Episode #12: From midges to nuclear terror, the microtonal power of therapeutic art and the performative solemnity of the consummate professional

In this episode, encountering some midges on a run gets me reflecting on nuclear terror in the 1980s, I contemplate how therapeutic art works brilliantly in the gaps between words, and explore why acts of carnival are vital for weirdos trying to make a meaningful difference in the world.

 TL;DL
02’ 06” A chain of thought from midges to 1980s nuclear terror
10’25”  The microtonal power of therapeutic art
18’ 18” The performative solemnity of the consummate professional
26’ 47”  Jackdaw invasion!
35’ 24” Upcoming workshops and Samphire Hoe Solstice Festival

Links to things I mentioned
Jonno Hanafin’s Percieved Weirdness Index
Unhurried moments podcast where I tell the story of that moment
Playing at the Edge Inner Critic Workshop
Paper Cutting Workshop in Guildford
Mask workshop
Samphire Hoe Solstice Festival

The written substack version of this episode can be read on my Substack.

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 37’ 53”)

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:12

Hello and welcome to episode 12 of Creative Adventures, an accidental podcast. And I'm recording during the day today for the first time. Maybe this is the earliest I've recorded during the day, because I've got plans later today. I've got plans in a project that's just consuming me at the moment. And I promise myself I wouldn't just use this whole podcast to talk about it. But I will do next time. It's an evolution of something that I've spoken about before, but I won't talk about it because you'll just have 45 minutes of me talking about that. So maybe I'll save that for next time. But it means I'm recording during the day and I live opposite two schools and by a busy road and I have a toddler that lives upstairs that is at home until about 1 pm before I think she goes to school. Or maybe they send her out to work, who knows? And her favourite hobby is I don't know. It sounds like she just drops trays of marbles and jumps from a massive height, or maybe just juggles dumbbells. So you might hear some of that. So I've just put a load of pillows up against the window, which is my effort at soundproofing. So it might just be that you hear a bit more traffic or school kids and the crazy toddler upstairs. And also the jack doors might turn up and start sounding like a pack of wild monkeys because they I they've had their breakfast, but they normally come back for the seconds around this time. And having the pillows against the window I've just realised it means I can't see my wildflower meadow that I'm growing that I mentioned last time. So I'll give you an update on that next time. There's no flowers yet and there's no bees, but I think by the time the June episode of this podcast comes out, I'll be surrounded by wildflowers and bees. And I'm really enjoying spring this year. It's the combination of that early May sun and a cool spring breeze is like the balance that I don't have to wear loads of layers and I also don't overheat in the sunshine. And I've realized that the in-between seasons of spring and autumn, they're my favourites, as they avoid those extremes of summer and winter and offer like a calm, transitional state. And I mean the extremes of summer and winter, not just in terms of the weather, but in terms of what humans get up to. It just tends to be a bit quieter and a bit more predictable. And I spoke many episodes ago about enjoying my strangely perilous evening runs in the dark. And even though I enjoyed them, I've actually really been enjoying running in the spring light, in the early evening. But the only mildly unpleasant thing is that this slightly warmer weather has brought massive swarms of midges by the riverside where I run, and I suddenly find myself running through them. I've started to learn to see them coming and to close my mouth. But there's there's loads of these massive swarms. And I'm calling them midges, but they're impossible to identify while I'm running. They're so tiny and they move in a chaotic, swirling way, but I haven't noticed any bites, so I'm assuming that they're some kind of non biting midge like fly. Either that or I run too fast for them to be able to bite me. But I find their crazy midge dance fascinating. It looks totally random but also choreographed at the same time. And I read that in medieval times these swarms were sometimes thought of as dancing spirits. They were the souls of the dead moving through the air or fair folk or unseen beings that you could only really spot them at that threshold between night and day. And as I was running the other day, I started to wonder about the origin of the word Midge, and that led me to think about the musician Midjur and whether he might have been given that nickname because of his height and his tendency to dance erratically in a swarm. And I was slightly disappointed to find out that neither of those things were true, and that his name actually comes from an evolution of an anagram of his real name, which is Jim. And thinking about Midger reminded me that at school I once did a project about his band Ultravox. I think it was in English lessons, and the brief was to write about a favourite band or musician, and for some reason I wrote a double header piece about Ultravox and the Beatles. And I remember feeling like a bit of a weirdo as everyone else chose artists that were in the charts at the time. And nobody in my class of 13-year-olds had ever heard of Ultravox, and most people considered the Beatles to be ancient in history. And I can't remember what grade I got, but I do remember that just before I handed it in, a friend of mine changed the words mid-year to read Midget Urin, and the phrase John Lennon was shot by Mark Chapman to read John Lennon was shot by Steve Chapman without me noticing, and I handed it in. And my teacher wasn't amused, and she was telling me about how offensive the term was that ended up in my book, and she just thought it was me. I mean why would I sabotage my own work? But that's what school was like. But one of the things that captivated me about Ultravox as a child, beyond their music, was the video for their song Dancing with Tears in My Eyes, which told the story of a nuclear meltdown that led to a catastrophic nuclear explosion that wiped out an entire population. And I grew up with a threat of nuclear war seeming to be in the news all of the time. And I developed a strange mix of terror and morbid fascination with it. And I remember being a lot younger and watching disturbing films about nuclear war, such as Threads and When the Wind Blows, and the day after, which just seemed to be on TV all of the time and showed the full horror of nuclear war. And as I ran following this chain of thought, I found myself wondering what else was in popular culture at the time in response to that ever-present threat. So when I got home I did some research and I was surprised to learn that the German pop song 99 Luft Balloons was also about nuclear war. The song was released in 1983 by a band called Naina, and it tells the story of balloons released at a concert being mistaken on radar for incoming enemy missiles, triggering a chain of events that leads to all out nuclear war. And the English version, which was translated to be 99 Red Balloons, which is the one I would have heard on the radio, it changes some of the sharper edges of the lyrics, so I can see how my younger self wouldn't have picked up on that. And learning the story behind 99 Lough Balloons reminded me of the true story of Stanislav Petrov, who's often described as the man who saved the world. And I remember reading about Stanislav Petrov only like five or six years ago. And he was a Soviet lieutenant colonel stationed at a secret early warning bunker near Moscow at the height of the Cold War. And on September 26, 1983, the system he was responsible for reported a sudden incoming attack of US nuclear missiles. And the protocol required him to pass his information up the chain of command so that a retaliatory strike could be authorized. But something in his gut told him that it couldn't be real. And he chose not to report it as a confirmed attack. And there's a brilliant documentary about him in which he describes his experience. And he said, I had a funny feeling in my gut. All the data suggested that the alarm was real. If I'd sent the report up the chain of commands, nobody would have said a word against it. I made a decision and that was it. There were twenty-three minutes of waiting. It was a very tense moment. I just sat there waiting. So he's just sitting there in this nuclear bunker, not knowing whether his decision to not follow the rules saved the world or would have catastrophic consequences. And of course his gut feel proved to be right. The warning on his computer was a false alarm, triggered by sunlight reflecting off cleards that the system thought were enemy missiles. And had he followed the rules as he was instructed to, all that nuclear war probably would have happened, changing the course of humanity forever. And he later said of the incident, people don't start wars, computers do. And if you can find the documentary, it's sort of like a film, but he plays himself in it, and some of it's real and some of it's acted. It's quite confusing, but it's really worth watching. And I think it's called The Man Who Saved the World, something like that. So having started my run thinking about midges, I ended it reflecting on how Petrov's story is a powerful reminder of the importance of instinct and trusting our gut feel. And no matter how many rules and protocols and computer systems we've got, that human gut feel and intuition is really important and really magical. And it's a great example of how the rules that we put in place to keep us safe can sometimes lead to disaster if that human judgment is removed. And often that can be the default, can't it? When we encounter the unknown or feel unsafe or out of control, our reflex response is to add in more rules or more procedures or more policies. But this can end up with the opposite outcome, where we're so rigidly bound to the rules that we put in place that the importance of spontaneous human intuition is suppressed. So for me, there's an important balance to strike here between freedom and structure, because obviously some structure is really helpful too. The academic Barry Mason wrote a paper called Towards Safe Uncertainty that has been a big influence on my work. And Mason suggests that as anxiously wired human beings we instinctively gravitate towards safety and certainty, putting rules and structures in place to make everything as controllable and predictable as possible. But in reality this often serves only to maintain the very status quo we were trying to escape, or in other instances actually results in disaster. Instead Mason proposes that we aim for a balance of what he calls safe uncertainty, where we just put in place the bare minimum of essential rules and structures to mitigate the biggest risks, leaving everything else open to spontaneous intuition. And I like to think of this as living in a state of just enoughness, where we have just enough structure, just enough order, just enough plans, and just enough guide rails to support free creative self-expression without suppressing and stifling it. And thinking of that school project that I did about Ultravox and the Beatles reminded me that I think it was around that time I saw an interview with Paul McCartney where he was sitting at a piano and said something like all the songs ever written and that will ever be written are hidden in these keys. And I remember that blowing my mind, to think that such variety and difference could emerge from just 88 black and white keys. And I don't think that's actually an accurate quote. I couldn't find the actual quote, so maybe I dreamt the whole thing, but I'm pretty sure I saw Paul McCartney saying that. And I've used that quote or that misquote many times over the years in various creative workshops and conversations until I eventually realized that what he said isn't quite true. Or at least it isn't true if we look beyond a Western perspective and what music is. So Western music notation has its roots in ancient Greece, and it was the ancient Greeks that first used letter names to describe different pitches. And this approach to music was developed and formalized further in medieval Europe by a monk called Guido of Arizzo around the year one thousand AD. And that seven note diatonic scale that we now know became widely adopted through monasteries and the church and early systems of musical education. And then over time Western instruments and tuning systems evolved around this framework, eventually setting into that familiar A to G system that we now take for granted. Those notes, the A to G in the sharp and minor major variations of it that McCartney was referring to, they underpin the vast majority of music created and consumed in the West. But other musical systems developed independently of this framework, and Indian classical music, which predates Guido Evarizo by well over a thousand years, is based on a far more nuanced understanding of pitch, often described as containing twenty two microtonal divisions, which are known as shruties, in one octave. Then Arabic Makam music uses notes that fall between the standard westward pitches, and Indonesian gamelin and Chinese pentatotic scales adopt entirely different ways of organizing sound. And this helps explain why those of us that are conditioned to Western music often find listening to music played on unfamiliar scales strange or unsettling. Our ears have been trained to expect a particular set of pitches or a particular set of intervals and patterns of tension and release and musical resolution. So when we encounter something different, it can feel recognizable enough to be music, but unfamiliar enough to feel slightly wrong. When Western music starts to break these Western traditions, it can be very bizarre. And even though I'm a fan of Captain Beefart's album Trout Mask Replica, it breaks so many of the rules of music that it can be sometimes really painful to listen to. But all of these systems, no matter how many notes they divide an octave into, are basically simplifications of something that's far more continuous. So all these human scales that we use, be that the Western tradition, the Indian tradition, the Arabic tradition, the Chinese tradition, they're simply grids that we overlay to help us understand and interpret and create music. But no matter how fine that grid becomes, there's always something happening in the gaps. And I did a bit of research and found out that if you divide an octave into the smallest pitch differences most humans can detect, you'd end up with somewhere in the region of 120 to 240 distinguishable notes. And what I find fascinating is that language works in a similar way. So language and the words that we use are incredibly useful to allow us to communicate and express ourselves, but it's also a kind of grid that simplifies something that's far more complex. And in the same way there's always frequencies between the notes in music, there's always meaning in the spaces between words. And this is why nonverbal forms of creative expression, such as drawing and painting or movement or sculpting, can give us access to a subtle meaning that language alone can't. These forms of creative expression and sense making give us access to the stuff in between the gaps of language. And even though I enjoy writing and I've found ways to weave intricate and interesting stories, I've always struggled to find words that satisfactorily describe my inner experience. And that's not to say I don't know what I feel, it's just that no words seem to match my inner experience with the precision that I'd like. And I often think it's a bit like those children's toys which have the differently shaped blocks and the corresponding shaped holes, and the idea is it teaches children spatial awareness, so you put the square in the square and the star in the star. And those toys are a great metaphor for how I experience a mismatch between my feelings and the language I have access to. It feels like I can always sense the exact shape of the hole, but can't find the right plastic shaped bit to fit in it. It's like words lack the precision to fully match the feeling, and they too become an oversimplified grid laid over something far more nuanced. So I found making to be a much more profound way of making sense of my internal world and processing difficult thoughts or feelings or experiences. Back in twenty eighteen I experienced a mild form of PTSD after being a first responder at a road traffic accident. And I won't go into the details here because it's not a particularly pleasant story, but I'll put a link to a podcast I did where I told the whole story, if you want to listen to it, I'll put that in the podcast notes. And after this incident, even though I was able to mentally process what had happened, my body remained in a state of hypervigilance for weeks and weeks afterwards. And it was only when I eventually made two abstract drawings in response to the feelings I was having and the images that seemed to be seared into my brain that my nervous system began to calm and re-regulate. And the drawings themselves didn't lead to any obvious insights or aha moments, but the act of creating them resolved something within me. It was like the process of making was fluid enough to create all of the precise shapes needed to fit the precise whole. And that's just one example of where the power of analogue making has helped me. In the playing at the edge workshops that I run with Gestalt psychotherapist Simon Kovicer, we encourage participants to use paints and pens and clay and other creative practices to get to know their inner critics. And by working in this non-verbal way, people often discover new ways of relating to their superego, or at least feel less constrained by it, and often they can't put into words what it is that shifted, other than the process of doing it has felt immensely helpful. So I find it sad and really frustrating how society has been conditioned to perceive art, and this all begins in school. And I've long thought that art education should be split in a similar way to how English is divided into English language and English literature. So it seems helpful to split art into maybe what we call art technique and artful practice. And art technique would teach students the skills needed to create technically accomplished work and potentially pursue art professionally. But artful practice would focus on the therapeutic power of creativity and on developing personal practices of making and creating that can support young people throughout their lives. Artful practice would teach children from an early age that the primary purpose of making is not simply to produce something impressive, but to explore and make sense of their inner world and help regulate their nervous system. Sadly, my experience at school and the experience of many others was that art was treated as something that only a talented few were capable of succeeding in, and that if you weren't one of those people, art should be consigned as being a hobby that you only indulge in when the important work was done. And I guess the biggest thing that school taught me, even lessons that art that for me are there to nurture uniqueness and nurture wonkiness. The biggest thing that school taught me was how to compromise myself and bend myself out of shape in order to fit in. In many ways, like how I think, how I act, the types of things I do, and even like what I wear and my appearance. But over time a lot of those things have gradually become easier, like over a long period of time. Not like I left school and suddenly that was all okay. Oh, the jackdoors have just turned up. You might hear them in the background sounding like a pack of monkeys. So I've given up trying to make this podcast audibly perfect. So you've probably got school kids, there's someone building a block of flats, and now you've got the jackdoors, so hopefully that just adds to the experience. What was I saying? Oh yeah, that rounding off. I think I've started the process about 15 years ago of doing the opposite of rounding off, which I don't know what that word would be. And lots of things have become easier. Maybe it's just come with age and getting to a point of I just I don't have the energy to do this anymore. And one of the things that's become noticeably easier for me over many years of working with groups and with organisations is worrying less about what to wear. And in truth, that's historically been a thing that's been on my mind a lot, not just in a work situation, but in everyday social situations. And it's ridiculous that I'd end up doing a piece of work in an organization and I'd worry less about what I was going to do. But the things that people would normally worry about, the main things I'd worry about is how am I going to get there and what should I wear? And I don't really know why this has been so difficult for me. I mean I've never really had any desire to look a particular way. I mean maybe when I was a teenager or in my early twenties I wanted to everyone to know that I was alternative and different and have long hair and wearing t-shirts featuring obscure bands. But I'm I'm well past that stage now. And I think this concern about my appearance comes down to trying to strike an impossible balance between feeling comfortably myself and fitting in. And at a deeper level, it's probably about a fear of rejection or humiliation or a worry that it will trigger some deep-rooted shame. And I've a few memories that might sit at the root of all of this. One is of being about age twelve or thirteen, and my incredibly cool cousin, who was a brilliant musician and just effortlessly stylish, he came to visit me, and in probably what was a well-intended bit of unsolicited advice, he critiqued my clothes, and he was trying to help me dress differently. Maybe he was embarrassed. I can't, I mean, I wasn't wearing like a fedora and a cape or anything like that. I was just wearing stuff, just clothes. I hadn't even thought about it. And I think that well-intended style advice made me just feel even more self conscious after that. And then I remember going to a Christmas party shortly after I started working the factory, about age 18, and being mocked because I turned up to this Christmas party just wearing like a baggy sweatshirt and scruffy black jeans, and everyone else had dressed up, all the guys were wearing shirts and And jackets and the sort of smart casual dress code, which I find the most confusing dress code. It's like be one or the other. I don't mind, but at least give me a bit of a steer. And I remember turning up to get the coach to this Christmas do, and people saying, 'Oh, nice to see you've made the efforts, Steve.' And that just sticking with me and going into that same bucket of phrases and observations from others that probably started with my cousin, maybe even earlier than that in life. And then I think it was that probably that same year, there was a 1960s event at the Factory Social Club where people were encouraged to come in fancy dress. And I remembered that critique of nice to see you've made the effort, and I thought, well, I'm gonna make an effort this time. And I arrived to find I was the only one that had bothered to dress up, and that just ended up being another humiliating and embarrassing thing to be the only one wearing this rather flamboyant 60s outfit, and everyone else was just wearing normal clothes. And this obsession and difficulty carried on when I started to do creative work with businesses, like in a consulting or an advisory or like running workshops and talks, and I just struggled to strike that balance between being professional enough that people would listen to me and want to work with me and take me seriously, but also not feeling like I was wearing something performative that stopped me from fully being myself. And I really liked John O'Hanafin's concept of the perceived weirdness index, which is such a brilliant title of an academic paper. I'll I'll put a link to it in the podcast notes. So John O'Hanafin's Perceived Weirdness Index, and he basically suggests that if we're not weird enough, we become assimilated. We just become part of the norm. Like we don't stand out, we're unnoticed, we're part of those trends and norms and traditions. But if we're too weird, we're rejected and shamed and humiliated. And the art, Hanno Finn says, is to be just weird enough. Like just weird enough to maintain our unique difference, but not so weird that we're rejected. And I found that really helpful conceptually, but that made me obsess even more about what is that elusive, just weird enough sweet spot. But over time, it seems to somehow have become less of a concern for me. And I've come to realise that I am genuinely at my best when I'm comfortable in what I'm wearing. Like if I'm doing some work with an organization or even one-to-one with someone, if if I'm feeling self-conscious about what I'm wearing and not feeling myself, they're not going to get the best out of me. And if someone can't get past how I look at an initial meeting, then things are only going to become more difficult further down the line when I'm inviting them to do strange and unusual creative work. And I'm happy to compromise to a degree so I don't come across like a lunatic or or even someone trying too hard to be performatively different. But beyond that, I just know I will not find it easy to get into creative flow if I feel even a slight incongruence with my clothing. And that's generally worked for me over the last eight or nine years, but there's always a few occasions where expectations have clashed. I remember running a two-day workshop and taking my shoes off because the room that I went in was carpeted, and that's what I'd do if I went into someone's house and they had a carpet. I'd I don't want to warp muddy shoes over that carpet. So I took my shoes off for the entire two days, and then later heard that the participants had found it distracting and strange. And I think I was doing this work for an academic institution, so they had feedback forms, and I think my lack of shoes. Oh, here's the Jack Daws again. I think my lack of shoes was mentioned on all the feedback forms. And I also remember joining a Zoom call with a potential client about a workshop that they wanted me to run, I think it was. And they commented at the end of the call that I was wearing a hat and suggested it didn't seem professional and that I wasn't taking things seriously, and I didn't hear from them again. But I've become fascinated by this concept of professionalism and particularly how it manifests in the world of business through rituals and language and appearance. And it's beyond just appearance. And the word professional comes from the Latin word profiteery, pro meaning to go forth in public and fiteri meaning to confess or to acknowledge. So originally the word professional simply meant to openly declare something about oneself. And I have to admit that when I started digging into this, I was hoping to find a rabbit hole connection between the words profiteery and profiterole, but was very disappointed to discover there wasn't really one. I was hoping that I'd discover that Profiterol was invented to become the most professional food in the world, but there's no connection whatsoever. Oh, can you hear those jackdoors? This is why I don't record during the day normally. I don't want to disturb them because they're having their dinner. I wonder what they're talking about. I wonder if they're saying, why has he got pillows up against the window? The lunatic. We want to see him. Oh, I think I think they've just gone. Um sorry this is so so jumbled. Uh hopefully you're following it. What was I yeah. Oh the history. History of the word professional, ironically, and the the world's most unprofessional bit of podcasting. So the term originated from that Latin term profiteery that has nothing to do with profiterole. And between the 16th and 18th centuries, the meaning of the word professional evolved to describe someone with a vocation requiring specialist knowledge, as fields of work like law and medicine or theology emerged. And then the Industrial Revolution gave rise to these bigger bureaucratic organizations, and and the mechanistic mindset that underpinned them, that whole world of tailorism, led to a growing desire for more standardization and separation and uniformity of humans. And this led to new standards of dress and formal language and emotional restraint emerging, and all of those things becoming increasingly associated with trust and reliability and status. And then more recently, as corporate capitalism has become the dominant organizational model, the meaning of professionalism has evolved even further. And over time the concept seems to have moved from meaning I publicly commit to this way of being, to something closer to I am paid to be this way. And whilst I'm sure many people feel comfortable and even enjoy this way of being, that socially constructed and performative nature of what we call professionalism seems to have slipped from conscious awareness, becoming like a kind of secret code that quietly excludes and rejects difference. The late academic Ralph Stacey was a big influence on my work, and he described organizational life as a complex pattern of human relating that is predictable as it is unpredictable, and as controllable as it is uncontrollable. And he suggested that organizations create rituals and routines and norms simply to reduce the anxiety this generates. And Stacy argued that many of the unquestioned norms of organizational life function as a quote, fantasy defense to protect against the anxiety that uncertainty and ambiguity generate. So arguably, from this lens, professionalism isn't simply a standard to aspire to, but an agreed social performance designed to reduce anxiety and keep anything outside the norm at bay. Carnival was a tradition in medieval Europe where social rules were temporarily suspended and roles reversed. And it traditionally happened in that period leading up to Lent, and peasants would dress as kings and men would dress as women and women dress as men, and there'd be satirical performances that would mock the clergy and the monarchy. And while it wasn't always consequence free, hence the use of masks and costumes, authorities often tolerated this brief and temporary suspension of normal social order. And the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bacton wrote extensively about Carnival in his book Rabulus and His World, and in it he suggests that Carnival wasn't simply a release from oppressive norms, but a temporary reordering of society in which people could experience social rules and hierarchies as less fixed and less like a natural phenomena or less absolute than they appeared in day-to-day life. And Carnival allowed many of the suppressed aspects of life, such as humour and contradiction and chaos, and the reality of having a body and its needs, it allowed all of these things to rise to the surface. And it's possible this is part of the reason these practices were tolerated by those in power. Because it was a time bound expression of these raw human impulses, Carnival may have acted like a temporary release valve which allowed people to briefly express these parts of themselves, but without fundamentally destabilizing the dominant power structures. And I guess elements of Carnival exist in the modern world, but I've always found the designated carnival moments of modern capitalist life rather weird. And the Office Christmas party is one that comes to mind, and putting aside that I never knew what to wear to these things, I always found them excruciatingly strange. It's like a single evening where people are allowed to let their hair down, where that hierarchy and structure are awkwardly suspended, and where people did and said things that if they did it in the office or the boardroom or the factory, it'd probably end up in a disciplinary procedure. And then the next day the performative solemnity of the consummate professional returns, as if nothing has happened. And it always felt to me like these were contradictory experiences of forced fun or mandated free self-expression, but with an underlying awareness that certain lines should still not be crossed. And I'm using Christmas parties as one example here. I'm sure there's many others. Maybe some team building events are a bit like that. So it seems to me that the modern cult of professionalism slowly rounds off that beautiful wonkiness of being human. And this cult of professionalism values only the parts of us that help maintain existing structures of power and status, and capitalist ideas such as growth and productivity and efficiency, and demanding that we leave the rest of ourselves at the office door or factory gate. And if we don't, we are considered unprofessional. And yet the reason I'm often invited into professional environments, and every time I say professional, I'm doing air quotes by the way. Every time I'm invited into a professional environment, it's because they're seeking something different, or they want something challenged or stirred up. But when I show up as my natural self through my appearance, my language, my way of working and my way of thinking, this difference can be perceived as unprofessional and either rejected or even worse, dampened down and smoothed off. So this just means that there's only a handful of people I end up working with now that are genuinely up for doing this work. And I've seen many other creatives encounter this dilemma. They're invited in because they're strange and fascinating and experimental, but because they don't fit the established norms, they're either rejected or end up bending themselves so far out of shape that they lose the very essence that made them valuable in the first place. And I often think there's nothing more heartbreaking than a clown having to wear a business suit to get a corporate gig. It feels so sad when that happens. So I'm left with a sense that maybe embodying an element of carnival in my work is incredibly important. And to notice that pull towards those overly solemn norms of professionalism, but also finding ways to live and express who I am, how I think, and what I do. And it's equally important to me to make sure that I'm able to do this work within the everyday life of an organization or an institution or an academic program, and not just as a mandated fun part of an agenda. I don't want to be the Christmas party. I don't want to be the team building event. Because I'd hate being part of something like that as a participant. And this means I often have to walk away when none of this feels possible, and that isn't the safest or easiest way to earn a living, considering the other ways I earn a living, uh making art and things like that, which is even more precarious. But this feels like a far preferable way to earn a living than to slowly suffocate my creative spirit. And then I always think if it doesn't work out, I'll just eat beans for a month. So that's it. That's the end of this noisy episode. I hope I hope the noise wasn't too distracting. And we time travelled during that episode. I actually recorded it on two different days because on the first day I started recording it, there was literally scaffolding being put up outside, and it was too noisy, it was distracting me. And then I've recorded this second part on another day, which has been equally noisy. So I think the lesson for me is I need to schedule to record this in the evenings, and I didn't plan it very well this time, and it's the latest. I'm finishing recording this the day before it goes out, so which has been an interesting experience, and it means maybe you've got a bit more of the uncensored imperfections of this podcast. But a couple of things before I go. One is I'm really excited that Simon Covichia and I are running our Playing It the Edge workshop again in London in November, and that's our two-day creative exploration of shame and the inner critic that I mentioned, I think it was on the December podcast, uh, some of the work that we do there, and that's two days in London, and in that workshop we use masks and clay and movement and gestalt exercises and mindfulness just to explore some hard stuff in a very playful way. So I'll put a link to that in the podcast notes. I'm also running a paper cutting workshop in Guildford, if you're in that area in June that you can come to, and there's a mask workshop, a summer mask workshop. And then the other thing I'm really excited about is I got invited back to Samphire Ho, which I'd never heard of till last summer. And Samphire Ho is a weird nature reserve in Folkestone, so in between Folkestone and Dover, and it was created with all the spoils from the Channel Tunnel. So all of the earth that was dug out to build the channel tunnel was dumped here and turned into a nature reserve. And I'm going back there on the 20th and 21st of June as part of a solstice festival run by the Bee Friendly Trust, and there's a load of different artists going there. And last year we had performances, we had workshops, I made a crab shrine on the beach, and I've got plans this year. I've got a very strange project that I've been working on that I'm gonna bring there, as well as making art. So there's a load of different people there, so it's free to come along to the 20th and 21st of June. And even if you don't take part in anything, go and visit Samphire Ho because it's a beautifully weird place, and there's a lovely beach there if it's sunny. So thank you for joining me. The next episode, episode 13, will be out on the 12th of June. And maybe I will tell you about this project that's been consuming my time, and meaning I have to record during the day, and I'll have an update on my bee meadow on the windowsill, if that's the type of thing you'd be interested in. But thank you for your support of the podcast. Thank you for sharing it, thank you for writing to me. It's very much appreciated, and I'll speak to you soon. Take care, bye for now.