User:Peter Hughes

Profile
I am one of many people named Peter Hughes. I live near Durham in north-eastern England, and work as a counsellor at the University of Sunderland.

I am an overweight, middle-aged man, sexually-straight, with a wife and daughter. I am white-skinned, and hope that I that I have a genetic heritage drawing from every part of the world. However, I am not defined by my genes: I am a person in my own right - a creation of the times and society in which I live, and of myself, and take full responsibility for who I am and choose to be. I was born in Willesden, London, UK; spent much of my childhood and adolescence in Chester, UK; and in 1976 moved to Durham, in north-eastern England, where I have lived ever since.

Socio-economically I am best described as middle-class, although that description now fits about half of the UK population. Back in Eric Blair's (George Orwell) day, I would have been described as lower middle class, or shabby middle class. I have a professional job, working in a university, but I do have to work in order to have an income; I take an intellectual view of the world, which involves listening to BBC Radios 3 and 4, and watching television programmes on BBC 4 and UKTV History; I have sufficient income to take at least one an overseas holiday most years.

I was born into conditions of poverty and what could best be described as a semi-disenfranchised underclass, which should have made me excellent material for Marxist leanings. I believe that my father may have been a member of the Communist Party in his younger days, although my experience of him was that he was thoughtfully accepting of the mixed (both command and market-driven) economy that existed in the UK from 1945 until the 1980s. Like him, I am fervently anti-royalist, and wish that, along with France, Germany, Italy and the United States, Britain were a republic. In party-political terms (which I consider to be a rather thin shorthand) I have been a card-carrying member of the Ecology Party (forerunner to the Green Party), an enthusiastic supporter of the Labour Party from 1973 for twenty years, and a Lib Dem volunteer ever since. However, despite the dishonest debacle of Iraq, I have considerable respect for the achievements of the Blair governments since 1997. Compared with the previous 18 years, I consider Britain to be a better place to live, with national devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; root, if not branch, reform of the House of Lords; a partial ban on fox hunting; independence for the Bank of England; a national minimum wage; a tax credit system that has permitted some wealth redistribution without the yah-boo politics of the previous half century; substantial legislation to reduce discrimination against disabled and gay people; the progressive outlawing of smoking; and some engagement with environmental imperatives such as recycling, land-fill and global warming. If there are many things done or not done of which I disapprove - I did not vote for the Blair governments, so how can I be disappointed?

Politically, throughout my adult life I have been liberal, green, strongly anti-nuclear, deeply pluralist, anti-racist, internationalist, with an enthusiasm for anti-discriminatory practice and legislation; the rights of un-/dis-enfranchised minorities, such as refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants, Black and ethnic communities, gay people, disabled people (not bogus 'minorities' such as smokers, fuel protestors, and dominant Anglo-Saxon men who complain that "women and foreigners have taken all the jobs"), the safeguarding of human rights (I do not believe that it is a human right to smoke tobacco or marijuana, nor to live in a neighbourhood in which there are only people with a skin-colour and cultural background identical to one's own), free-speech (including that with which I disagree), open-government and participatory democracy.

Spiritually, I am simultaneously an atheist and believe that there is an aspect of divinity in all creation, making me a staunch pacifist, and a strict vegan. I find the tension in the bipolarity to be creative and constructive. As a Quaker, I cannot imasgine attempting to persuade someone to believe the same as me. I have organised and participated in much peace work, social justice work, as well as environmentally-conscious work of different kinds. For many years much or all of my work was volunteering, and I have served on many national Quaker committees, as the Chair of Durham City Centre Youth Project, as the co-ordinator of a wholefood collective, as a probation volunteer, as a non-stipendiary chaplain, and so on.

Philosophically, I am existentialist, which partially defines my work as a counsellor. My style of counselling is my own integration of existentialist and person-centred approaches.

In Myers-Briggs terminology, I am INFJ. Whilst I should feel more at peace with myself were I INFP, my sense of social and environmental justice is powerful. Many of my weblog postings have an ethical tag.

I have a lifetime enthusiasm for movies, and several decades of interest in movie-making. I have uploaded a number of short movies onto YouTube, and have participated in the BBC Video Nation project. I am a keen photographer, and take fine art seriously, even though I consider myself to be artistically-incapable. I enjoy much orchestral music, but cannot play a musical instrument. My understanding has been shaped by the writings of Herman Hesse, Christopher Isherwood, and Williams Golding and Shakespeare. I also enjoy reading science and technology, history, language, philosophy and contemporary ethics, and these are matters that I explore on my website and in my weblog postings.

Computing and Computers
I cut my teeth in 1976 learning to program on an IBM 360/60 at the University of Durham, UK, coding Fortran onto punched cards in order to model gravity anomalies. A year later I used an ICL PDP 10 with paper tape for data analysis regarding gravity anomalies on Rannoch Moor. A year later still I was able to use JANET (or an early incarnation) to send an 'e-mail' from the Institute of Geological Sciences, in South Kensington, London, UK, to the University of Durham. Beyond Fortran, I learned PL1 and Basic; I have written a significant commercial application in Sierra Spellbinder, and I can write applications in Paradox and Access. I am comfortable tweaking raw HTML, but have never learned Java. I get a bit confused with a Python application, but manage (personally I would rather stick to HTML, because it is possible to be sure where data is coming from). I was usinng bulletin boards in the late 1980s, and Compuserve in the early 1990s. Unlike many people who complain about IE, I remember Mosaic, and thinking that 28 kb/s (not 28 kB/s) was fast.

Documents in the Public Domain and Wikipedia
I have had a website since 1997, in which I have been trying to place on-line as much information as I can about issues that interest me: vegan / vegetarian lifestyle and travel; travel and place; facilities for disabled people; counselling and counselling training. My vegan pages and counselling training documents are accessed and utilised worldwide.

At the University of Sunderland I have created a significant, publicly-accessible Counselling Service website, including much self-help information.

I operate four weblogs, albeit that my postings can be sporadic: a public weblog, a more private weblog, a family weblog and a work-based counselling weblog.

I am a wiki enthusiast, including making frequent use of Wikipedia. I imagine a world in which all information is on-line, and all writing is done on-line. I have created three Wikipedia webpages: one from a bare stub, High Shincliffe (the village in which I live), and one from new, Cade's Road (the Roman road running past High Shincliffe), and one that appears to have a long and unhappy history River Wear. I have made minor contributions to several other Wikipedia webpages, including Spock Networks and Fluorite.