehend what it would be like (given my longterm mobility-limited and chronic ill-health outlook) occupied with something else.

One of the things that drives me with all of this is also a sense that it’s now too late for me to make up for regrets from the distant past. Even though there are times when the late 1990s feel like yesterday, and the mid-2010s feel like a lifetime away. In terms of going forward, I take the view of Eglantyne Jebb in fighting for the rights of younger and future generations (just in my case at a local level) by focusing my limited capacity on scrutinising the institutions that most parents simply do not have the time in their lives for.

Which actually makes me wonder what said busy parents from any socio-economic background would state if given the chance of commissioning a group of policy advisers to investigate any issue of their choice, do the research and investigation for them (in a similar way as civil servants do for ministers), and come back with a set of options and recommendations.

• What would they ask?
  • Why do potholes always seem to be a problem?
  • Why can’t we house homeless people in empty or under-used houses?
  • Why is childcare so expensive?
• What would the advisers come back with? (You can explore some of the ‘too difficult’ issues identified by former Labour Cabinet Minister Charles Clarke in his book from 2014)
• What political issue would you want exploring by people knowledgeable about the issue, and have them write a short summary for you? Similar to when The late Queen put a question to academics at the London School of Economic & Political Sciences about the banking crisis of 2008. (You can read the response from the British Academy here – and one that focuses on the collective failure of economists in academia here which I also concur with – one that Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics emerged from)

It wouldn’t be an extensive report – it would have to be as concise as Attlee’s memorandum to The Cabinet on whether the UK should have an independent nuclear weapons capability. It was under 3 pages – you can read the transcript here.

Anyway I’ve rambled.

Food for thought?

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