But it was not until he returned to Starbucks in 2008, after an eight-year hiatus, that his engagement with political causes became more explicit.
Much of the online traffic to this blog will have come via Mrs Brown's personal Twitter feed, "SarahBrown10", the real time social networking site on which she has built an extraordinary following of nearly 380,000, and from where she encourages engagement with good causes such as Million Mums, a charity she helped to launch to combat deaths in childbirth.
Such campaigns will no doubt continue to evolve alongside new technologies, allowing charities to build engagement with a cause and drive direct action.
All of which means that less prominent organisations are in the uncomfortable position of scraping the bottom of the celebrity barrel – settling for less fame, or less engagement with the cause.
It becomes more about a desire to show our best, most humanitarian side, and turns into a display of superficial solidarity rather than a deep engagement with the cause.
Today, many Quakers are drawn to conscientious "engagement" with the root causes of injustice and violent conflict and its humanitarian consequences on the victims of displacement.
'Green Grow the Rashes' (1787), 'Afton Water' (1792), 'A Red, Red Rose' (1796) and 'Ae Fond Kiss' (1792) are unrivalled expressions of love, while 'O'er the Water to Charlie' (1788) and 'Charlie He's My Darling' (1796) are evidence of Burns's political engagement with the Jacobite cause.
While that audience has stayed and followed my engagement with many campaigns and causes, I hope that many will find the world of podcast appealing for a more in depth, substantial but no less entertaining look at the people in my world.
His themes – an intense engagement with nature, the destruction caused by the enclosures, even unrequited love for a woman called Mary – are remarkably similar to Clare's.
