One Life - Live show, London

Saturday March 1st 2008

One Life - Live Show, Olympia London

I went to this show last year - in fact it was the one where I met Teach Yoga and decided that there teacher training course was the one that I wanted to do. This year we had the added incentive of trying to appraise whether we might have a stand there next year. It features a lot of stuff that is very relevant to us. Psychologies Magazine, with whom we have a lot of our advertsing, is a major sponsor of the show and there are lots of the stands based on the sort of things we are trying to do. But it is odd to attend a show when you are mainly trying to appraise how good the various stands look, rather than the detailed content. Some stands are pretty poor, it must be said.

There were a few speaker that we had thought of seeing, so while Linda attended a life coaching session, I watched the talk by Tom Hodgkinson, author of "How to be Free", one of my favourite books of the last few years. His talk was partially on the historical circumstances that generated the "Protestant work ethic" as distinct from the "merriment" enjoyed by the non-Protestant countries of Europe. The last 25 years or so have seen a very large shift in day-to-day living conditions, but it is hard to see how many people can opt out. From a game theory point of view, modern life has an "arms race" character in which people as a group end up with outcomes which they probably wouldn't want on a case-by-case basis, and it is very difficult to avoid this outcome. But Hodgkinson has and did share some details of his day-to-day life now. Overall though, I would have though that most people would have found the lecture a little above them, what with the many literary references, and so on.



Tom Hodgkinson at the One Life show

There were one or two promising leads from the show that we will be pursuing over the next week or so. But the decision of whether to have a stand of our own next year was not clearcut and we'll have to leave it till we get to the end of the current holiday year before we can really assess it properly.