I tried to remember the last time that I attended #tuttle as I cycled through the backstreets of Kennington mid-morning on Friday, all bound for the fifth floor glory of the Royal Festival Hall.

Three years ago? Possibly four?

What I do remember is that I cycled on the BONKERS Moulton, through Trafalgar Square and then rolled up outside The ICA to make my own bicycling artistic statement.

Heads didn’t turn; London continued to go about the business of whatever it is that London does these days.

Which isn’t too dissimilar to the conversation at Tuttle on Friday morning.

Originally pitched as a social space to explore ideas about collaboration in an online and offline array of networks, Tuttle 2013 is still as informal, still as relaxed, yet a very different gathering to three / four years ago.

Tech comes and goes, and so do people. Three of us had an entertaining conversation on Friday morning against the backdrop of the magnificent view of over the RFH balcony and out towards a sunlit Thames.

The trio of Tuttlers had our backs facing the Old Father. We didn’t turn around once to admire the view during our debate. You can take a horse to water, or something. Probably best not to bring Trigger along to Tuttle though.

Who needs numbers anyway? The ICA was always a little crowded. Tuttle at times could be slightly exhausting. There’s no way that you could get to speak to all the people in the room that you wanted to tap into.

I confess that at times I used various social channels to try and confirm Tuttle face-to-face conversations earlier in the week, rather than go with the general ethos of ANY conversation has to be right.

I arrived on Friday morning and was welcomed instantly into an exploration of the Zombification Cultural Theory.

That’s the Zombification Cultural Theory, and NOT the Zombification OF Cultural Theory.

Phew.

That debate can wait for another blog post, Comrades.

@LloydDavis and @TonyHall were thinking rather hard for a Friday morning about The Shard as a totemic symbol for all that is wrong with contemporary London.

I didn’t like to mention the time that I took Wifey up The Shard, so to speak, as part of our honeymoon.

We then explored ideas about the failure of contemporary protest movements, and the parallel failure to set any tangible goals. Ideology was missing from the conversation - probably not deliberately, but possibly with the view that all this post-modern bollocks has made it rather difficult to rebel against THE MAN when THE MAN is now an anonymous stockpile of capital sitting on the other side of the world.

The uber-geekness of past-Tuttles was also missing. We did end up bemoaning bloody blip.tv though, and the piss-poor customer model of encouraging content creation, and then wiping out overnight five years of school based content for cultural reasons.

Bloody zombies.

It would be rude at this point not to plug Lloyd’s incredibly engaging new podcast. Questions are asked, answers are sometimes given. It’s perfectly OK that the answer might be “I haven’t really thought about that…” - it invites the listener to then think about it and form their own view.

We also touched on the randomness of simply creating content, such as the podcast, for no other reason than creating a podcast per se, and then simply putting it out there.

I admire Lloyd’s online DIY ethos of creating, not criticising. It’s a useful starting point in then starting an online or offline conversation. I know that Lloyd would welcome any input.

And then just as the midday zombie procession was about to start across the water in the City, Tuttle came to a close. There was no grand clocking off or signing out. Three blokes that had met in a very loose network on a lazy Friday morning decided to get up and go and do something else.

Lloyd and Tony had plans for an audio walking tour. I had plans to capture the magic of the school Winter Fair, Somewhere in SE17.

I’ll be back at Tuttle when the time and work tide allows.

Only dead fish swim with the current, Comrades.