I used to like Maff Potts but now he’s written a book
I first came across Maff Potts via a presentation in which he was dressed up as a chicken, or it might have been a duck. A lot of yellow anyway. (Watch it here.) His slides kept going wrong, which I assumed was part of the schtick. He assured me later it wasn’t, although it was a good match for his message that ‘we’re all a bit shit sometimes’. That’s one of the mantras of the Association of Camerados, which Maff set up ten years ago after a long career doing his best to support homeless people.
Soon afterwards, during the first Covid lockdown, I invited him to participate in what turned out to be a very popular webinar Public World (then trading as Buurtzorg Britain & Ireland) organised. We called it ‘What’s love got to do with it?”, referring to public service. My other guests that day were the estimable Kathy Evans and Donna Hall, but Maff stole the show with a passionate riff about ‘bad kindness’, which went viral. (Watch it here.)
I still hadn’t met Maff in person by then. At last I did so after inviting him to set up a Public Living Room – the flagship Camerados activity – at the Caring Places festival we organised the next year. 100-plus people gathered in person with an audible sigh of relief that we could. Maff and three other Camerados turned up bright and early with a van full of furniture. Piece by piece, they lugged it all up to the top floor of the fabulous Savoy Place, London home of the Institution of Engineering and Technology.
They had worked up quite a sweat by the time they’d transformed the space with sofas, cushions, coffee tables, the lot – truly a homely living room in a majestic setting overlooking the Thames. We loved it so much we still use a photo of the scene on the Public World homepage.
But Maff’s generosity wasn’t done. He had also installed a piano next to the stage in the auditorium down on the ground floor, ready for the opening plenary session. My work involves a lot of getting up in front of an audience, and I have never grown to like doing it. Seeing Maff’s smiling face and hearing his pro-level piano playing was just the calming and cheering welcome I needed.
Having read this far you will have gathered that, as well as being a highly committed, funny, hard-working and wonderfully warm man, Maff is also multi-talented. As these are all enviable qualities, obviously it’s a struggle to keep liking the guy. And now he has gone too far, by writing a book.
Surely he can’t be a good writer too? I’m afraid he is – very good, in fact.
His book’s title, Friends and Purpose, expresses the two things Maff’s experience has taught him are the basic building blocks of human happiness. A Public Living Room is the ingeniously simple set-up in which strangers get a flavour of the truth underpinning the Camerados movement, that ‘the answer to our problems is each other’.
The book is elegantly structured and designed. Candid and moving stories of conversations in those open-air pop-up lounges in towns and cities across Britain are interspersed with Maff’s thoughtful and impressively vulnerable reflections.
You will need tissues, but there are also plenty of laughs, out-loud belly laughs that by now I have come to associate with big Maff himself. Above all, this inspiring book will make you think. Its important message, at once simple and profound, shines through page after page.
If, together, we are to create a living manual of how re-awakening our sense of human interdependence can create a fairer and more sustainable future, Maff Potts might just have written Volume One.
Friends and Purpose, by Maff Potts, published by Gometra, 2025.