We’re done...

The At the Grassroots project is no more. The blog has been binned. It was meant to be a collaborative project supporting grassroots projects in Bristol, Bath and the surrounding settlements. Despite our best efforts, that collaboration never materialised. It was left down to the two of us to maintain the At the Grassroots blog and also, The Directory – a listings page of grassroots projects in the region. Three recent posts on the now deleted blog explaining what the project was about, appealing for help with distributing the latest paper and lastly, inviting people to collaborate with us in maintaining and growing The Directory yielded absolutely no response at all. Absolutely zilch. We were left watching the tumbleweed.

We’ve been activists not just for years but decades. We’ve had a few successes and a fair number of failures. It’s bloody painful but we have to admit that the aim of making At the Grassroots a collaborative project has been an abject failure. We were thinking – do we carry on banging our heads against the proverbial brick wall distributing the latest edition of the paper in the pathetically vain hope that someone may step forward or do we simply say sod it, bin the blog and the papers and get on with the rest of our lives?

The two of us behind this blog are 68 and 70 years old respectively. We’re knackered, getting pretty cynical and last but by no means least, we’re burnt out. The thought of having to go into Bristol and Bath, slogging round the streets trying to find venues willing to take a small bundle of papers for their patrons was almost making us physically ill. Neither of us have any idea of how many years we may have left of good health. We were both thinking that we’ve reached the point in our lives where we want to make the most of what time may be left to us. Banging our heads against the wall on a project that no one is interested is not a good use of that time. So, the At the Grassroots blog has been deleted and the papers are in the recycling sack.

If anyone wants to take on The Directory as a personal project, they’re more than welcome to do so. Get in touch with us and we’ll send you a text file of it you can work on. If anyone with youth and energy on their side is interested in taking it on as a project, it would be brilliant. It would be theirs to own and develop how they wish. We want no credit at all for it. The satisfaction of knowing that someone with more energy than us has taken it on would be more than enough compensation.

We still intend to carry on with the practical work we do at the community fruit and vegetable plot we’re involved with in the town where we live. That’s something we want to carry on with until we’re no longer physically capable of doing so. As for blogging, this blog will continue although it will probably only be updated only once a week. As for any future papers, we would only produce them for one off, large scale protests where we feel what we had to say could be relevant. Activities such as stickering and postering will still continue as and when we feel that they would make an impact.

So that’s it, we’re taking a step back. We’re pretty much done with activism and all of the infighting, egos, backstabbing, thankless slog and everything else that goes with it. We’ve pissed off a lot of the Left, a fair number of anarchists, the Right and the reactionaries, and most recently, a number of people who define themselves as ‘truthers’. As for the doomer-preppers, they can do one! We haven’t got many real friends or contacts left that we can trust. We could be described as the Millwall of activism in that very few people like us but as we’re both West Ham, that really wouldn’t be appropriate! Anyway, we’re off to rest up for a while and get our zest for life back again:)