Learning opportunity

It’s the first experience of the parenting and working juggling act during school summer holidays for my wife and I. We’ve managed. Just about.

My daughter reminds me in some ways of my younger self. Particularly her tendency to lose focus when she’s not impassioned by the topic I’m trying to engage her with. So far, it seems, this is not so at school, where her teachers illuminate us with reports of ultra focus. Kids in their comfort zone are a different animal.

One morning she’s astounded by the ease with which I name the nation depicted in a graphic of around 24 nations in my son’s Lego instruction booklet. She asks why her mum does not know most of them, and I do. I explain to her that this is owing to my obsession with football sticker albums during various football World Cups. Knowledge via passion.

One afternoon, I transfer parent duty to my wife after a morning with the kids, and my daughter is quick to transfer her allegiance and affection.

‘Flick Daddy back to the studio!’

I cackle at the verb ‘flick’ in this context and maul her to the ground, tickling her until she taps out and ruffling her hair. In retaliation, this progresses to ‘Flick Daddy to Turkey!’ (She has a classmate whose father is Turkish.)

The next morning, I intercept her on the landing to give my wife a well-earned bit of extra sleep, and she is not happy about this. Denying my prompts to read a book or play with some toys, she sits on the sofa, scowling at me while I stir the porridge and prepare bowls.

‘Turkey.’ Now just distilled to one word, her indignation is palpable.

‘Australia.’ She notches it up.

‘Antarctica’, I return fire, flicking my fingers at her, narrow-eyed.

This continues, picking up steam when my son arrives, opening with ‘South Pole.’

By the time we’re onto planets, I’ve made a mental note to acquire a second-hand globe or world map. Humour is the conduit here, and if we can keep this tongue-in-cheek expulsion-wish list game going, her global geography will be significantly elevated far more than it could have been with a simple ‘sit down and look at this’ brief ahead of the return to year 1.

That’s all teachers want. The good ones, anyway. The time to understand individual needs and tend to them.

Burn any Bridge

There’s a slide in The Creative Condition talk that says LIKE MINDED PEOPLE? The question mark because I wanted to highlight the limitations of spending time only with those we feel comfortable with, or who remind us of ourselves.

One friend I’ve recently made makes some people uncomfortable with his unbridled honesty.

We’re talking in the street, with one other fella who says, ‘I always say it’s a small world, so don’t burn any bridges. You never know when you might need something, or encounter them again!’ And to a degree, I get his point. I think about it and consider putting forth a more nuanced interpretation of what he said, but my friend is in there like a shot.

‘I gotta disagree with you there, mate. I will burn any bridge if it calls me a c*nt.’

I splutter and wail and love how polar he’s gone.

This is what I mean. You need range if you want to understand the world and stimulate better ideas.

Like-minded people are lovely, but they only go so far.

Three nice things after a shit night’s sleep

It was fine until 3.58am, when my little lad needed a piss. This is progress. Better than the wet beds of just a few months ago. But there was residual anxiety in my gut, and it kicked up when I laid back down.

That was it. A massive ladle full of worry soup. Everything from mortality to a remembered – and potentially missed vet appointment. They charge for those n’all.

I called a friend this morning because I’d levered myself up to a workable energy level, but still felt extremely fragile, and a friendly voice, who knows what it’s like to live with this kind of loopy brain, was required. He helped. He knows what I mean and assured me we’ll get there.

Coming off the phone I felt vacant, and now had to confront a swollen to-do list, some of which requires using my brain and my creativity.

I said it recently – there is value in adversity – but it’s not sustainable to create over a longer period while under siege. In that moment, I didn’t know where the resilience to create was going to come from. But three nice things happened that showed me.

The first task was to pop into the local computer repair shop. I’d called up the owner, who’d done some work on my laptop and fixed my printer, to see if the now-missing printer cables had been left there. They hadn’t, but he told me to come by anyway, as he tends to have things lying around what is a high street electronic graveyard. And either way, they sell them.

In the spirit of supporting local business, I popped in. He smiled and handed me the two cables under the glass screen over the counter. Not mine, but spares, which he said I could keep.

Then a little boy smiling at my dog just down the street. I stopped and offered up a stroke of my border terrier, and his little face shone with glee.

And finally a nice ‘hello’ from a member of staff at the cafe I choose to go write in, for fear of dozing off at home and not getting the work done.

By the time I sat down upstairs, a seed of optimism and acceptance has sprouted and begins to wind around that horrible lingering belly full of nerves, and I’m able to create.

A test

I’ve made progress with my thoughts. the first half of 2025, like many of the years of this decade, came with challenges. Mental health challenges. Nothing too severe, but the unwelcome and too-frequent presence of anxiety had to be dealt with.

Think big: climate, war, the notion of death. New parenthood fatigue and overwhelm with a badly-managed buffet of creative endeavours left me vulnerable.

I’ve studied cognitive patterns, talked to burnout coaches, anxiety specialists, those who’ve suffered more than I have, and read books. It’s all helped – theory helping me to practice a greater degree of curation of my thoughts, and my responses to them.

Then think small. An unexpected assault in the form of a spoiled wrestling match. How pathetic, but how real! School days in the late 1990s were minefields for this. The internet was not yet here, so those of us who could not afford Sky TV and those who were not allowed to stay up late to watch the U.S. broadcast of a big show would spend the day creeping around, covering ears in a futile effort to save the outcome of matches that were built on months-long storylines until we got home to watch the recording in purity.

Today it’s so much harder. Any online activity is fraught with risk, and I hit play on what I think is the NotSam Wrestling Summerslam night one review podcast, only to hear him reel off the result of the main event of night 2 before I can scramble for the pause button.

Rage I seldom feel bubbles, spits, then roars up and out of my face like a volcano eruption. I mean, I genuinely release a primal scream with my head back on my shoulders, followed by a torrent of expletives. Then self-loathing, before I realise how fortunate I am to sit this atop my list of grievances.

I know it’s all circumstantial – that idea that there’s always someone worse off is true – but we also live our own story, and the small pleasures count too. So I begin to chastise myself for allowing the flow of a productive morning to be interrupted by something so trivial.

But the magic is butchered. And tonight I’ll watch to see ‘how it happens.’ Not ‘what happens.’

As pathetic as this is, I begin to step aside from my thoughts and watch them, neutralise them. A tactic psychologists and experts will help you learn in order to manage an unruly toddler of a mind. Slowly they calm, and it’s not so bad. Disappointing, not bad.

Clearly there is work to be done, but I stop short of marching from the garden studio into the house to tell my wife of this trauma. There’s maturity in that, even if my fellow-wrestling fan brother does get the thick end of it over WhatsApp.

‘Orrible, this

I was outside a pub in London with Simon Dixon the other week. Simon and I have enjoyed time spent talking for my podcast, and during occasional pop-ins to the DixonBaxi office, but following their week's sabbatical with the Think Paradiso team, we finally found time to talk about life in general.

We got onto our roots growing up in relative scarcity in Yorkshire, and how that shapes you as you enter the creative industry. That can be both good and bad, but awareness of it is important to avoid having your perception of self shaped by others.

It's a common topic that comes up when I coach my clients.

Simon made a valuable observation that while I'd illustrated for 18 years, if you had to define me, it wouldn't be as an 'illustrator' but as a 'storyteller.' It's something I realised as my path veered off into many disciplines, such as writing and interviewing, which illuminated me just as much.

Growing up in Keighley in the 1980s/early '90s meant I was surrounded by a litany of live-action cartoon characters, and local lore was strong.

I've seen some run and hide from such origins, but I've always used it in my artistic voice.

As I travelled around, fortunate enough to go to university, I looked for such traits and rich tales in others.

In Preston, I met Andrew Lewis and always adored the thick central Lancashire accent. So when I wrote and published YA MUM and Other Stories from the Backstreets of Britain, I thought a nice launch campaign would be to round up a broad spread of friends and peers with great accents, who embraced their roots, to read story excerpts.

Andy was a perfect fit because we shared a warped fascination with the underbelly of the towns we were raised in.

This level of filth, of course, only works for some, but that's the glory of storytelling. It comes with infinite possibilities and must be hewn from the personality, lived experience, and tastes of its author.

If you could benefit from some help tapping into your voice and story, get in touch here, and we can discuss a coaching program.

Abolish the Parasite Class

It’s hard to get the word out there these days. They’re arresting the most peaceful of protestors in the street, so that ups the stakes. Social media is a wall of white noise and everyone is so overwhelmed by the incessant content bombardment that it wears down the spirit of even the most caring people.

I had an early Sunday drive alone. About one hour in, enjoying a rare bit of headspace, I marvelled at the freshly spray-painted message on a motorway bridge:

ABOLISH THE PARASITE CLASS

Not only did I admire its aesthetic merits, but it landed. It got me thinking. It wasn’t one of 5,000 updates on a feed, and it towered overhead, urging consideration. You don’t hang 40 feet over speeding cars in the dark if you don’t mean it. That intent creates resonance. Resonance finds a way.

This uncompromising call to action followed a conversation I’d had with friends on Saturday afternoon at a pub in Manchester. I’ve spent nine years of my life living in that city, and I love the place, but the skyline is now riddled with buy-to-let only high rise totems of crony capitalism. You’re doing well if a pint of ale comes in under £7. Renting and buying property anywhere near the city gobbles up an unreasonable portion of anyone’s income and saddles them with dangerous levels of stress. On the surface, this is sold as progress. More nice bars, eateries, cafes, and entertainment experiences, glossy fronts where there used to be litter and pissy, dank loading bays and side streets. But this is pay-to-play, and so few of us are invited to the table.

Meanwhile in the medium-sized towns, particularly in the north, businesses shut down and move out too frequently to keep count. There’s a tangibly rotten collective psychology throughout, and the people don’t point the finger at the greedy elite, but only ever at their neighbours, at newcomers, and the most vulnerable. The ‘others’ who are fed to them via the media, bagged and washed, ready to eat scapegoats.

Even within particular regions there’s extremes. Quaint towns with middle-class money surround bigger, struggling, post-industrial working-class towns bereft of jobs and disposable income, decaying and increasingly overrun with empty shops.

This class divide was always here, but never so stark. Not in my lifetime.

So when this message over the motorway grabs me by the throat, I sigh and nod because it’s hard not to desire a revolution. A collapse. Something to jump-start the souls of those who cry for something kinder.

My days of sending myself into social-media-triggered negative thought spirals and cutting myself off from creativity and joy are gone. I’m largely offline, arranging calls, working hard to maintain a baseline of relative optimism so I can contribute to the fight via my work. The fight to elevate creativity’s role in our communities, so we can solve problems, not contract them like terminal sicknesses, as I attempt to get by in these anxious times.

It isn’t ignorance. It’s an acknowledgement of who rules these online platforms, and why that particular branch of rage was playing right into their hands, doing me so much more harm than good.

I won’t be abseiling down motorway bridges in the dead of night, but I’ll be operating in the physical world as much as I can, thinking differently about what rebellion means and might look like in today’s world. I’ll be telling stories, bringing people together through creativity, curiosity, and passion. Considering how it can be fun, additive to my overall flow and mood, helping me out if bed in the mornings, not making me want to stay in it.

The Dark Reflection

I’m working on a writing project. Last week, I spent time interviewing the subject I’m writing about, and this person took me right back to childhood. I do this on the podcast because you start to see patterns, threads running between the person I sit with today, and the reasons why, why not, and small brush strokes around the edges.

Anyway, this person recounted sneaking into an idyllic building, up in some hills, and finding some old, original books from a bygone era, spending hours upon hours alone studying them. Reading every faded, aged page, soaking up the knowledge.

As he did this, I had to police my inner child, who shrieked with juvenile laughter. What had occurred to me was my own version of this. My subject and I are very close in age, and while my imagined version of these secret reading sessions is probably wildly exaggerated in its sheer splendour, it still set the stage for my mucky underbelly equivalent.

In my first published story story (Soft Play in It’s OKAY zine issue #1), I recalled how my gang of friends and I spent a large portion of our childhoods on a defunct, decaying wool mill, around which the last people to walk its yawning corridors – two security guards – would give us a tour around. On these tours, some of us would quietly splinter off and roam the nooks and doorways to see what we could see. One time we discovered a Morrison’s supermarket carrier bag full of porn magazines, and would then return to it for as long as we could during these tours.

It was grim, dried out, dog-eared and so pre internet, and when juxtaposed with my writing subjects more romantic experience, a great illustration of the contrast between people’s roots, how the culture and economy of the day is the context we do not choose, but must navigate.

Does this every change? I don’t think so. Creativity is always subject to context, and I try not to overthink what that has enabled and thwarted in my own experience of it.

Maybe I was onto Something

Here’s something. I was late to parenting. This means that on a bad day, I stagger around on my dog walk with three eye bags under each eye, staring into space. In all honesty, had I had them younger, I imagine it would only have been marginally better. And maybe worse because I’d have far less understanding of myself and life in general.

But one colossal upside is my time spent observing the human condition through all of this work. It means that, while, like every parent, I get things wrong and learn as I go, I am able to apply those learnings to the way I raise these two small creatures.

One big lesson I took from my parents, and have seen amplified in many of the people who have found their element in their work and broader life, is that for a person to find their way, they need the right balance of encouragement, mentorship, and freedom to find out.

My daughter has barely stopped moving since she was born. She expresses delight with a jump, a kick of her legs, or a spontaneous dance move. I recall watching her watching Bing, the kids’ TV show, her entire body in the air, held up by her arms gripping onto the chair arms, legs crossing left and right. So, gymnastics on Monday mornings. In the pool, and on the climbing frame, she is utterly fearless. Physical dynamism is a pre-set. And now, it’s street dance on a Saturday morning.

My son isn’t far behind with the climbing ability, but his brain adores mechanisms, systems, puzzles. He began prodding at my wife’s piano, so she showed him a very basic tune. He sat there until he’d cracked it, and kept coming back. So, piano lessons.

There’s privilege here, don’t get me wrong. The massive majority of my little leisure money goes on their interests now, but consider this the gentle nudge.

There’ll never be pressure. That doesn’t work. I don’t care if either of them are flagged as some unprecedented level of prodigy. If they’re not enjoying it, it ends. Of course, encouragement to work through and persevere is a very different thing, and that time will come, but at 5-years-old, it is our job to merely enable and observe.

It felt unreal as I watched my daughter keep step for step with her instructor. My son finishing his tea, ambling over to the piano and spending the next 40-minutes without suggestion or obligation, cracking codes, trying, snarling, trying again, smirking as he got it right, felt on a par with any great career or life highlight thus far.

This was both personal exhilaration because my hopes that I was onto something with this strategy was, at least for a moment, accurate, but also professionally, because I subtly use this approach in my coaching, in the advice I routinely share with other people who are looking for something better aligned with who they are. It’s why I don’t show up with templates, only a universe of creativity’s makeup. This is why talking about chores, mischief, mistakes, dark humour, what books they’re reading, what feels insurmountable, and so much more matters.

It’s also why so many people feel stupid, frustrated, angry, and disillusioned with an education system in dire need of an overhaul as we move into a world where revolutions are going to happen quicker than election cycles.

A Cool Day In the Heat

I can almost hear the laughter of my friends from hotter countries as I flail around, a jaded, anxious, directionless mess in 30 UK degrees.

But it’s what you’re used to, and this old nation of ours isn’t built to cope with this.

I don’t sleep properly, which any good psychologist will tell you is fundamental to solid mental health. Then my thoughts run all over the place. I can’t prioritise, so all but the most urgent, time-sensitive tasks are scattered like a burst bag of marbles. Then guilt, then the fear of professional implosion, then absolutely anything that might be troubling.

Over the weekend, during a cooler day and after a better sleep, I find a moment to nap while the kids are playing their own game nearby.

Even as I’m wrung out across the sofa like a face cloth, drifting as the Wimbledon Tennis Championships waits for the rain to pass, as the commentators drone on about all the beautiful surrounding secondary detail, my heart speeds up. Not because anything is a threat, but because I find a bizarre thrill in how perfect this scenario is – a Saturday afternoon nap during paused play at Wimbledon.

Eventually I chuckle, calm down again, and manage 15 minutes.

The heat will return, and all I can do is brace.

It’s What You Do. Who You Are.

We were four or five pints deep when I told my electrician friend that business had been better this year than the previous two.

‘You know what the difference is, or one of them?’ I rambled.

‘What?’

‘I’ve been spending less time sending speculative emails, on social media, and arranging calls instead, meeting people, going to things, taking care of my relationships, and starting new ones. It’s easy to forget how important that is, you know? Seeing the whites of someone’s eyes instead of a fucking avatar.’

He’s nodding as I trail off into questioning whether it might just be that I’m now in my 40s. He shrugs and says,

‘Well yeah, that’s who you are.’

The simplicity of his words and the certainty in how he says them hit me hard.

‘As long as I’ve known you, that’s just what you do – talk to everyone, bringing people together, making it make sense.’

And it’s funny because I fall into that trap of thinking the best insights will come from those in my industry, but this friend has known me since 2005, when he moved to Preston without knowing a single person, and bumped into a lecturer of mine in a pub. The two of them played pool and drank beer, and by the end of the night, they had decided to start a 5-a-side football team. Trouble was they needed 3 more and ideally a couple of substitutes. That’s where me and the other football fans on the illustration degree came in. Then I invited him to everything, and he was always shocked by the range in the many little worlds I liked to inhabit. I had my creative industry lot, but I’d worked in factories, the council, bookshops, and regularly had friends from Yorkshire, London, and overseas come out. I’d always loved it that way.

Twenty years later, and despite much of my counsel being from other artists and designers, his valuable perspective makes it abundantly clear – he’s right. This isn’t a strategy, it’s permitting myself to step away from the noise and do it the only way I know how. The way it works for me.

The Layby People

Those people I see on long drives north, and back south, the slouched people awaiting help, forced out of plans. I see something in them. You might remember I recently wrote about getting lost, how there is no better way to be ultra-present. Well, it’s a variation of that.

Two lads, around 13 and 15 years-old respectively, and a dad who paces a few meters away. The lads both wear tracksuits, and their faces are blank, gazing at the zooming cars still on course for their destinations. They remind me of author Chuck Palahniuk’s comments about there being no better place to write than hospital emergency waiting rooms, if you want to capture unfiltered body-language and presence.

None of the four groups of unfortunates I see want the situation they’re in, and I have no way of knowing whether it will turn out to be good or bad for them, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t believe there to be an opportunity in the predicament.

Outraged by Outrage

I had a moment, reflecting in the car on a long drive. I haven’t yet mastered the new car’s operating system and somehow kept flicking the CD player onto the radio. One one burst of broadcasting, I heard the words ‘appalled by comments at Glastonbury Festival…’

Kneecap and Bob Vylan are on the thick end of it.

Kneecap showing solidarity with the colonised – in this case, Palestinian people – and Vylan too.

I observe my feelings here, and while acknowledging that Vylan’s comments calling for death to Israeli Defence Forces were strong, and perhaps self-defeating, I find it hard to see it any other way than making artists easy scapegoats.

Can anyone credibly point the finger at young musicians speaking out about genocide when far darker participation in these horrors is at play on the same shores?

We can all remember a certain Marshall Mathers in these shoes back in 2000, can’t we?

Gobshite!

Where I'm from, James Brown would have been called 'a gobshite'.

Sometimes, the slinging of this word would have been more justified than others. Loudmouth might be more universal, but I like gobshite.

Context, among other factors, determines whether a gobshite is an asset or a pain in the arse. In the mid-1990s publishing world, James thrived, giving many artists, writers, photographers, and stars their break because his brash qualities came with bravery and a willingness to resist conforming to industry standards.

He surrounded himself with people who were great at what they did, and balanced his extreme characteristics.

I'm a social bloke, but I also need my solitude because I'm sensitive. People are nuanced.

James had his demons, and while the mid-1990s proved to be the right time for his kamikaze way of doing things, it also lacked the awareness we have today around mental health. He documents this brilliantly in his autobiography, 'Animal House.'

Abandon is a characteristic that tends to come with gobshites.

Where I'm from, that tended to lead to one of two extremes: (mostly) trouble or achievements in a field where their differences were hugely beneficial.

Education is still massively failing gobshites. For every James Brown I've seen countless others pinball through chaotic lives until the lights stop flashing.

We still, as a society, refuse to acknowledge the inarguable need for broader learning, where drama, dance, art, sport, and other vehicles for different kinds of energy and intelligences can significantly reduce the amount of pinball lives being lived.

Every gobshite who has illuminated my life has a beautiful tender side that they'll show if you give them the chance and the vehicle to show that in a way that our culture tends to barricade. These contradictions embody the human condition. I love helping my coaching client recognise this duality because it opens up so many fulfilling pathways they never even considered.

All of those 'naughty' kids at school were brimming with creativity, but their identities were built on mischief and a system that reflected only failure back at them because of its Victorian rigidity.

That was the mid-1990s.

We live in a world where technology is outpacing science fiction.

Surely we can do it better?

For deep insights into the work and creativity of people contributing to this cause:

The Creative Condition podcast episodes on this:

197 with Bikestormz founders Mac Ferrari and Jake100

175 with a head of home at a secure children's institute

183 with Loaded Magazine founder James Brown

241 with multidisciplinary artist Sara Prinsloo

99 with Gary Mansfield, who discovered art and transformed his life in prison

152 with Olympic gold medal-winning rugby coach Ben Ryan

154 with Creation Records founder and ex-Oasis manager Alan McGee

https://open.spotify.com/show/4Rs8oXioIYV32u2GwTZFfx?si=ec796ffebb2f487e

Such a nice, mild mannered bot

Here’s a sample of what goes on in a very short space of time in my highly sensitive, artist brain when I consider AI. It’s exhausting and takes constant management, but manage it I must.

Robot dogs roam the streets, tracking down and eliminating anyone going against whatever elite doctrine is cooked up and served without our input.

AI doesn’t really get going because of the major climate event it tips us into, and chaos (in my mind, preferable to the previous dystopian imagining) ensues.

Species begin to thrive again because we’re able to make revolutionary clean energy breakthroughs, and we find a tender balance, with mistakes and jeopardy along the way, between the gains of advanced technology and human needs. (This vision is restricted to particularly optimistic days)

Those who cannot hold tight enough to keep up with the speed of societal, technological, and economic shifts form an unprecedented extremity of underclass, worse than the Victorian era’s, but in it we find a consolatory community we’d almost forgotten might be possible.

We’re all bald in jelly tanks, 'The Matrix' style.

And I never really settle on any satisfying conclusion.

Other than the certainty that I need to push myself, the human artist, the creativity coach, the thinker, to maximum levels of inner-authority, bravery, and belief in why I do this, while trying to work out how to enlist the help of a few AI tools if just to not completely fall behind.

But that takes time, and this revolution isn’t waiting around.

I walked into London Waterloo station to be confronted by a gigantic advert for Rayban x Meta ‘AI translation glasses.’

If I still worked in Blockbuster Video, we’d be relocating Minority Report to ‘historical fiction.’

I hope this provides a little glimpse of the need to take people along for the ride from a mental health and purpose point of view. The sheer intensity of this revolution we’re in, without any form of consultation with the population, is incomprehensible.

I shared some of these thoughts with a good friend of mine who runs the media department in a school. He’s started to speed up his workflow on the admin side of things, and he’s always had one eye on the underground bunker. He said to me,

‘Tell you what though mate, whenever I interact with these chatbots, I always say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, just in case.

The piano and the mint Viscount man

Continuing this week's 'Reclaim the Throne' mini-campaign to take back those moments of opportunity (to rest, write, read, make, ponder, plan, etc) from big tech, I had two beauties in Manchester Piccadilly Station earlier.

I felt happily fried after an intense 4-hour Pit Stop coaching session, and heard communal piano music. I walked over and drank it all in for a minute or so. This guy played and sang, but what really wove magic was his sway, his body language, full of abandon as he rode from side to side, up and down, snapping his head this way and that as his flow state transported him somewhere far away from here, somewhere inside him and everywhere at once.

Then, in less epic fashion, the man at the gate to platform 10 didn't just scan my e-ticket, but smiled, arched around the gate, and pointed at the idling train.

"That's your train there." His thick Manc accent, full of something close to affection, caressed me with as much pride as the way my nan used to curate and unveil a plate of diabolical filth - mint viscount, Gold bar, Penguin biscuits. And somehow, it landed in the same way.

If I had to pick him out of a lineup now, I couldn't. It was about the moment, the intent, not the man. I'll remember the way he made me feel. The old me would have stayed on his phone without knowing why, missing that feeling altogether, that observation.

And it all looped back to something my client and I discussed. We spoke of the challenge of being sensitive in a crazed, snarling, changing world. We both, once upon a time, wanted to change the world alone, warriors overlooking the need for our tribes. But now, a little older, we reflected on the cult of individualism, how it can throttle progress and creativity's potential. In design, like many industries and organisations, we default to celebrating individuals as changemakers. But let's face it, creativity is a communal condition. No matter how big a role one person has, ultimately, it's nourished and made possible by many. In a culture that celebrates creativity in its broadest sense, we all win and don't need an award to hoist.

I'd like to know more about the man on the piano, the member of staff who rose above his job description with no need for a gold star. But these were more important than singular moments.

They were a part of something bigger, and I'm happier and more inspired having looked up to notice them.

Reclaim the Throne!

Even just one other

I got overwhelmed again. You might know the feeling – that weight of everything you're trying to carry, crashing down, to the point where even replying to a message feels insurmountable.

We're all carrying varying degrees of too much, at least most of the time.

I can't even be sure what triggered it this time. Something I read about blackbird sickness, or Amazon preparing humanoid deliveries, maybe. Then into intense days loaded with illustration projects, coaching sessions, writing, interviewing – and then, with piss-bag eyes, reeling mind; every concern, mundane task, family duty, and Ben Tallon's life plot hole is sucked into the panic vortex.

Not uncommon for these sensitive artist minds, and more frequent in parenthood.

I'm back in control of my stupid brain by the time I arrive at London Euston, heading north to do some coaching work. The place is teeming with people pulling little suitcases, and also on phones, trundling around the human obstacle course without looking up.

I find a wall to sit against, under a staircase to the right of the lobby, before sliding down it dramatically with a full-on old man groan. Then I see another bloke sitting against the opposing wall, legs stuck out, paperback in hand. His presence triggers a rush of loveliness in my belly, so I sit with the joy for a minute or so. This little pocket of quiet, so close to the noise, yet gorgeously separate, is perfect. Before he looks up to see me grinning lazily in his direction, I mirror his choice of time-passing and pull out my paperback.

As a kid, hauled into compulsory school church services, I'd sit staring up into the upper echelons, imagining what it'd be like to camp up there, under those ornate arches, by candlelight. The notion of how cosy that would be was enough to help me through the endless warblings and hymns. I glance up every so often to see if it's still just us two. It is for a while. Then he's disappeared, and the space is immediately far less welcoming.

A burst of basic human connection. Since the pandemic, it's taken time. I remember speaking to Manchester creative industry friends, asking how the vibrant events scene was, only to be told it hadn't really gotten going again since COVID. I believe there are signs of life now, but some of those online habits stuck, and it tends to be tough on our creativity because that basic human connection is essential.

I've been parting with loose change to surprise my kids with new Pokémon cards from the market toy stall, anticipating the day when I can take them to New Realities Gaming, a seductive little nerd hole up by my local train station. Any form of tribe will do.

It's not lost on me that I'd have missed that moment of unexpected comfort after a personal crash had I reached for that attention vampire in my pocket. I did eventually, to reply to my wife, taking the opportune moment, but I shoved it back into my jeans the second the message delivered, then people watched a bit longer.

Doctor - Patient - Creative

There have been times my fierce commitment to roaming far and wide to inform my understanding of creativity has wavered.

It felt risky to write books, interview, and run music companies when my job title said 'illustrator'. As soon as people tried to bracket my podcast as 'an illustration podcast,' (after the first episode with Danny Allison), I piled it full of guests from far beyond one form of visual communication.

Episode 2 was a conversation from a chance encounter with then New York University's professor of theatre Rebecca Johannsen. And not out of any petty rebellion. I've simply always followed my curiosity, even when logic screamed otherwise. From the outset, I was in the service of creativity.

If you want to be truly creative, drawing only from the reservoir of existing industry material is counter-productive. Any narrowing of this kind has, in part, made things easier for AI. So the need for different thinking today is an emergency.

That's what I'm helping individuals and agencies with through The Creative Condition and my coaching work.

Before my conversation with HIV and sexual health consultant,Rageshri Dhairyawan about deep listening on episode 259 of the podcast, I read both her book, Unheard: The Medical Practice of Silencing and A Fortunate Woman, as referenced in Rageshri's work.

Rageshri's experiences of being unheard in healthcare, despite her work within it, taught me so much about the need to truly listen to people, to respect them and rise above our conscious and unconscious biases.

And very quickly, I joined the dots between the issues in healthcare detailed by Rageshri and the creative industry.

I'd like to share with you an excerpt from A Fortunate Woman, a stunning piece of work by Penny Mordant. Consider this in terms of the asphyxiating effect of data, protocol, liability, and risk aversion on creativity, storytelling, play, and joy.

You all know what I mean.

The rise of evidence-based medicine over her time in the practice has seen remarkable strides in the treatment of disease and improved medical outcomes beyond recognition. It was certainly transformative in the early days for the young doctor to anchor her clinical decisions within an established framework of best practice informed by the latest science. But what has proved more difficult to measure in terms of its efficacy is the value of the doctor-patient relationship within it. Because this is so hard to quantify and cold, hard figures, performance metrics inevitably skew towards incentivising outcomes that are easier to define in statistical terms and a population rather than a personal level. While not a bad thing in and of itself, this culture shift towards standardized interventions for common medical conditions has created a cascade of unintended consequences within primary care, many of which of eroded that doctor/patient relationship upon which it was once built. Workloads have increased, practices and their teams have gotten larger. The role of technology has expanded. Part-time working has become the norm. A portion of the press routinely use the issue of part-time working as a stick with which to beat the rising number of female GPs, but in reality, if the doctors of either gender, part-time working is the only way to endure the pressures of the job. All the while, the wholesale management of risk according to standardized guidelines trumps the judgment of individual doctors. Thus, by increments, the axis has tilted from an emphasis on the patient to an emphasis on disease, from interaction to transaction. Moreover, as patient numbers have risen, access to a doctor; any doctor has become the overriding priority and individual relationships find themselves push to the margins continuity of care remains much talked of but it's far less often achieved and because it's so tricky to measure it doesn't feature in the framework of payment incentives for general practitioners.

Let's welcome the massive potential that technology continues to offer creativity, but more caution about how much humanity we surrender to it is sorely needed. Those who thrive in the era of automation will be the ones who lead with authenticity, personality, and the lived experience, not those who demand cheap silver bullets.

Get lost!

I was 26 when I visited Istanbul. Me and a friend, no roaming internet connection, just passports, little folder stuffed with printed maps and handwritten directions that would hopefully enable us to reach our hostel.

These travels, before the age when I began to feel like I could trust my sense of self, were thrilling. This was, in part, down to the adrenaline brought on by the chaos of it all. The last days of relying on our heads and pre-planning. Our noses, senses, and guts. I enjoy the convenience of today’s transformed landscape of connectivity, but what are we losing by always knowing where we are?

In Istanbul we walked into a mucky little bar and were sucked straight into the magnetic field of king bar fly. He was Irish, tight jeans, straggly, shoulder-length hair, and his aura roared, crackling and spitting deep orange embers.

‘Hiya mate’ opened my friend.

‘BOYS!’ He chortled, getting off his tall stool, flicking his hair back over his shoulder as he pulled each of us in for a hug we didn’t feel we’d earned, having just met him for the first time. And we were his for the next half hour and two beers, basking in his tales of misadventure.

He lived there, so we asked him what we should be doing while in the city.

‘GET LOST!’ He said it several times, and assured us that if we wanted to experience Istanbul properly, we should stop trying to plot, and plunge arse first into its vibrancy and mystique. All those humming side streets and spellbinding bazaars. This wasn’t travel advice, it was wisdom, and so much better than TripAdvisor.

I try to ensure that despite my role as a father of two five-year-olds and a busy business owner, I carve out time for new experiences, crowbar in a little jeopardy and adventure. I seek the sense of being lost, even if I have to engineer it.

I push my coaching clients to do this. Most of them, in some way, have settled for something that could be challenged, redirected for personal illumination, and tiny thrills.

Last weekend, a fellow father described how he recognised his son, a teenage victim of the Covid-19 lockdowns, had no wayfinding skills so he would take him places a few postcodes away and let him walk back. After a series of phone calls to his dad, mildly distressed, describing the strange places he’d found himself, he managed to get back on track, steadily rebuilding a crucial component of independence.

We’re connected all the time, and if we let ourselves, we’ll never be lost again. And that is an ugly purple bruise on our curiosity, our ability to be truly present, the way we were in that bar in Istanbul. How can we truly appreciate what we have if we never mislay it with the real threat of never having it again?

And it needn’t be overseas, or even beyond your own postcode. Change is accessible at all times, but we forget that.

Go out and look for it. Get lost.

Lollipop Leanette v Them

Right off the back of an afternoon flow state, I thunder up the hill having left it late to collect the kids from school. I still inhabit that glorious lucid state when I arrive, when solutions feel near for all and any issues, and possibilities are endless. Lollipop Leanette holds fort in the middle of the road, as she likes to, despite me – the next pedestrian – being fifty or so yards away from her traffic haven, meaning I – an overly considerate weakling – have hit a jogging pace to avoid upsetting the apprehended driver.

And without fail, she laughs a triumphant, defiant sneer. It’s beautiful and I implicitly understand it. To crown it, she turns to look at a tailback happening to the cars she has allowed to go on and says, in the most beautifully snarky voice, ‘I don’t know where they think they’re getting to, anyway’ and oh, the dark sticky treacle pouring out of that face is so sordid and magnificent to me.

I carry on, through the school gate, and I stop to make a note on my phone to remind me to write this piece on Monday because my lucid state has me joining all kinds of dots.

It’s one word that drove home so many observations, birthed so many thoughts.

They.

The antagonist. Her antagonist. Our antagonist. The foil.

A classic storytelling other. The contrast. Not always, in fact rarely, when you go beneath the surface, good v evil.

For Leanette, it is the vehicle and the person behind the wheel. She is the guardian of children and their protectors, a shield in high-vis gear come rain or shine, and if you pause for just a moment to engage her, she’ll detail HGVs that have nearly flattened her.

In 2002, for me, it was the customer browsing the VHS and DVD films in Blockbuster who would not fuck off despite closing time having passed minutes ago. I HAVE A LIFE OUTSIDE OF HERE YOU KNOW. Only once did I flat out refuse to process the rental of the eventual selection on the grounds that I believed this one was doing it, at least in part, to piss me off. SEVEN minutes after close. No mate. I watched them shuffle back to their car with a blend of guilt and glee, Shrek in hand.

And now, in this career, selling art, words, and expertise, who are the baddies? What makes them so?

I could go down a rabbit hole here and there’d still be no right answer, but as I waited for my kids to emerge, making small talk with the mums and dads, I began to wonder about the framing of these antagonists, their impact on creativity, and flow – how they can just as easily provoke more interesting responses than plain sailing and smiles.

It was in Blockbuster and the other retail and factory jobs I held until my illustrator beginnings that I heightened my tolerance, often fighting the corner of a person I recognised was more layered than the ‘prick’ or ‘arsehole’ tag another might – and often with good reason – have stuck on them in the aftermath of some mild skirmish. And not always just tolerance. It would grow into admiration, recognition of valuable difference.

In my lectures and coaching, I now ask my audience and clients to consider the duality of ‘like-minded people’ - the idea that we seek to populate our existence only with those like us, who align with our interpretation of the world. Here of course, there is capacity for joy, but also a risk of unnecessary limitation of our imagination, idea generation, and understanding of the human condition.

The tension between desirable and undesirable is a place where creativity gushes hot.

As far as Leanette, I’ve been thinking about the creativity in her role. Obviously it’s a subtle blend, but I saw that expression. Those eyes. The voracity in her handling of the impatient and reckless drivers, but also the mastery with which she aims her silent daggers. Believe me, she has her means, ways, and unique tricks for mastering her three meters of road. And it’s not just the metal boxes under her dominion. In my haste to get back and start work on my first-ever ‘drop-off’ day, I accidentally undercut her. Let’s put it this way: she didn’t shout, she didn’t gesture, she didn’t even turn to look at me, but I won’t be doing it again.

A Burst Ball

The burst basketball sulks in a nettle bush.

I fish it out with a stick and kick it as far as the basketball court in the park.

It’s deflated, but there’s enough air left in it to throw at the hoop.

It misses. My dog’s not interested, off rolling on his own ball.

The guilt creeps in. I’m on my lunch break and there are project amendments awaiting me in the studio.

But where is the guilt from? The client? No. They’ve been great. The end user? No. Myself? Yes, a learned behaviour. But on what level?

Conditioning? Yes. I think so. Productivity, the great self-soother. If we’re going, going, going, then we’re closer to success, aren’t we?

Telling someone they don’t work hard might as well be an insinuation their old man works for Avon. That’s how much glory they’ve coated that notion in.

Recognising the artificiality of this guilt, I shove it out of the way. It doesn’t go, but stands off, shocked by my retaliation.

I shoot the ball. Woefully wide. But this bending is good for my back. The throwing works my chest, arms, shoulders, and neck. It refocuses my brain, and the lethargy that had been settling like dust on the top of a picture frame is blown away. Finally, I score one, and take a pathetic amount of glee from this win.

I get back to my desk five minutes later than I intended to, but I work with far more focus that I would have if I’d adhered to my systemic guilt.

It’s a valuable lesson to remember.