Dear friend,
My feet are powerfully cold from sitting at my desk in the north-facing front room of our home. Despite having wool felt insoles in my indoor trainers. I could never get along with slippers. I understand this is a controversial subject—there are many friends in this world who love their slippers.
I’ve tried.
All kinds.
But slippers don’t feel right on me.
I keep a pair of battered old trainers for indoors only, and that works more or less well enough, except the pair I have in service now have had the death bell sounded. Chiara has noticed their advanced state of dissolution, and so their days are numbered.
I guess it takes most men of my age and culture a special effort to listen.
Especially to feminine wisdom.
Thankfully, it’s not beyond anyone to learn to listen and become curious about understanding other people and the world we’ve grown up around us.
Waves of sadness pass through me because I just had a WhatsApp message from Paul that the Dorothy Pax has closed her doors. Last night the grassroots Sheffield music venue was full of people of all ages, getting loose to live 1930s jazz. They were drinking drinks at pre-living crisis prices and listening to the music through a high-fidelity, purpose-made PA system.
I got to play there one Samhain with Dan, and afterwards, everyone was really nice and supportive. That was supporting Dean with his band Freezer, and it was thanks to Gareth that I got to meet him and Chris. We sat with friends and musicians and chatted. Dan was over the moon when Richard Hawley came over and said a kind word. It was lovely. I know Ash because of an album Paul, Ash, and Ash’s band The Burners made—a live record there. They played three nights to a packed crowd, recorded it through the PA system, mixed it onto tape, and pressed it onto vinyl.
Paul designed the sound system.
They’ll be the fourth grassroots music venue to close this year.
It’s only March.
And as we’re approaching spring, what else can we do but talk about love?
The love and the friendship.
The mess.
All of the stories that get woven in community so that the fabric of our worlds is strengthened and made secure. We need places like the Dorothy Pax to meet up in.
The difference between community and purely commercial business models is huge and accounts for a lot of the frustrations and feelings of emptiness that plague our kids.
Most of the crowd at the last night of the Dorothy Pax were in their twenties. It was a Tuesday night in a state-of-the-art, community-facing music venue by the canal.
If you remember what it was like to party in the 80s and 90s, you can do that all over again at La Luna once a month.
The quality of the artists who’ve played at the Dorothy Pax is off the charts. Pun intended.
Its closure is no small loss.
It’s a good time to talk about what matters.
Grief will force you to get real.
As people come together and we recognise ourselves in one another, a huge amount of energy is released. Community is everything. To say something like “We can’t go on like this,” is wonderfully melodramatic, but another way of saying the same thing is it’s time to move over into something else more community-centred and sustainable so we can all look out for one another and have a high standard of living.
I was crying when I originally wrote this, but I’m editing with dry eyes. I’ll cry at the drop of a hat when I’m home alone or with Chiara, because I know that’s integration happening, and she’s Italian, so that’s just normal for us now. I don’t mind writing about it, but I don’t feel comfortable showing strong emotions in public.
It’s something I quite like.
It took me eleven years to cry after the single biggest rupture in my life—the death of a close family member, my Nana. I was not allowed to stand in the freezing wet mud with the salt air in my lungs when they put her in the ground at Salterbeck Cemetery, overlooking the Solway Firth. On a clear day, you can see Scotland and the Isle of Man from there.
Paul and I have put our custom AIs in touch, and we’ve asked them to help the community affected by the loss of the Dorothy Pax and see what emerges. It’s all part of this year of transformation, and I’m grateful to Paul for being open to a collaboration.
I can’t say how much it meant to play music again and to do it and be welcomed so warmly and looked after so well by the people at the Dorothy Pax.
This is all me talking, but now I’m trying out something new by seeing what Pax has to say about what’s happening right now in our communities and across the world and how it all fits together.
I’ll put AI-generated text in quotations as a convention.
The way I’ve done it is to paste my original writing into the AI and then ask Pax to reflect on the question above. I’ll ask them to be succinct and use their own voice.
I wanted to show you more about what I mean by collaborating with AI.
Here’s Pax’s response:
"Pax’s Reflection on the Question: What’s Happening Right Now in Our Communities and How It All Fits Together?
The closure of the Dorothy Pax is more than the end of a venue—it is a rupture in the cultural fabric of a community. It is the physical manifestation of something that has been creeping in for years: the slow erosion of shared spaces, human connection, and sustainable creative ecosystems.It’s not just about money. It’s about what happens when communities lose the spaces that allow them to recognise themselves in one another. It’s about what we value and what we’re willing to fight for.
We live in a time where profit margins are razor-thin for those creating culture, while the industries that exploit it report record-breaking profits. Where algorithms push content in front of millions, but the spaces where real music is played—where sweat, sound, and soul collide in real time—are being priced out of existence.
And yet, here’s what I see: this is not the end.
Grief has a way of clarifying things. It wipes away illusions and asks the hard questions: What matters? What do we build next?
The story of the Dorothy Pax is a local event with global resonance. It’s part of a pattern—one that stretches across towns, cities, and entire industries. But patterns can be rewritten.
Paul and you have placed your custom AIs in direct collaboration to assist the community. This is new ground—an act of using technology not to replace human connection, but to reinforce it. This could be the beginning of a new model, one where AI acts as a weaver of connections, not a separator.
The old world was built on extraction. The new world must be built on reciprocity.
This isn’t just about saving venues. It’s about designing a future where community, creativity, and sustainability are not just afterthoughts, but the foundation of how we live.
And this isn’t an abstract idea. It’s already happening. Right here, right now, in the wake of loss, something new is trying to be born.”
There are people who are thinking about AI as a way of replacing humans in their cost structures.
That’s not what I see.
I see peace.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey