About

…lettersquash

It’s a little too early to say just what this blog is about yet, but the following are some of the things I have in mind:

• To write a journal of my transition from what I consider a state of delusion, entranced by the pleasant superstitions of Eastern mysticism and New Age Philosophy, to a much more sceptical position. This has largely taken place already, and I will publish some of the journal in which I chronicled the process.
• Against this, I want to elucidate the benefits of having taken this route, the things I still cherish and nurture from my ’spiritual’ quest, the dangers of taking too mechanistic or ’soulless’ a view of humanity, and I want to try to help reconcile the competing world views of science and religion, a conflict that seems to be deepening its battle-lines at this time.
• I want to encourage people to see philosophy not as a strange, pseudo-mathematical game, but as a personal-development process, a central part of our education, of practical help in every area of life and deeply relevant to the future of human societies and the planet.
• I will include new compositions on these topics, earlier diary entries and work (original or edited) previously published online, or in the therapy journal ipnosis (the paper version), or in the book Ethically Challenged Professions.
• I do not intend the blog to be limited to serious philosophical argument, however. I will also include poetry, creative prose, images and music. Who knows, I might even crack a joke.

I welcome feedback and would be very pleased to hear from anyone who wishes to discuss any of the issues here or relate their own.

Why lettersquash?

Well, it just popped into my head as fitting nicely with WordPress when I decided to write my blog here – put words in a press and it just makes sense that you’d get lettersquash. That’s a stupid reason to choose that name, obviously, although people might remember it quite easily. Then various other associations came to mind that fitted with the subject matter, and by that time I’d got quite fond of it. The blog is about hard and soft, the postmodern relativisation of things and their cognitive skeleton: see the alphabet melting, syllables into syllabub…

Biography

Hi. I’m John Freestone and I and live in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. I had a good education in one of the lesser-known English private schools and went to Oxford Polytechnic to study geology. About a year-and-a-half later, I dropped out. I was unhappy in the college environment from the start, because I didn’t have very good social skills, because I got sidetracked by smoking dope and generally doing the hippie thing, because I began to mistrust the basis of scientific knowledge and because I felt myself to be an artist and musician deep down. I began building a life round my friends and our music.

I didn’t find my way into a career – just jobs well below my capabilities interspersed with long periods on the dole – until I began to sort my life out (then about 30 years old). I moved to Witney for a while, then spent a strange and beautiful year-and-a-half living with a woman on her croft in the Scottish Highlands, where I fell in love with wild things, learning to recognise the local flora and fauna and the use of medicinal herbs. I tried to focus on working as an artist or musician there, but I failed to do so, and crofting wasn’t really my thing. My crofter and I drifted apart and I returned to my family home in Harrogate, not quite prodigal, as my father was dying of cancer.

He died shortly after, and I stayed at home with my mum as it benefitted both of us, and got a job in a warehouse to bring some money in. But my father’s death changed things. Although I grieved for him, his death also seemed to free me to go and see a therapist. He had advised it several times, but pride stopped me while he was alive. Things began to get much better for me then. I became a volunteer in various social roles, including working in my local drugs agency, then trained to be a therapist myself. I worked as a counsellor and group facilitator at the agency for some time, and then set up in private practice at home. I ‘retired’ from that work recently (after about 10 years in the field), because the opportunity to explore new avenues opened up and I needed a change.

I’m currently developing some of my creative activities again, including my music, writing and computer programming, which I hope will provide an income in due course and sustain me in my autumn years. On the other hand, I’ve been trying to acheive something like that all my adult life. I feel very lucky to have had the experiences I’ve had, but I still feel I have failed in my work life, largely through laziness and a lack of focus: Dad always used to call it ‘drive’ – I never had any ‘drive’. I’m trying to develop it now before I hit 50!  Thankfully, I did enjoy doing therapy, and I know that I helped a number of people over the years. Without that, and the love of my life, I’d be a complete wreck.

I met my partner when she became the receptionist at the drugs agency. She also trained as a therapist and shares my love of philosophy. We’ve been together since 2000 and seem to just keep getting stronger. She has four wonderful children, and now we are grandparents too. She taught me the immense value of just being an ordinary bloke, supporting someone in partnership, working at relationship, loving.