The five-year-old’s lunar broadcast

‘What? Do you know what I mean, though?’

No, well, sort-of. My poor wife has to suffer my neurotic bursts of grandiosity every couple of weeks. I’ve noticed a pattern that needs amending. Off the back of a testing spell – be it eco-anxiety, financial panic, overloading myself with projects that could have waited, I’ll find my groove again, and everything is possible.

This time I’m plotting an assault on BBC Sounds producers because my vision for The Creative Condition has grown. I’m a lifelong audiophile, which played a major role in starting the podcast that grew into the brsnd and cause in which you, dear reader or listener, are now immersed. Or playing in the background. And in this frenzied world of constant streaming content, who wouldn’t want a Yorkshireman exploring creativity tucked away on some 1am graveyard slot on the BBC?

When I feel this stuff, it is with such passion that I blather on as if my wife had been in my head, sharing the years of germinating ideas before the mature and burst out of my face in a multi-sensory, quickly spreading ambition virus.

She reminds me that having not been made aware of this long-term thought process, I must realise that making sense of its sudden birth is a challenge. I stop and start to laugh, seeing her very fair point.

My challenge, of course, is to save a little of this beautiful wonder, this energy and willingness to dream, so I don’t repeat the pattern that invariably ends up in a burnout on the other side.

Like my two five-year-olds, one of which stops half-way through finding a clue in her treasure hunt, and shouts a request for the building of a ‘tent’ in the front room.

‘That’s me, isn’t it? That’s my brain, right there…’

‘Yes. A five-year old who is suddenly certain they’d like to broadcast for the BBC from the surface of the moon.’