Episode #8: Eels, outsiders and the excruciating greyness of normal

In this episode I reflect on the cyclical emotional process of making this podcast, tumble down a fascinating eel rabbit hole, ponder the excruciating greyness of “normal”, and explore my love of the brilliant weirdo.

TL;DL
1’ 15”     Running in the dark and the peril of head-torches
6’ 34”   The repeated process of making this podcast
8’ 55”   The excruciating greyness of normal
10’ 53”  Patterns of stuckness
12’ 54”  Tumbling down an eel rabbit hole
18’ 22”   My love of the brilliant weirdo
32’ 20”  Making little zines that you can buy
33’ 02”  Mask workshop promo
33’ 24”  Spread the word

Links to things I mentioned
Sound of Silence podcast
Pavement’s “Type Slowly”
Michael Malay’s “Late Light”
Watzlavick et al on stuckness
Daniel Johnston: “Walking the cow”
Lucia Pamela: “Walking on the moon”
Wesley Willis: “Rock and roll McDonalds”
The Shaggs: “Philosophy of the world”
Connie Converse: “I have considered the Lillies”
The Legendary Stardust Cowboy on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-in
Shooby Taylor live at The Apollo
Daniel Johnston’s first live TV appearance
Buy my zines
My next mask workshop
My online shop
Become a patron of my studio
Buy me a coffee (from £1)

The written substack version of this episode: Stevexoh’s substack thing.

If you're wondering why this is an accidental podcast then listen to the first 5 minutes of episode one.

Comments, questions, requests and stuff to stevexoh@gmail.com

(Total listening time 34’42”)

Transcript

 (00:12.366)

Hello and welcome to episode 8 of Creative Adventures, an accidental podcast. And a big thank you to everyone that's been sharing the podcast and recommending it and reviewing it. It means that there's a load of new listeners, so hello and welcome. And as you're new, you may be wondering why is this an accidental podcast? And if you are wondering that, or if you already knew that but forgotten, then go back to episode one and listen to the first 10 minutes or so and it all will become clear.

It's a dark and cold January evening in South West London and to be honest I don't mind the dark evenings. Lots of people find it a bit depressing but I quite like it because it means that everything sort of gets cosy and shuts down early and it means that I can put on cosy clothes and feel like I'm hibernating a little bit early on in the day. I mean I know I could do that in the summer.

It's a bit weird doing that when it's boiling hot and light until almost 10 o'clock. But one of the things that I don't like about the evenings getting darker earlier is it sort of limits the amount of time in the day when I can go for a run. And I sometimes like doing evening runs sort of around five or six o'clock, something like that. But it means that there's parts of my route that I can't see anything. And this year I've just decided to do it anyway.

What's the worst that's going to happen? I'm going to trip over a tree root or fall down a hole or a bear will jump out and eat me. So I've actually enjoyed that thrill of running in the dark where I can't really see where I'm going. And I know I could get one of those head torch things, but that would take away the thrill. And also there seems to be more and more of the running head torches recently because

I often walk back down the towpath from my studio to my flat in the dark and there's always people running there and I've noticed this winter in particular more people have head torches which is great if it helps them see and brings them comfort but maybe this is a public service announcement or just a soapbox. If you run down that towpath at night with a head torch on I have one request and that's don't look at me as you run past or don't look at me

 (02:35.808)

as you approach from a distance because it just blinds me I'm sure it's not just me but it's just blinding and I know it's a polite thing to do or just a reflex social action to look at someone as you approach them or walk past them but it's like having a truck driving towards me on full beam so my request, my polite request via this podcast is just become socially awkward when you run past people if you're wearing a head torch and you run past someone

just become socially awkward for that moment while you pass them break eye contact, look down, look away pretend you don't want to be seen and then as soon you pass them look back up again and that saves my eyes and I say all of this and maybe by the end of the winter I would have bought one because I fell in the river or something because I couldn't see where I was going and I always listen to music when I run and it feels weird not having music

It's like something that I've associated with running and on my shorter runs I just put my liked songs on Spotify on shuffle but on longer runs I've got specific music for a specific route and I'm not sure why I do that but I imagine it's something to do with the comfort of over time the music synchronizes with a particular location like each bend or each landmark or each part of the run becomes associated with a song or a lyric and I guess that

feels supportive and sort of works as a motivational boost and a navigation aid for me. So my current long run begins outside my flat and sort of weaves through some residential roads out onto the south bank of the Thames over the Bridget Hampton Court and then along the north side of the river to Kingston and then back back to where I started. And my chosen music for this specific run is Pavement's live European Tour 1997 album.

I can't remember why this ended up being paired with a root. I I think maybe I just listened to it the first time I ran that route and it's just stuck ever since. And over the last year that album and that run have become inseparable. I know that the Geddy Lee line in stereo needs to be playing as I pass the hairdressers in Thames Ditton and the opening bars of Stop Breathing play as I begin the first part of The Northern Towpath.

 (05:00.95)

And if I make it to Kingston Bridge before Range Life is finished then I know I've run a good time. And if for any reason any of those songs come on shuffle or something when I'm not running I immediately know the place on the run that they'd be playing. It's like this strange music and the location association that just sort of gets cemented in me in the flow experience of running. And running has become a really important thing for me. I've run for about 20 years now.

And there's of course significant physical benefits to this but the main reason I do it is to support my own mental health and support my own creative wellbeing. And often I'll feel a tension in my body or a stuckness in my brain and running seems to just shake all of that up in a way that gives me access to a more regulated state or a more grounded state. And as I've said, running seems to help me find a way out of creative stuckness.

There's a point in each run where I suddenly seem to have access to a plethora of creative ideas and abstract thoughts. And if I'm stuck writing a talk or designing a workshop, I'll often go for a run and know that by the time I get back, I'll have a load of ideas, or at least the stuckness will have loosened a little bit and given me a sense of where to start. And big immersive projects like Sound of Silence, world's first silent podcast featuring special guests, that they emerged in this way.

I've also found that running helps immensely when thinking about this podcast. And I've noticed over the eight episodes, I go for a repeated emotional journey with this podcast. It's like I put out an episode and think, I really loved that last edition and feel a sense of satisfaction very soon followed by, I don't think I can do another one that's as good as that last one and then become quite despondent. And then I'll be in a bit of a

slump or a low for a little while and then I'll think I've got some ideas of what the next episode could be about and I feel excitement and I start writing what the podcast is going to be about and get into a state of flow and then after a few hours of writing I step back and think this is rubbish this is rubbish I can't do it this is terrible no one's going to want to listen to this and feel self-doubt and a deeper despondency and then I walk away

 (07:27.015)

and hope that nobody will ever notice if I don't put out another episode but I come back to it after about a week or so and I'm revisiting it and rereading the ideas and some of the stuff I've written I think actually I quite like this and then I can see a way to join it all together or to tweak it a way of falling in love with it and then I've finished writing it and record this and send it out to the world and feel excitement and a sense of achievement and then very rapidly go back to step one

That one was great, I can never do another one again. And it's a frustrating process and while it's somewhat helpful to realise that it's cyclical and each stage eventually resolves itself, there's little consolation when I'm in those despondent stages and thinking, but this time, I know it's worked out before, but this time there really isn't a way out of this. And I've come to use running as a way to help me through those despondent steps. Like when it all seems rubbish or when...

I don't think I can write anything. I'll go for a run. And when I come back, I'll either have some ideas or I'll reread what I've written and start to see a way that it could all hang together in the podcast. And sometimes the flow state of running will connect me with a brand new idea or a theme that I want to explore. And very occasionally, the music I'm listening to directly inspires something. And that's rare because listening to the same thing on every run means there's not really gonna be anything I haven't already noticed.

But on a recent run, I heard a lyric in Pavement's song, Type Slowly, that completely unlocked the flow I needed to start writing and recording this podcast. And the lyric is, people of the bay is excruciatingly grey. And I'd put a little audio clip of it, but I think the podcast would get taken down for copyright. So it doesn't sound as good when I say it. People of the Bay is excruciatingly grey.

And I felt quite depleted by the end of 2025 for various reasons. I spoke a lot about it in the last episode. I just felt emotionally heavy and bored and restless and frustrated. And it felt like all the things that used to spark and ignite my imagination and fascination no longer did it. It's like the back end of 2025, I was hungry for something, but not knowing what it was I was hungry for, not knowing what was missing. And I realized in January that

 (09:51.455)

various circumstances, some beyond my control and some self-imposed, had basically constrained me and cut me off from the kind of wanton experimentation and fascination that brings me to life. I also realised that December in the festive period had somehow channeled me into a way of living that felt far too normal for me. But hearing that lyric whilst in the flow state of helped me put words to something that I already intuitively knew but hadn't quite realised.

that normal feels excruciatingly grey to me. And this might explain the strangely reassuring way why my life has unfolded or evolved to have as little normal as possible in it. I think Stephen Melkmus wrote that line about his everyday experience of life in San Francisco and it helped me realise that when I feel this deep frustration and boredom and restlessness there simply isn't enough random iridescent colour in my day to day.

there isn't enough colour in the greyness. And Paul Václavich's work about patterns of stuckness has been a significant influence on me and let me know if you'd like me to talk more about that because it's fascinating work. But in summary Václavich describes these patterns as things we instinctively reach for in order to resolve a situation but actually end up making it even more stuck. And I like to refer to these as ever tightening loops of common sense where we rely on the patterns of the past

to help us escape patterns from the past and it's paradoxical. We resort to things like best practice and common sense and past ideas and of course they're going to result in more stuckness because they're imbued with the very thing that we're trying to get away from. And my rule of thumb has become to break out of a stuck pattern we need to move towards the counterintuitive, the nonsensical, the strange, the stuff that doesn't seem like a common sense idea.

And I realised that when things feel excruciatingly grey, my default response can be to search for a better shade of grey. But without contrast, even grey loses its meaning. So I'm learning over time that the way out of this stuckness is not to look for a less excruciating version of the same thing, but to seek or at least be open to experiences and experiments that introduce a colour or a flavour that doesn't make much sense in my current day-to-day palette. And they can be things that

 (12:17.032)

I seek out or try to do or just things that I'm open to and being open to random connections, bringing a splash of color and excitement. And I spoke about quantum flirting, I think in episode three of this, Arnie Mindell's idea of quantum flirting, which is basically being open to the quiet whispers that are just in the background of our day-to-day experience, whispering inspiration and ideas to us. And over Christmas, I had a moment

like that of just this this random colour appearing and consuming me and fascinating me. I found myself tumbling down a fascinating eel rabbit hole and I realized how much I love these experiences like rare moments when something spontaneously piques my interest so deeply but I can't help but seek out more information from it. It's like there's a particularly strong flavour of curiosity that I can't ignore.

I can't put it off for another day. And I think I've been like that since I was a kid. I remember being obsessively into all sorts of things as diverse as learning loads about sharks or learning all different types of London buses at various ages. But more recently I've noticed these fascinations tend to be about creatures. It could be about any creature but it's usually ones that are misunderstood or shrouded in mystery or just very very weird. And I've always found eels interesting.

I've got a vivid memory of going fishing with my dad when I was a kid and watching him accidentally catch one and sort of cursing because he didn't want an eel and they explained why he didn't want an eel is because they wriggle and wrap themselves around your hands and they're impossible to get off of the hook and I also remember my mind being completely blown when later in life I learned that all European eels, so the ones we find in rivers in the UK and in Europe, they all come from the same place

European eels, literally everyone, is born in the Sargasso Sea which is like a strange expanse of water in the North Atlantic. It's less of a sea but I think a place where different currents meet and it's just this mysterious place in the North Atlantic where every eel is born. But although I was interested that information wasn't enough to ignite an obsession. That was more like a pub quiz fact. But this all changed when I started reading Late Light by Michael Mallet.

 (14:43.216)

a book I'd been given because of my interest in And reading isn't my forte for many reasons, but I found myself enjoying the first chapter when Mike was describing coming to the UK and becoming fascinated by things that I take for granted because I've always lived there, being fascinated by species of birds I see every day or trees or UK customs that I don't even notice are UK customs. But the end of chapter one, when he mentioned the subsequent chapters,

would be dedicated to four creatures he'd become obsessed with. Another part of my brain came online. I was not expecting that in this book. I hadn't read the blurb and hadn't read the index. I just thought, I'll have a read of this. And the first of these four chapters was simply entitled Eels. And seeing it written in bold in the middle of the page made me realize that I even love the way the word eel looks. It sort of looks like a creature in its own right. That double E doesn't make sense.

it's an amazing words to look at. Bill was reading Michael's account of waiting in the mouth of the river seven at night for the glass eels, the juvenile eels to arrive from the Sargasso Sea that I became captivated and he went on to explain that these juvenile eels arrive with no predetermined biological sex and that is only decided when they reach fresh water and spend time in the habitat and that evolves at a later point. But the bit that really hooked me like a wriggling eel

was learning that nobody knows where eels come from. I mean, we know they come from the Sargasso Sea, but nobody has ever seen an eel mating. It's this mysterious thing that happens in the depths of the sea. And these weird baby eels that look like weird translucent leaves with a little eel head on them, they just drift up from the depths. They just float on the current up from the depths.

And those mysterious depths of the Sargasso Sea are even weirder because the adult silver eels, like in the final phase, I mean this is, I made a zine about this, the different phases of eel development, it's like they're four or five different creatures. But the final phase, the silver eels, when they reach maturity, they don't eat anymore. Their digestive system shuts down and it sends them a signal saying, right, that's it, no more food. And they swim back to the Sargasso Sea.

 (17:06.312)

It's a 3000 mile journey that they make by metabolizing their own bodies to get there. Then they swim down to the depths and they just mate and then they die. So you've got these old starving hungry eels going down to the depths and then these translucent leaf shape objects just floating back up. And I love that. I love the mystery of it all.

and I love it that with all our human knowledge and technology and communication and science and books and internet and AI we still don't know where these weird little snake-like fish come from and it feels important to maintain an element of mystery in life to allow nature to enchant us in this way to not try and seek to explain everything to allow things to be unknown and unfinished and unresolved including my knowledge of myself

For me it feels imperative that I remain somewhat of a mystery to me even though this can be frustrating or overwhelming at times because mystery gives birth to wonder in the same way that those dark weird depths of the Sargasso Sea give birth to eels. We don't know why or how they float up from the darkness but they do. And I think it's that same sense of mystery and wonder and awe that draws me to the artists that I like and the musicians that I like.

And I think I can almost pinpoint back to where in my life that interest began. At age 18 I was working in a factory, something that I can romanticise in my memory, but which on reflection I actually found really hard. I mean I didn't mind the manual labour and the shift work and it actually felt like a step up for me working with these big technical machines versus the run down salad packing factory that I'd worked in since I was about 14.

But the thing I struggled with in the factory was to fit into the factory culture. And the people I worked with were almost exclusively men who were older than me. Some by just a few years and others by a much larger margin. And I was quite happy just interacting with the machines and drawing cartoons during the breaks. But ever so often I'd find myself thrown into a conversation that I not only didn't want to be part of, but didn't know how to participate in.

 (19:28.408)

I felt awkward and embarrassed when my colleagues launched into noisy banter, boasting about the exploits of their weekend and I'd just stand on the sidelines smiling every now and then and hoping nobody would ask me a question. And even though I liked playing football I had absolutely zero interest in talking about it. And as a much younger skinny tall lad with long hair and an interest in weird alternative music I was often the subject of a gentle ribbing.

which was something I could never quite work out as being playful and good natured or more aggressive and more closer to a mild form of bullying. But I survived by keeping my head down and getting really good at running all the machines. So at least the supervisors would give me an easy time. And I didn't really have any friends at the factory, which didn't bother me too much as escaping human interaction felt much more desirable. But one summer a young Irish lad called Brendan came to work in our department on a break from university in Dublin.

Brendan and I immediately hit it off. He was also a bit weird, he also had long hair and I soon discovered he had a brilliantly alternative weird taste in music. Brendan and I would talk about the Velvet Underground and My Bloody Valentine and Spaceman 3 all to the backdrop of bemusement and eye rolling and bit of piss taking from our older colleagues. Brendan was just there for one summer and on the day he went back to uni he presented me with a mixtape that he'd entitled Various Savories.

I thanked him for it and said goodbye and we said we'd keep in touch and then on the way home I played it in my car and from that point on everything changed. That little C90 cassette blew my mind and it introduced me to songs and bands and musicians that I still listen to and were listed amongst my favorite artists today. One of them being Pavement who many many years later ended up getting me unstuck enough to write this episode of the podcast.

But was one song on the tape that stopped me in my tracks. It started with a weird recording of a kids toy saying, this is a pig. Do you hear the frog? Followed by a strange childlike ghostly voice asking, hi, how are you? And then what followed was three and a half minutes of what I couldn't work out was either the best thing I've ever heard or the worst thing that I've ever heard. What made it even more of a mystery was that I'd already lost the inlay card for the cassette.

 (21:53.305)

So I had absolutely no idea what any of the songs were and in particular what this one was. And with no emails or social media in the early 90s the only way to contact Brendan was by letter. So later that week I wrote to him begging him to tell me who this track was by and while I waited for a reply I became obsessed with this song. Playing it over and over again trying to work out what on earth it was. Who was it by? Why am I so intrigued by it?

On paper this should be terrible but I love it. I played it to some of my music loving friends to see if they recognised it but they just unhelpfully joked that it was so weird that Brendan probably recorded it in his bedroom as a joke and put it on the tape just to see if I go I love that one Brendan. But after a few weeks I received a letter with a Dublin postmark and opened it to discover that the song was Walking the Cow by Daniel Johnson, a singer-songwriter from Texas.

Brendan went on to tell me that Daniel had somewhat of a cult following due to his weird lo-fi style. All of these early albums were recorded in his garage. In fact I think I mentioned this last podcast when Daniel created his early albums he had no way of reproducing them so he had to play them through from start to finish for each copy. Brendan also told me about Daniel's shadow sides, his demons that he'd been diagnosed with schizophrenia

and he was plagued by paranoid thoughts and an obsession with the devil and that Daniel had been arrested a number of times and caused his father's plane to crash and spent time in a psychiatric institution and it was on hearing all of this that I fell in love with Daniel a beautiful strange misfit of a creature who seemed unconventional and unpredictable but made this incredibly raw and uncompromising music that I just felt in my heart and in my body

And my interest in outsiders began with Daniel but went on to include other musicians over the years. Lucia Pamela was a woman born in 1904 who lived a seemingly ordinary working life but she built her own musical instruments and created these strange soundscape walls she sung over in this crazy enthusiastic childlike voice and she's got an album that you can listen to it's an album about living on the moon and all the creatures that she she meets on the moon.

 (24:21.919)

Wesley Willis is another favourite of mine. Wesley was a Chicago street musician who sort of lived on the margins of society for much of his life and he recorded hundreds of really weird surreal songs just over these keyboard rhythms and you've got these highly polished keyboard rhythms and then Wesley's singing voice is just this gruff monotone voice which is a brilliantly strange contrast

then at the end of each song he just randomly advertises a product and Willis was also known for greeting people with a headbutt instead of a handshake leaving him with a distinctive bump on his head and the Shags were a teenage sister band from New Hampshire who were formed in the 60s and they recorded these raw naive songs and it's like they couldn't play their instruments but

they played as if they could play them. It's very unusual music. And what's fascinating about the Shags is they were formed because their grandfather went to see a mysterious fortune teller who prophesied that his granddaughters would become a famous band. And there's a load more. There's a load more of these fascinating outsider musicians. People like the legendary Stardust Cowboy, Conny Converse and Shoobie who make this brilliantly raw and strange and mysterious music.

that just draws me in. And it's the same with outsider artists in a visual sense. People like Bill Traylor, Alois Corbaz and Howard Finster. When I came across their work for the first time, it was imperfect and unpolished and raw. And it moved me to make more of my own weird and wonky art. And I realized that all of my creative practices would develop in a way that was much more aligned with who I am and what's important to me if I turned to the outsiders for inspiration.

not the experts and that's become a philosophy that shaped all of my work whether it's visual art, music, talks, writing, podcasting. I always turn to the outsiders for inspiration because they do stuff in weird and fascinating and mysterious ways that I can never quite understand. I've often wondered what it is that attracts me to the brilliant and often tortured weirdo and I use that term weirdo with great love and affection and I would regard myself as a weirdo.

 (26:46.177)

and part of me thinks that maybe it's I see something of myself in these outsiders in a way that I'm not totally conscious of I mean I've never really felt I've fitted in anywhere and I make art because it helps me make sense of myself and the world and my place in it and then I also actively avoid being part of a thing or a club or a movement and I hate being pigeonholed or labeled but I think there is more to it than that

And when I encounter work that comes from the raw self-expression of an outsider in whatever medium they work in I feel it in my body. It sounds a bit corny but I will feel it in my body. It's not a conscious thing. I love to see a piece of work and experience a visceral attraction and I don't know why. Like hearing Daniel's music for the first time. I loved it and absolutely had no idea why. And I wasn't even sure if I loved it. It was just like a magnet.

It's as if the rawness and naivety and uncensored spontaneous self-expression seeps into me like stimulating awe and wonder. But I feel I must emphasize something at this point which is really important to me whenever I talk about outsider artists. I'm always really keen to make sure that I'm not engaging with our work as some sort of weird freaky sideshow or a spectacle. I genuinely genuinely adore it. All of the

musicians I've mentioned and the artists I've mentioned. I genuinely adore their work and I'm moved by it and I'm fascinated by it and I want to fight a corner for these artists in whatever way I can. And I also appreciate that their marginalisation is often their day-to-day life experience and not some cool romantic artistic ideal. They often exist on the edges due to circumstances and not choice and that reality inevitably shapes how their work is expressed.

I feel sad and frustrated and angry when I see the work of an outsider squashed or rejected by experts or by society in general simply because it's different or challenging. There's videos online of the legendary Stardust Cowboy being mocked on a US variety show which is just sad and the audience are laughing and loving it and he said afterwards he was really disappointed by it. Or there's another video of Shubbie Taylor being booed off stage at the Apollo in New York and

 (29:08.227)

They even got Shoobie name wrong in the introduction. And it just goes to show how big budgets and huge audiences can be used to mock and humiliate those that are doing something brilliantly different from what everyone else is doing. And the same dynamic exists today in programs like The X Factor, which often includes a token outsider in each episode who's there less to be heard and more to be humiliated for comedy effect. And I can't help but wonder if all of this public shaming and rejecting of the outsider

arises from a fear of the unknown and of anything that might challenge our fixed beliefs about who we are and what it means to be a creative human. And I read an interview with Shuby Taylor who spoke about the Apollo incident and it was good to hear his reflections on it. He said, I was hurt, very hurt because I got booed off. I figured, I did it wrong. But after months and months of thinking about it, I said, no, I did it the way I wanted to do it. And so that's sort of a

bit of a happy ending to the Shoobie Taylor Apollo story. And there's many ways outsiders influence and inspire me but I think the most vivid is witnessing what becomes possible when someone gives themselves unbridled permission to be uncompromising in their artistic expression. To make or perform or sing or write or move just simply because this thing needs to get outside of you. It's not for any other reason.

It is so important to express this thing that you don't have time to wait or to train or to refine and perfect. The process is more important than the performance. So at a deep level, it really doesn't matter what others think about it. And I strive to make art in this way where I can. It's just for me. I simply need to get it out of me in a way that might bring me catharsis or meaning or help me understand what's going on in my inner world. And I don't find that easy all of the time.

I occasionally watch Daniel Johnson's first ever TV performance before I play an open mic and I watch that to remind me of all of this because the video of Daniel playing for the first time on TV he's like vibrating with nerves and it's raw and he's not really playing the guitar in a conventional way and there's this huge cool audience watching him and it's live on MTV but he just plays it anyway it's like and I obviously can't read his mind but it looks like he's thinking

 (31:32.61)

This is so important for me to get out. I'm just gonna do it no matter how it feels. And although I watch that for inspiration, it often just reminds me of how hard I can find it. It makes me admire and appreciate the outsiders who seem to do this naturally. I'm not assuming it's easy for them, but they seem to find unconventional ways of expressing themselves and it being that important that this work exists outside of

So that's it for this episode I've already got the bit at the end where I'm thinking this is shit but hopefully if you're hearing it then I went for a run and came back and listened back and edited it and thought yeah I quite like that but a couple of things before I go I really like making little zines like little books which are eight pages made from a folded sheet of A4 paper and I like them in the same way that I like haikus

constraint forces a different type of creative expression. And I finally got round to putting all of the zines in my online shop. So there's a few there that you can go and buy and you can get them in all different colors and they come with a cute little colored envelope. And there's one there about eels, there's one there about crabs, one about rooks and a couple of other random ones, how to make insanity fish stew. So if you'd like one of them, go and visit my shop. I will put the link to the shop.

in the podcast notes. Couple of workshops coming up. Mask Workshop 20th of March 2026 if you'd like to come to that. I think there's only a couple of spaces left. My favourite workshop to run. I think it was episode six where I spoke about masks. So if you become intrigued by that, come along to this and I'll probably run some more later in the year. And I guess I'll end by saying the same as I said at the start. If you like the podcast, then rate it, review it, share it, because

This in itself doesn't sit in the normal stream of podcast. I mean, it was never meant to be a podcast. It was meant to be an audio version of my sub stack. But even though I do it just for me and it's a catharsis for me, I like it when people listen. I like it when people get in touch and I like it that it leads to new connections. So if you've got a minute, rate it, review it, share it, spread the word. It seems that with how we share our creative work, we're dialing back.

 (34:00.437)

technology that social media is just pointing us to more of the same so the way to really connect with artists and outsiders and anything that's different is by word of mouth and I appreciate all of your messages and all of the sharing and all the reviews that you've already done for me. Episode 9 will be out on the 20th of February and I'll see you there but for now thank you so much. I can't remember how I normally end this that's weird

I don't know, maybe I end it differently each time, but I don't know. Bye!