On February 2nd 2012, about 60 people gathered to watch In Transition 2.0 at Parkwood Primary School in Finsbury Park. Parents, children, school staff and activists from transition towns across London were plied with delicious stuffed pitta (by Nuran), cake (by many) and Urban Harvest cocktails before watching the 66 minute film.

And so goes the official write up. I didn’t mention that little glitch. How we didn’t get to see the last ten minutes of the film. That while the year 5 teacher, Andrew, was pulling out the disc, rubbing it on his T shirt and trying to get it going again, I squirmed on the school bench knowing that it was all my fault. You see, when the disc arrived, I read the little sticker “only for use at the preview” but couldn’t resist a bit of afternoon delight; my own private preview. I had no idea that the Transition Network had access to such Mission Impossible levels of technology! Perhaps if I try to watch it again it’ll fail 20 minutes before the end? (Actually, Andrew did mention there was a scratch on the disc. Oops!)

I stood to make my “technical hitch” speech and was struck by how enthused and happy everyone in the audience looked. I started to feel the relief every event organiser feels once they know people aren’t merely being polite but are genuinely engaged. A good moment, then, to hand over to the hugely capable, Debbie Warrener (and wander off to get an Urban Harvest cocktail). Debbie appears in the film because she facilitates a peer support group for North London activists. The Macy Monday group meets on Mondays and sometimes we do Joanna Macy exercises. I started the group after taking part in a Truth Mandala at the Transition Conference two years ago. We also do Non-Violent Communications and Constellation work. It’s become an important way for us to give each other support, avoid burnout and catch up with what we’re all doing.

Anyway, Debbie got people to quickly bunch into groups of five and then consider a few questions that pointed them towards committing themselves to some kind of action. People were then asked to summarise this in literally three words or fewer and the ideas raised were collected and grouped thematically on a flip chart. The four most popular themes were: social enterprises; celebrating success; growing food; and engaging the community. We divided into these groups to give people the chance to discuss their ideas further and swap each other’s contact details. Above is a picture of the social enterprise group.

There was a nice bit of serendipity in the food growing group: Sean was there looking for a site to do a permaculture garden design, Laura was there looking for someone to help with food growing on her estate and Gemma was there from the plant nursery, ELL. I was in the celebrating success group. Watching the film made me realise that we haven’t been good at stopping to look back at what we’ve done, and going “Woo Hoo!” However, my head was still in the abstract and I was taken aback when Zoe announced, with barely contained excitement, “I want to celebrate now!” Someone suggested a conga. “Yes, we’ll do it at the end!” said Zoe. I wasn’t sure it would work, but she totally pulled it off. The video clip is below. What an absolute star that Zoe is!

While all this was going on, people polished off the last of the food and a few people were filmed by Jonathan Goldberg and Anna O’Brien giving their reactions to In Transition 2.0. I attach a couple of my favourites. Looking at these, I feel we will have to invest in a proper official copy of the DVD … but without the in-built self-destruct functionality.