Luke's Notes
Luke's Notes
Luke Martell
This is a personal blog and I post on social and green alternatives, education, books, stories of university life since 1990, politics, music, family, and other themes.
Latest Posts
The third post on My Top 100 Tracks. When I recently told my partner this was one of my top 100 favourite tracks of all time and played it to her she laughed. I think it was a bit unexpected to her that I would like a song like this. She...
Watching your team score a winning goal in the last minute of a match is great. But try leaving Facebook, Instagram, X, WhatsApp, and Amazon all in one day. That's what I did recently. That feels really good. Actually, I became inactive...
The second post on My Top 100 Tracks. Explosive. That's how this track's often described. One hit on the drum and then the song dives straight in fast and direct. It was released in 1978 as the opening track of The Clash's second album...
The first post on My Top 100 Tracks. 'Do Anything you Wanna Do' was released in 1977. I was 13. The band was called 'The Rods' at that point. I know it's a cliché, but it blew my mind. Often thought of as a punk band, there was a...
Introduction to My Top Tracks and, further down, outline of Alternatives to Spotify I listen to music about 3 or 4 hours a day and a lot of that time not in the background, but listening to it only and doing nothing else. It's been at...
Race and gender identity; racism and colonialism; family and outsiders; social dislocation; police and thieves; environment and nature; war, violence, and survival; spies, footballers, and ordinary lives. I thought I'd keep on reading...
Pessimism need not be a block to action and change. It can be a spur to them. I taught environmentalism throughout my career as a university lecturer in sociology. I wrote a book about it published in 1994. There was plenty of cause for...
I joined my local library when I moved to Brighton (UK) in 1987. I didn't go that often. I would take my kids now and then when they were little and they would choose books. But I had a 50-hour-a-week job and the two small kids. The...
About 40 years ago, as an undergraduate student, I wrote some dissertations that were probably better than anything I wrote as a professional academic, admittedly a low bar. I wrote this one when I was 21. The film academic Colin MacCabe...
On communism in theory, attempts at communism in practice, and the implications for socialism. I wrote a book about Alternative Societies. It was about ways of organising society differently to how we do now (a blog summarising its...
In 2024 I retired from being a university lecturer. I wanted something to keep me writing, but not full-on academic writing. A blog seemed to fit the bill. Blogging and empowerment When blogging first emerged in the 1990s I thought it...
Continued from Alternative Email 2. This part looks at some other email providers that I did not discuss in the 'shortlist' in Alternative Email 2, alternative calendars, changing email, picking up email, other alternative internet...
Continued from Alternative Email 1 which focused on criteria for alternative email. This part looks at alternative email providers. Alternative email providers In this part I am focusing on alternatives that, on my criteria from the last...
This is the first of 3 posts on alternative email; alternative to big tech email like Gmail, Hotmail etc. Below is a list of contents followed by an introduction. Contents Alternative Email 1 Introduction Widening ethical criteria for...
Continued from Sussex Stories 7 This is the 8th and final part of these Sussex Stories 1990-2024. Zoom: COVID-19 and lockdowns When COVID hit in 2020, VC (Vice Chancellor, university CEO) Tickell incredibly pushed on with face-to-face...