Richard Douglas

@maitrereynard

Research Fellow, Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity, University of Surrey. Wombles. Yes, and armchair Spurs. Go Thorns. Commanders. Trying to see the positives.

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Bluesky

Ist das dein Profil?Übernimm es — dann gehört dir maitrereynard.dirty.social.Profil übernehmen

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· 8d

I see I need to go to Italy and look through a kebab shop window to catch some test cricket in August. Thanks ECB.

A badly shot picture of a tv screen with a test batter in whites, on a drab wall in a kebab shop in Italy

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· 9d

I mean, if we’re doing this.

Louise Jameson as the Dr Who companion Leela

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· 14d

I’ve taken away boxes and boxes of books - and there are still so many I’ve left behind. These just a fraction of them.

A bed groaning with piles and piles of books

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· 26d

Thank God I got a haircut. I was looking too much like Jeff Lynne the Dog for comfort.

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· Jul 13

It was finishing day yesterday. Highlight this time I think was Grover Gardner's reading of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here. (To which title, I always want to rejoin in a Mick McCarthy voice, 'It can.' Which, of course, is the book.)

A stylised, modernistic depiction of three American stormtroopers, visors up - on the front cover of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· Jul 2

This is the correct take.

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· Jul 1

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· Jun 25

Very excited to get my hands on a copy of the second Miss Hortense mystery by Mel Pennant. The first book was my favourite read of 2025. @johnmurrays.bsky.social

Miss Hortense and the Last Rites - by Mel Pennant

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· Jun 24

I’ve read a couple of these ‘of course, it’s been rubbish, but what a marvellous expression of democracy’ thinkpieces today.

PHIL: Listen, thanks. Look, Phil Hawthorne. I’m Chair of Rumpus. Look, we’re the group for progressive Mercians. We’ve recently put out our pamphlet, Good Mercia, setting out the changes we need to see in our society if we’re really going to be living what Aristotle called the good life.

PHIL: Look, the position of Rumpus is clear, we recognise people will want to make up their own minds about this, and we’re neutral on this referendum, it doesn’t affect our main position which is working towards a Good Mercia.
HAYLEY: Hang about. You’re saying that in your vision of Good Mercia, everything could be on fire and it wouldn’t matter? What about people’s homes?
PHIL: I guess I’m just not that interested in structures.
HAYLEY: Structures? That’s people’s homes!
PHIL: Look. On fire. Not on fire. The important thing is we achieve real democracy. And in that sense we’d say that tonight is a triumph, whatever the result of the vote.

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· Jun 24

I had some fun writing it.

THE SETTING
The year 2026, in the Kingdom of Mercia. Ten years after the referendum in which Britain left the European Union, and the succession of referenda that followed in its wake, Britain is now divided into dozens of independent states. Here in Mercia life has gone from bad to worse, the people reduced to scratching a living from the land as best they can. With each misfortune the cry goes up for another referendum to make everything better again. Now it is time for the vote on the latest question: Shall We Set Everything On Fire — Yes or No?

FlameOn! campaign
OSCAR POTTSDAM, an ealdorman of Mercia
REV MILES WASTER, a priest
JULIUS STURRIDGE, Leader of the Worshipful Company of Nutters and Fruitcakes
BRIGITTE LOKI, an ealdorman of Mercia
Squirt campaign
DONALD CAMPBELL, Lord of Mercia
CHUZZLEWIT COBSTONE, Leader of the Guild of Rude Mechanicals
CHERYL DONALDSON, envoy of the People’s Republic of Clydeonia

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· Jun 16

OK, now we’re seeing the benefits of getting rid of Levy - the club are now capable of getting a fucking deal done.

Sky Sports announcement - Spurs agree £52mn deal to sign Jan Paul van Hecke

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· May 25

Walked the last quadrant of the route yesterday in the punishing heat. The scenery through my favourite part of London for walking - along the Thames, Richmond Park, Wimbledon Common - kept me gust first, then an appointment with a barrel of beer on Blythe Hill sustained me to the end.

A view into Old Deer Park from the Thames towpath.

A posh paint shop on the right. And an even posher (?) paint shop on the left. Yes, Richmond is that posh.

A pelican crossing by the Robin Hood gate into Richmond Park, reserved for those on horseback.

A desert landscape nearby the Cherry Red Records stadium.

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· May 25

Day 3 was a day of contrasts, taking in a quarter of London I didn’t know at all. It began marvellously with a walk through the Hampstead Heath extension in the sunshine before going downhill as we hit the Brent Cross-M1 complex. Then uphill to Harrow and a long walk along the Brent to Brentford.

Brent Cross shopping centre, bringing a bit of the GDR to London

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· May 24

Behind on my updates. Day 2 was a sunny delight, rambling alongside the Lea, in and out of parks all the way to Highgate Woods and Hampstead Heath.

A leafy path alongside the River Lea near Stratford

A blue plaque for Peter Sellars (a new one for me) near Highgate Woods

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· May 22

That was long one yesterday. Endless pootering around the green spaces of Woolwich and Bexley.

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· May 21

South London, innit

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· May 15

They’ve done him dirty there.

A drawing of a very ill-looking Harry Kane

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· May 15

Just got my World Cup wall chart from @noscoredraws.com up, and it’s an absolute beast.

A massive wall chart, with all the groups for this year’s World Cup, decorated by a collection of felt tip pen portraits/travesties of some of the main stars

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· May 14

Catford: you ain’t so bad.

A lovely old vista of a green field, overhung with boughs, giving onto a view of skyscrapers in the distance.

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· May 1

And though I say it myself, this article by a certain Bill Blackwater on applying Rosa Luxembourg’s economic theory to present day politics is an absolute banger.

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· May 1

Sorting through some boxes of books and I’m being slowed down by leafing through my collection of @renewaljournal.bsky.social issues. Not least this one from the summer 2015 Labour leadership contest.

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· Apr 10

Genuinely not noticed this as being on the rise at all. In fact, not noticed anyone tailgating through the barriers for a long time.

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· Apr 1

Wrote this about Gene Cernan, the ‘Last Man on the Moon’, in a book, The Meaning of Growth.

In school vacations at the turn of the 1940s, Eugene Cernan would leave the Chicago suburbs and stay with his grandparents on their farm in rural Wisconsin. Without electricity, theirs was a pre-twentieth century existence. Young Cernan mucked in, pitching hay, tending the animals—and mucked out, cleaning the two-hole outdoor privy. In the winter, they would read by kerosene lamps, then sleep altogether in an unfinished attic warmed by the wood-fired stove downstairs. When Cernan looked up into the night sky he saw a folk Moon shining down upon his peasant world, like—
Like the lesser light which, on the fourth day in the Book of Genesis, God creates to rule the night; like the Greek Selene, traversing the heavens in a silver chariot drawn by snow-white horses, or Elysium, in which the substance of the heroic soul resides, retaining some dreams and vestiges of life; like the wife to the Sun in the folktales of some indigenous peoples of North America, who played with the stars while the Sun was sleeping, but every month turned her face in mourning for the children she had lost to him; like the universal symbol, invoked in prayer the world over, in relation to ‘agriculture and the harvest, fertility, birth, growth, the vicissitudes of weather, the crises of human psychic life, and the traditions of magic embodied in astrology’ (Montgomery 1999, 204)—
And just three decades later, Gene Cernan was driving around the surface of the Moon in a car.

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· Mar 31

Oh FFS

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· Mar 18

The boy’s said let’s go to Spurs tonight. And quite right, let’s not take Champions League football for granted. Might be a while before it comes this way again…

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· Nov 7

Shame!

In pre-production, considerable effort was invested by the BBC Visual Effects Department in assembling the various arachnid props which were required for Planet Of The Spiders. For the Great One, assistant Ian Scoones designed a five-foot spider with red eyes which appeared to breathe by means of an inflatable bladder. Letts felt that this creation was too frightening, and instead opted to use the same prop which had been designed for the Spider Queen.

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· Oct 22

Iain McGilchrist in @jonathanrowson.bsky.social's Spiritualise report. I have much the same thought every time some AI assistant tries to justify its existence by popping up and asking if I want it to summarise whatever I'm reading.

“McGilchrist puts it like this: “There’s a danger, in my terms, of the left hemisphere [of the brain] having to collapse things too quickly into something familiar, ‘what is it precisely?’, leaving, therefore, no place for the intuited and the implicit, through which alone all great ideas in art, in religion, and in our lives are communicated. Making things more explicit doesn’t actually make them easier to understand: it means we understand something other than what it is we are seeking to know.”

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· Oct 19

Rereading @jonathanrowson.bsky.social's landmark Spiritualise report for a talk I'm giving in December. Have got to the chapter on death. This is a good one to remind ourselves of. (Point 2 refers essentially to job-work, and not the meaningful kind.)

Consider that Bronnie Ware, a palliative nurse, distilled the five most common regrets of dying individuals from numerous firsthand accounts (Ware, 2012a):
1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· Sep 30

Extremely grateful for these endorsements from some seriously brilliant people…

"A fascinating account of anti-environmental rhetoric and discourse, and of the ideology of technology at the heart of Silicon Valley. Putting it into the history of struggles over theology and science, Douglas shows that what seems the most materialist of outlooks rests on a fantastical ‘metaphysics’ of the market economy."

Professor Alan Finlayson, University of East Anglia, UK

"Douglas offers a profound set of meditations on our collective failure to think ourselves out of ‘growthism’. By positioning our ecological crisis on the canvas of modernity itself, The Meaning of Growth will be of interest to sociologists and moral philosophers, as much as to environmentalists and political economists."

Professor Will Davies, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

"This rich analysis dissects the discourse of growthism and illuminates the reasons behind the failure of the limits thesis to gain political traction. Through a multi-layered interpretive approach, Douglas unpacks the ontological and emotional dimensions of growthism and proposes a return to metaphysical questions as the starting point for effective political action."

Dr Sophia Hatzisavvidou, University of Bath, UK

"Advocates of environmental politics are often accused of unwittingly worshipping a religion of pantheism and ‘Mother Nature,’ but Douglas deftly turns the tables, showing how resistance to ecological sustainability relies on a repressed and ultimately perverse theological impulse."

Professor Jason Blakely, author of Lost in Ideology and We Built Reality

"Ever get the feeling that the efforts you and so many other individuals and organisations are undertaking to shift economic priorities are not making a dent? This book explains why. It pulls open the deep-seated and tightly held assumptions underpinning the growth agenda. Douglas crisply presents a critical layer in the growth-dependence puzzle that all of us, not just those in the post-growth movement, will need to grapple with. And the soone…

Richard Douglas@maitrereynard· Sep 3

Paul Thagard on ‘philosophology’, as Pirsig would have put it.