In the ancient times before mobile phones
In this edition, I reflect on a 2005 mix-up that taught me the value of communication and creativity.
It’s 2005 and a week before my nineteenth birthday. Mobile phones at the time were still primitive, but if you were creative and had enough time on your hands, you could edit your own ringtone on some Nokia devices, which I successfully used to program the main riff of my teenage band’s new song as my alarm sound. Once again, the primitive early years of now-dominant technology encouraged creativity, despite (or because of) the limitations.
But I digress. On the Saturday afternoon I’m thinking of, I was standing at the entrance to the Cornerhouse, a large cinema/shopping mall in the centre of Nottingham. I’d planned to meet my mum and sister there for lunch, and had forgotten to bring my phone. No matter; they’d be there by 1pm and I was five minutes early.
Time ticked past and soon it was half an hour past the meeting point. I agonised about what to do: if I left and tried to find them at the pub we were supposed to be meeting at, they might come to the Cornerhouse and miss me. The best thing to do was to stay where I was.
Fretfully standing there, it became an hour beyond our meeting time. I felt sure I’d made the wrong call; obviously by now they knew I wasn’t there. Were they trying to contact me? Should I ask to borrow someone’s phone? I didn’t know their numbers…
Even now, two decades on, I can still feel the stress and worry rising through me. Had something happened to them? Should I call the police? Maybe there’d been an accident. My body ached as I stood at the entrance, scouring the faces of passers by for ones I knew.
After two hours of waiting I took the bus home, unsure what would be awaiting me there. It turned out to be my dad, on the phone, who looked up at me and said “Oh wait, he's just walked through the door”, then yelled at me for worrying everyone.
I collapsed into tears at the unfairness of it all: I didn’t know what else to do, and thought going home would just make it all worse. It turned out my sister had yelled “see you at the pub” through the (closed) car window at me when we’d said goodbye, and I gave a thumbs up which obviously meant I’d heard this and agreed (I hadn’t). I made sure I never went out without a phone again after that.
Sometimes we commit to courses of action that feel like we can’t change course again afterwards. Even as that uncomfortable feeling rises inside us, where we know we’re doing something that won’t help, we push it back down and stay the course. There’s probably some kind of Brexit metaphor here, but really we can keep this to the individual level: sometimes I find myself “soldiering on” with some pre-determined course of action, and wondering why I’m still doing it.
Conversely though, it’s freeing to realise you still have the power to let go and change course. Occasionally when I’m mid-way through a nightmare, I encounter a moment of lucidity and remember it’s a dream, and that I can change it. Like a narrator reaching into the pages of fiction to drag the characters into a new direction, I can sometimes steer my dream back onto a more preferable path. Life can sometimes be the same, too.
After the Cornerhouse debacle I got calls from my friends, who’d been contacted by my family after I “went missing”. I was frustrated and upset once again at having to deny the story and explain that it was everyone else who’d gone missing, not me – I was in the place I said I’d be. But technicalities and gotchas don’t really help when you’re forcing yourself to be right, in spite of all the alternative evidence available. I hope that these days, I’m a little more pragmatic.
Mini-feels this week
The curse of the self-promoter
I have an album coming out next week, as I’ve trailed here before. This week I released three singles – you can listen to them here.
It’s been difficult for me to promote this stuff. I feel uncomfortable trying to force my friends and loved ones to go and listen to my stuff: I don’t have an innate right to their time and attention, and the scales are unfairly balanced: the time I spent writing the songs, recording them and polishing them – it doesn’t have an equivalent weight in someone else’s busy life and how much attention they’ll pay it (and it shouldn’t!). But it’s hard to square those feelings when you really just want acknowledgement.
I’m in awe of people I know who make things. I have friends who are artists, photographers, poets, authors and musicians: anyone who manages to find time to be creative in this world of chaos, challenges and uncertainty is doing an incredible thing, to my mind. I don’t always make the time to engage with what they’re doing, to my shame – but I want to do this more. Every time we self-consciously promote something we’ve made, we should make sure we’re doing the same for others. That’s my new year’s resolution, I think.