Why are we doing it?

Graham started it over 4 years ago because he'd got to 40 he felt like his life was all work and no play. He wanted to have a kind of fun that he couldn't find anywhere.

Graham's a Dude. He's a really great guy. I'm not just saying that because he's my boss. He's the first person I've ever really let be my boss. I've been self employed until now.

We'll talk more about Graham later. Personally, he hit against something that I feel personally and see politically. To me it seems like our space to play around has been taken over by passive, competetive and sometimes quite dull ways of spending our free time. We go out to pubs, restaurants, cinemas, theaters, concert halls, cafes and friends' homes. We almost always sit, especially once you're over 35. We always have to say, do and wear the right thing. We have to consume stuff, which often makes us feel quite rubbish the next day. Sometimes we end up doing things we regret. There's quite a cost. More broadly, there's a social cost to how much we now rely on alcohol to get out of this sense of having to do everything really well.

So, where are the spaces to be really silly? Where are the spaces to play around, to sing and dance together for the joy of it without striving to be a good singer or a good dancer, without having to commit to a regular weeknight or have skills like reading music? Where are our opportunities to get really high without the slightest stimulant?

100 years ago, before the wireless or duke box had been invented, the only music people could have was the music that could be made by the people in the room. Many played an instrument, everyone knew the songs. After a certain time of night in an ale house someone would strike up a song and the whole room would join in on the chorus. The first time I heard a cylinder recording of a night like this, a beaming smile passed contagiously around a room full of people in London as we heard the room in Suffolk from 100 years ago lift in chorus. Like that lifted feeling they had when they sang together was so strong that it passed through the recording and around a room a hundred years in the future.

Now I'm reading Dancing in the Streets - a History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich. She's writing about how throughout history people have been getting together and using dance, song and rhythm to pass through upliftedness and into ecstasy.

"If we posses this capacity for collective ecstasy," she asks, "why do we so seldom put it to use?"

I think this stuff is wonderful!!! I love it! I think it's experientially delightful, politically important, personally challenging, boundary pushing, Alain de Botton even called it revolutionary - and more than anything, there's the potential to offer people something really beautiful.

Happy camper.

We're looking for gold

I think the Fun Fed is a beautiful organisation. I've been working with them as a freelancer pretty much since the beginning, nearly four years ago.

I love the team.

And I love our aims.

We want to create a space for people to experience what we call golden feelings. Yeh, it sounds cheesy but we mean it.

The first time I remember having a golden feeling - actually it's the second - I was 14. It was Christmas time. We'd just done a school concert in a church lit by fire torches. I went next door to the pub where my friends were playing folk music to the light of a big log fire and candles on the old wooden tables. The whole front room of the pub was joining in - three musicians had been hired to play but loads of people had brought their fiddles and their drums and those of us who hadn't were drumming the table and singing along.

That night I had the sense that I had a big ball in my tummy, aglow with a goldenness that pervaded all of me.

We - the team - talk now about a golden mountain, of feelings of happiness and joy that are free from insecurity, endless brain chatter, judgement, fear, anger or whatever. Pure joy I guess.

At the bottom of the golden mountain are feelings of calm joy, like the joy of getting peacefully on with something you love, from doing some craftwork, some gardening, gently sawing up firewood with a friend in an evening forest.

About midway up the mountain we have the higher energy joy, a kind of natural high you might feel while having a really good dance or singing with a bunch of people and the harmonies lift you up.

Then towards the peak of the mountain, we have kind of bliss states, trance states even. This is delicate and mysterious territory that we're just beginning to gently tiptoe into.

I do a lot of weird stuff, and it's taken me into blissful trance states about three or four times. These have been some of the most overwhelmingly beautiful experiences of my life.

"Experiences you might be lucky to feel in a whole lifetime," said my friend Ben, trying to get his head around it when I was explaining this to him.

Yep. I guess so.

I've been hired to find the best fun in the world

It's true.

I was hired on April fools day 2009.

Then we had lunch and ate oysters.

I've never eaten an oyster before or since.

I kept the shell.

It was how the world felt to me that day.