Diary 27th To 30th July 2017

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Diary Thursday 27th July 2017 After a busy earlier half to the week things settled back to normal and I was at the Job Club this afternoon, meeting my job search quota of jobs to satisfy the welfare people but not managing to find any jobs I actually liked applying for. I spent the remains of the day preparing for the talks I am giving tomorrow. In the evening, the local real ale group was making a best pub of the season award to the richly deserving Princess Alice pub in Preston o I went along to the event, both to support the pub and meet the real ale campaigners, who have invited me to give a talk to them in September. A well as their great range of real ales the pub put on a free curry for everyone attending their award presentation too. Lovely. Diary Friday 28th July 2017 After more daily job searching it was time for my talk on my cult experiences at the community centre. This is a talk I have given before to various group though the first time I have illustrated it through power-point and the first full presentation of it in my new home city. In the evening I was involved in the Spark true story telling event, which this month centred on Escape. Having spoken at more length n my cult escape earlier, I gave a shortened account of it in the evening, letting the audience know that they were getting a lucky escape themselves as the afternoon audience got the full two hour version. Spark talks are just five minutes long. I talked of how the cult escape was quite undramatic. With so many involved in in-fighting and other leaving because leader in The US were passing rules about we could and could not do in our own home in the UK, I was free to drift in and out and after leaving three or four times but drifting back, I finally quit as much from boredom as my recognition of it all being so bogus. The meditation trances would till kick in involuntarily for a few years but I was essentially free from the Summer of 1985. Exposing a campus-cult at university in 1988 led to a flurry of media interest in my own escapades, including a tabloid reporter who phoned me up for the sordid details only to hang up on me in disgust when I told him there were no sex-orgies or scandals in an essentially celibate meditation sect. A TV producer later wanted me to surround myself with satanic imagery, candles and incense, while talking with my head wrapped in blanket robes. I refused to do the interview unless I could just talk normally and giving the story as it was. H eventually backed down. Though a regular monthly event at Ham & Jam Café anyway, this Spark show was incorporated into Preston’s annual Tringe Arts Festival. After our show we went to the nearby Guild Ale House to watch the closing part of the very funny Lightness And Dark show, that involved very funny partly improvised comedy and a few brave volunteers from the audience, centred on a game of indoor cricket, using apples and carrots as balls. Very funny and relaxed entertainment. Diary Saturday 29th July 2017 Job hunting and library visiting again. Diary Sunday 30th July 2017 Pretty much as Saturday with a slight additional culinary disaster. I prepared what looked like a very appetizing macaroni cheese dinner for myself only for the pepper dispenser top to break off and drown the meal in way too much pepper to allow it to be edible. The whole meal fed the bin instead of me. Ho-Hum. Arthur Chappell