I think it's about time I blogged about the film Back to the Future. Indeed, the film itself is about time. Or time-travel. In fact, I think it is about much more than that. It's my favourite teen movie of all time. I was 14 years old when it came out and I saw it at the cinema

Twenty Past Two

Ray, a friend of mine who works at the same University as me, has a son who writes a blog at fourteentwenty.com. I only just looked at it this week for the first time. I like it. A couple of things that caught my eye were Flat Life, a 10 minute animated short, included here:



and Dreams:


Flat Life shows how much each of our lives are connected with other people's lives, and Dreams shows us there's more to life than simply meeting other people's expectations.

Talk to Trisha

Or rather listen to her... you can still listen online to the radio show mentioned below by clicking here. I gather it will be available until Sunday 15th June, after which it will be replaced by Trisha's next show! Our bit begins about 1 hour 16 minutes into the show, so if you want to you can skip the (frankly depressing) part with the woman who has written a book called No-one Wants You: Memoirs of a Child Forced into Prostitution (an undoubted best-seller with a joyous title like that).

A Life Less Meaningless?

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed from the list over on the right that an event called "The Big Hope" is currently underway at Liverpool Hope University. This Global Youth Congress, involving several hundred delegates from over 50 countries, is the University's main contribution to the year-long celebrations in Liverpool as European Capital of Culture 2008.

When the organisers were preparing this event I was one of a number of people who were asked to lead a 'strand'. This would involve leading some kind of activity for a small group of 10-15 delegates throughout the week that would ideally lead to an outcome of some sort. Inspired by the strap-line that appeared on the cover of the University's prospectus, For a life with more meaning, I proposed a strand called simply 'Life with more meaning'. The idea would be that we'd work to develop materials for a short course that encouraged 'young' people to explore the big questions in life such as why are we here, how do we decide what to do with our lives, what it's all about... all the interesting stuff!

This weekend the delegates, from far flung places like Kosovo, Belgium, Tibet, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Yorkshire (!), have been out and about armed with camcorders filming video-diaries and conducting interviews with people about the meaning of life! Yesterday, four of us took part in a radio show talking about what we'd been up to. So if you're really interested you can listen to the show on-line this evening at CityTalk FM on Talk with Trisha (yes, the Trisha!) between 8pm and 10pm UK time. I think our bit features in the second half of the show.