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What will Piccadilly Circus look like in 100 years? I wrote a story and contributed an idea of a "story bench". Can you find me in 2035? Explore this future model of Piccadilly circus.

From AI-driven buildings to insect markets and canals, Futurescape London, a 3D digital model, allows the public to explore the future of city centres.

Explore Futurescape to see what Piccadilly Circus could look like in 2035, 2060, 2090 and 2121.

Grief books, my father and friend's deaths

One of my best friends died when I was 19. My father died when I was 20. I witnessed the last breath of both of them. I heard the death rattle. The rattle is aptly named, I think to myself whenever I hear the term. 

I was reading an essay by Mayukh Sen, Grief Books*, which made the observation that many of us acquire grief books. A piece of writing that ferries us around through loss: allowing us to feel less alone.

Sen writes: 

My father had been sick with lung cancer for three years, the final of the many illnesses I had seen disturb his body since I was a child. The inevitability of his loss did not suffer its blow. I was 25 when he died and I could count the people I knew who had endured the loss of a parent before that age on one hand. His loss felt unbearably cruel  in a way I could not articulate. So I became cruel to the world in return. If a friend expressed sympathy in ways that felt incorrect to me, I killed them off, the excision a bid for self-preservation. Any generosity I had was reserved for those who had touched grief like, even strangers.

Myself, when my father died, I did not know a single friend my age who had lost a parent. I did not know other friends who had lost close friends either. And while I did not excise friends in the way Sen describes there were plenty of friends who I judged could not or did not understand the circumstances very well. Where as some others - strangers even - did understand.

For grief can be very singular and difficult if not impossible to share - although the willingness to share, can be a shared impulse. Still on that day, when I read that page - juggling the distractions of an autistic son bouncing along an overground train - I recognised a truth in the way I had used books as grief books. I recognised the genre of grief books he describes (cancer writing; the memoirs of grief, such as The Year Of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion). I felt for a few moments a spasm of grief and recalled the death moments of my friend and of my father. Moments that never truly leave me. 

I’ve commented that there are events which occur when afterwards you feel changed. Perhaps changed enough to feel a different person. The first kiss, the first love; the first death of a loved one. That these seminal changes are hard, if not also impossible, to relate to people who have not experienced them.

My father found some comfort in reading what Sen describes as a genre of “cancer writing”. He read John Diamond* as he was dying of cancer. My father could relate to Diamond in a way he could not to us, with our lives ahead of us. Cathartic and sad every time my father read a new piece. Both losing an inevitable race at the same time.

I remember my early set of grief books being CS Lewis’ Grief Observed, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, and Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. I am not religious, but I still recommend people to CS Lewis - particularly if they have a Christian faith - today. I had grief food. Memories of grief food. Stodgy British puddings like jam Roly-Polys, bread and butter pudding, and spotted dick conjure my father’s joy and sweet tooth at such dishes. In my cupboard, I have an inexpensive and well used bowl from my dead friend. She would have been happy it has been so well used.

Grief books can come in all forms and shapes. Sen’s grief book became Five Morsels of Love by Archana Pidathala* 

Sen:

Pidathala makes grief central to her work without overstating the systematic motivation. I marvel at her strength. “Every time we meet,” she writes of her and her cousins, “we reminisce about the morsels ammama would feed us  and unanimously agree that we will never have or find the same taste in anything ever again.”

She lays bare the cool logic behind the impulse to cook in death’s shadow: death reminds us that we are lucky to be alive. To remain alive we must eat.

A sense of wonder pervades every page of Pidathala’s book. She is more concerned with joy than death. One gets the sense that cooking, and the act of writing about it, has taught her to live again.

At the end of the essay he writes:

“When my father died my two closest friends confessed that they were terrified. One didn’t know how she’d handle what the loss did to me because she never had a best friend who had lost a parent before. “Don’t worry,” the other reassured her, “it’s like we’ll get to meet a new person.”

…

But the inverse of my friends maxim holds true too: those of us who grieve may change ourselves but the world around us shifts.

...

I am now able to acknowledge that this cookbook was no diversion but rather a guidepost clarifying my grief. Maybe I’d have the will to write about it one day I told myself as I read over it over and over again the sound of my fathers voice dimming in my memory. So now I have.”

I often think about when I will write about my father’s death, my friend’s death. I’m starting to make a piece of theatre work around it. Sen made me think. And so now I have to. 

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*John Diamond’s obit in the Guardian (By Jay Rayner) starts:  “The journalist, writer and broadcaster John Diamond, who has died aged 47, did not battle his illness bravely. Nor was he courageous in the face of death. He developed cancer and, despite treatment, it killed him.”  Diamond was married to food writer, Nigella Lawson.

*Sen’s tweet about the essay collection, In the Kitchen, published by Daunt Books.

*The website of Pidathala’s book: five morsels of love 

Rishi Dastidar on life, poetry, and writing | Podcast

Rishi Dastidar and I chat about life, poetry, writing and poets always having another job. Rishi gives advice on how to be a poet, embracing Insta poets and whether last lines are harder than first lines, or second books harder than first books; and why we love lists and why we need to pay more attention to verbs. 

He is open to offers from companies seeking a Chief Poetry Officer.

A fascinating and wide ranging chat from this leading British poet.

Transcript below (unedited, expect typos). A podcast audio version available here and below.

Links to Rishi’s books: Tickertape here and Saffron Jack here. His twitter here. 

Rishi Dastidar’s poetry has been published by Financial Times, New Scientist and the BBC amongst many others. His debut poetry collection Ticker-tape and his second book is Saffron Jack. He is chair of the London writer development organisation Spread The Word. Rishi edited  the final part of the Nine Arches Press writers’ trilogy, The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century.  (Blog on that here). Rishi is also head of brand language for Brand Pie.

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Ben Yeoh:

Hey, everyone. I'm really super excited to talk to Rishi Dastidar. He's a poet, he has two books published, Ticker Tape and Saffron Jack. He chairs spread the word. He's also edited a book on poetry craft. So Rishi, welcome.

Rishi Dastidar:

Hey Ben. Lovely to be with you this afternoon.

Ben Yeoh:

Great. So poets always have another job it seems. I think you've talked about this, it's poets slash something else. Like, is this a good thing? Does the richness of life make you a better poet?

Rishi Dastidar:

So yes. So it starts on the basis that there is no way that anyone could make a living from just selling their poems. So there is a necessary need for anyone who calls themselves a poet to have alternative forms of income. Now, if you work towards it, if you're fortunate, hopefully, that the secondary sources of income can be quite closely poetry adjacent. So teaching in a university, teaching in a school, performing, performing your poetry on stage, on screen, possibly even. And maybe even perhaps lending some of your poetry and your voice to adverts, for example. And that's a fairly accepted and a way of being for lots of people who practice and work as poets now as well. My contention is that as an artist  [Inaudible]…

…I think it is something in such that it would benefit, there is a benefit to be had from more poets getting that secondary or getting that income from things that aren't necessarily poetry adjacent. So I jokingly suggest slash civil servant, not even jokingly suggest you know, roofing, nursing. I happento work as a copywriter in advertising and branding. So yeah, it's slightly more adjacent than others. But I think it's notable and I think a lot of notable poets have brought those other working lives into what they write and how they write as well. So yeah, I think the model of just being a poet who's largely as academic is only just one model and we should have more models of doing poems.

Ben Yeoh:

Should there be more corporate managers in fact?

Rishi Dastidar:

So this is partly for me because I would quite like to have the title of chief poetry officer. So to any viewers of this who are in a position to hire please do consider me for said role and I will bring magic to all your corporate communications of varying and different hues. A bit more broadly, yeah, I think if you think of poetry as a way of thinking and a way of thinking that is slightly different from one you might get when you're thinking about creative writing, more generally. I think bringing more and different modes of creative thinking into corporate life into business life more generally is a useful thing, partly for giving you different tools and different modes of thinking to get to different results. But also some fundamental level, acknowledging that business, yeah, it's never just rational, there is emotion in it. And it's interesting when you dig beneath a lot of what passes for commentary and talk on culture building, for example. A lot of the thread there is, Oh, these things called emotions, how do we manage those away? How do we channel them productively? That's a very corporate thing to do, isn't it? As opposed to maybe acknowledging them more and actually thinking, how do we actually recognize and use them in ways that might not necessarily be seen as just pushing them out from this domain as fast as possible. And art in its broader sense is useful for that. And I would say poetry is one of those skills and toolboxes that you can actually bring to think about that and start to do that.

Ben Yeoh:

I've read some stuff about some poets being afraid of these Insta poets. Like I'm not afraid of the instant poets, are you're afraid of the Insta poets are there in fact, even Tik TOK poets? I should have looked this up. I'm assuming that probably must be by now, but should we be afraid of the Insta poets?

Rishi Dastidar:

Oh, no. Not at all. So this is a semi recurrent thing that happens maybe every 18 months or so where somebody rediscovers Insta poetry and decides that it is a terrible thing or at least a dangerous thing because it's stuff that doesn't necessarily look like what they believe poetry should be and it has the temerity to be popular and it has the temerity to then crossover and sell. I mean, (Inaudible). 

Now, my take on it is, is that Insta poetry is perfectly valid as a type of poetry. I mean, it's slightly odd just even still calling it Insta poetry because after all, you know, the corollary of that would be well, okay no, I prefer book poetry, who says that no one says that. More substantively though, a lot of people's critique of Insta poetry is positioned as an aesthetic critique, you know, this is rubbish, this is a dog roll, this is shit. But actually what's encoded within that is actually something that's closer to an elitist critique.

Because when you actually look at who is writing as to poetry, and of course who has become successful and popular through Insta poetry as well, more often than not tends to be writers, voices of colour from marginalized backgrounds who bypass the more traditional editorial gatekeeping channels to find an audience, to find an audience with their aesthetic, with their poetry, which has happened to be popular. And so it might not be to your taste, that's absolutely fine with me, but please do not think that Insta poetry is the harbinger of the decline of civilization because it really, really isn't. I always hope that people discover poetry that they liked through Insta poetry, but then they discover that there is a world beyond that. If you like Rupi  then hopefully you go on and discover other writers who are away from her different from her as well. Insta poetry as a gateway drug? Yeah, I like that.

Ben Yeoh:

So actually that leads me on to do you think poetry, British poetry on deep global poetry then, have this challenge of a diversity of voices and what should we be doing?

Rishi Dastidar:

So, well, that's a big question to start to unpack. Let's start with the global. I think that simply because what is very clear is that those of us in the Anglophone world, we bluntly do not read enough poetry outside of the British American tradition because we do not read enough poetry in translation, but that's frankly, part of the wider problem that we don't read enough literature in translation full-stop. 

And so you know that there are tremendous poets working in languages other than English that never reach the readership, even amongst poets that they deserve, just simply because they haven't yet been translated into English and the barriers and the bottlenecks that there are to do that. But absolutely, you know, my writing of poetry has got better by attempting to read more poets outside of English in translation. And also tentatively trying translations as well, you know because that is a very, very good discipline to actually discover more work and discover more artists. So, yes, absolutely, there is a whole sea of poets out there who one is not familiar with.

In a specific UK context, there has been, I think up until about 10, 15 years ago, there had been a big lacuna, which was the poets of colour, writers of colour had effectively been overlooked in telling the story of poetry in the British Isles, but basically, writers of colour had not even been written out, just not been considered. And so, yeah, that has changed, that is changing. And we're starting to see the fruits of a lot of work by writers and activists before, in pushing people forward in developing and bringing more voices to readers, you know, broader audiences and winning the TSA prize last year and like a book, winning the Ford for last year as well for her best single poem. But that's the tip of what has been a 20, 25-year project to actually start to say to the wider British poetry establishment. There is a whole thriving set of poetries and poetics that are out there that you are not yet fully recognizing. And that is changing, there is still plenty of work to be done, but it is getting there and getting better. And I think bluntly, you cannot tell a credible story about the history of British poetry now without recognizing that large scene that writers of colour have provided since the 1950s and sixties onwards, especially.

Ben Yeoh:

Yeah, I think I agree with all of that. It was quite a while back now, but I remember first discovering ghazals and Sufi poetry. And, you know, this tradition, which stretches back so far has a performance element to it, followed by, you know, millions of people, right. But outside of the English language or visual poetry, you can't look at any of those original haikus or written in Chinese or Japanese poetry and not say, well, wasn't that visual poetry before we in the Anglophone world would have even thought about visual poetry. So I think that's on global and obviously the British poetry, true. So I guess you could argue poetry is one of humankind's oldest art forms and considering, Oh, oral poetry, there's an argument that maybe it's his oldest art form, and maybe you've had some version of the Insta poet every two years ever since the start of that. There were some arguments that I guess that it's one of the smallest art forms that at least in its elite form has this niche readership. I mean, what do you make of that? Or maybe the converse is perhaps if you consider rap as poetry, there is not that. And I was reading one opinion that argued that the advent of rap and hip hop, and to some extent, those forms of art was the reaction of black artists or artists of colour finding essentially a poetry expression, but in a different form. So I'd be interested in seeing, like, do you think is one of the oldest art forms is poetry really small today or is that perhaps it's more diffuse if you think about it in terms of a larger art form.

Rishi Dastidar:

Yes. I tend towards the latter. And again, I think, to some degree, that question comes out of effectively post hyphen modern inheritance in the sense that what you see from the 1920s onwards, is effectively poetry becoming more and more elite than it had been up until that moment. And this is not to deny the power of the art that comes out from that period of post-first world war onwards. But there is absolutely an inflexion point that you can detect that where our data even further back than the beginning of hip hop, actually to the moment which pop music, rock and roll moves out of the music hall and moves into something that looks much more like wider society. And there's an absolute, absolute crossover point. So there's certainly [Inaudible 13:16] British poetry where you have that happening and you have the rise of the movement, so the last, obviously white male movement of British poet. And gradually you see pop music, almost taking that space that poetry once had, and you see poetry running more to the Academy, running more to art school thinking art school theories, and meanwhile, people's hunger and desire for music and speech and song is being satisfied through pop music as well. 

So poetry in its broad sense is still there, it's present, it's around, it diffuses an absolutely brilliant word to actually describe it because we know it's there in songs. We know it's there in adverts around us. We know it's in hip hop and rap, but the elite pursuit that we call poetry, yes, it's by definition has got a lot smaller. But I think one of the things that isn't often a compliment to the point is that now, it's not more in terms of thinking in terms of attitudes with what you might describe actively more than this post-modernist visual arts movements and visual arts thinking. And of course, that's where a lot of critical attention and cultural elite cultural formation attention is paid. And so you have this weird dichotomy where have people who call this thing called poetry and because it's practice by very few people, they give off the impression that, of course, it's a very elite pursuit, but then you actually stop and think about it in that poetry is a lot wider and it's a lot bigger and there's a lot more of it around.

Ben Yeoh:

Yes, great. I think I agree with all of that as well. So I like lists, you like list, Saffron Jack essentially started with a list and continues with list. What's up with lists? Should we be interested in list poetry? Why do you like lists so much?

Rishi Dastidar:

List poetry, yes. I mean, list poetry, list poems, not quite as a genre of poetry in their own right. But do they exist as a thing that's recognizable? Yes. Do I write a lot of them as well? Yes. As a sidebar a review does stick in my mind of my first book where I did said it's hard to [Inaudible], can't really disagree with that. Lists are wonderfully powerful because they are orders, they are a tool of making sense of the world. They are the ultimate weapon if you are a control freak who feels that they are out of control. Just by the very act of putting something down in some sort of order, you're suddenly making a claim against kales, suddenly making a claim against entropy almost, in terms of, I, for this moment can [Inaudible] this moment in time and actually grasp things and put them together in a way that starts to approximate sense, approximate logic, approximate flow. And so I think that's why they have their appeal more than everything else. And especially in times and in situations where you feel on the edge of chaos and you feel things spiralling out of control, there's nothing more powerful, but reasserting that control through doing that. And you know, if you think of a fundamental level, what the poets do, we're observers as much as we're anything else. So poems are bluntly lists of images, lists of sensations, lists of memories that we're refound, recontextualize, reasserted. And some of us are better than others at fundamentally disguising that they are lists. I am particularly bad at not disclosing them.

Ben Yeoh:

So Saffron Jack is a long-form poem. Some of humanity's greatest artworks have been long-form poems, but I think arguably today, the long-form poems have gone, yours excluded, there's very few of them. Where have they all gone? Should we be bringing them back?

Rishi Dastidar:

They haven't gone. What has happened is that the publishing industry prefers to call them something else because they might be more salable in different ways. I could point you towards Robin Robertson's Booker prize-nominated novel, The Long Take. It's written in verse. It doesn't necessarily have…

Ben Yeoh:

It's not a novel it's a long-form poem…

Rishi Dastidar:

It doesn't have anything that you might recognize as traditional prose characterization. It doesn't do much by way of plot. And when you look at the way that it's arranged on the page, lots of white space between lines. Why is it called a novel? [inaudible] one of our great poets and editors. But presumably, someone somewhere had a commercial discussion around, you know, what if we positioned this as a novel, we're far more likely to have success than the…

Ben Yeoh:

Bigger market for novels.

Rishi Dastidar:

Is bluntly the case. I mean, sort of knowing your field, [inaudbile] lots of interesting monologues, the opposition to those monologues, but then when you actually break them down and look at what they're doing on the page, they're poems as well, and they flow through and they have poetic effects as well. But just because they happened to be delivered by one person standing on a stage, and they've been published by a Mathew Ramika, we call them a play, we call them a monologue instead of a poem. You know, I mean, again, this comes back to the idea of poetry being diffuse and it's very diffused and this means it's harder to actually see where it is actually a poem in disguise to something that's more commercially palatable.

Ben Yeoh:

It's become like one of those symbiotic creatures, which has just squirrelled its way and all sorts of other art forms to audit survival because you don't name it. Speaking about saffron Jack, long-form poem, ideas, do you think there was just one major idea flowing through Saffron Jack? Was that how you kind of thought about it or came about or is it kind of a lot of mini ideas, which kind of coalesced? Talk me through how you kind of thinking about the themes and what saffron Jack's about.

Rishi Dastidar:

Definitely the former. The poem is an attempt to try and answer the question, what would it be like to set up your own country, call yourself King of your own country? And I know that [ ] a lot of megalomania on my part, but for a long time, I've been fascinated by these things called micronations. So places like Sealand, even San Marina, these places which look too small to be viable countries, and yet they call themselves countries. And when you look at micronations, in particular, there's always something interesting going on in terms of why someone just decided that they could be American and Australian, but they can't move to or immigrate to a different country.

So instead they decide that they must set up their own principality and do so in a backyard or in Sealand's case, in this [ ] The sort of person who finds themselves feeling that atoms being rearranged just by the pattern of words on a page, by the sound of words hitting the air. Chances are you're going to like poetry and you will find poets types of poetry that work for you. And I am absolutely a high mantra of poetry. I don't care whether, what turns you on is the absolute avant-garde language gains of JH Prin or whether it is, you know, Ruby Cow and other Insta poets. I am just happy that you are now in the world of poetry and enjoy it enough. You will start to find lots of other people who have that similar atom rendering, atom changing effect on you. If you're moved enough by that experience to start to want to produce it and create it yourself, the fundamental thing you must do is read, read, read, read, read, read. And you will find that the more you read the better you get at writing poetry.

Because it's only by reading that you actually discover what you like, what you don't like, what is possible on a page, what isn't possible on the page. And something that people who had just been setting out often say is, oh, but if I read too much then I'm going to end up sounding like those poets. And that's a necessary stage of any artistic evolution. Any writer who's published goes through a phase of sounding like their heroes, sounding like their idols. The trick is you have to push through that phase to actually start to get to a place where you start to sound like you and you start to sound like your voice, your obsessions, and things that are really animating you. And that can be a long process. Absolutely. My friend, Joe Bell talks about the fact that becoming a poet takes something like 10 years of reading and writing and dedicating yourself to it, which means... And knowing what we talked about at the top in terms of the lack of rewards. And that need for having an income outside of poetry means that it's a vocation and it's something that you have to really want to do outside of thinking, I'm going to write a bestseller because chances are, you're not. And so, that tends to winnow people out a bit that tends to leave the people who are obsessive stroke dedicated. But, honest to goodness, don't be scared. Don't be scared of coming into this world. Don't think that poetry isn't a thing for you, don't think that you're going to be asked, ahh, yes but what is the subtext of what you are saying of what you are writing every time? Because that's only a question of concern to people teaching English. Poets don't ask you about subtext. Poets don't care

Ben Yeoh:

Yeah. And even established poets writers, we all worry. Like, do we really have a voice? Does this sound like X or Y? I mean, in some ways these are kind of concerns which never go away if you are a reader and a writer.

Rishi Dastidar:

Exactly, exactly so.

Ben Yeoh:

Any newsletters, pamphlets, or magazines that maybe people want to get into, we should look at, in fact, so I hadn't even prepared this. Look, I have one (Inaudible) it’s coming on screen now. I have a business day job. But keep poetry around for me because you never know when that might help. So obviously that's what I would recommend. And obviously, you're linked with them. So that's a bit of a bias one. So if there's any other, so Realto, we'll put that in the links actually, we'll have something

Rishi Dastidar:

So there's plenty of places that you can go to, to start to discover the world of poetry. I mean, the poetry society is the most obvious sort of initial starting point. It is the UK's dedicated member organization for poetry, for the promotion of poetry as well. They publish the poetry review, the UK's leading journal. And so taking a subscription out to that gives you an immediate sense of what is going on now in contemporary British poetry. Then also it gives you a sense of the spread of activities and aesthetics that people are interested in. Purchase also help organize a whole raft of writing groups around the country. So if you want to become more active, that is absolutely a place to go. Hopefully, reopening soon, I should say is the national poetry library at the South bank. And it is the UK's main library for poetry. And you'll be able to get from the most collections that have been published since 1950 onwards and all the latest additions of the magazines. And for those of you outside of London, Leeds has a very good poker library in the university managed still. I think its poetry library is about to open soon as well. So those are well worth checking out.

If you're moved enough to actually want to start writing, then do check out the poetry school, the UK's main provider of poetry education. Plenty of courses at all levels, beginner, intermediate, advanced taught by poets and many poets I should say, who are writing now, they got their starts by doing school courses. I was one, I spent a lot of my formative years writing as many poetry school courses as I could get my hands on while I'm still learning, but while I was doing that. And yeah, the realtor, as well as you know, I am biased because I'm a contributing editor then, but three times a year we give you a very good sense of what's going on in terms of British and international contemporary poetry. So yeah, plenty to choose from there. And of course, like we've been saying all the way through in terms of poetry is the fierceness. You will hear poetry on the radio, poetry places, a great vehicle for finding stuff out. Gal jet Nagra on radio four extra has a regular slot where he digs into the BBC's archives and brings us more poetry bits and pieces like that as well. And of course, social media, like we said, at the start, you will find poetry on Insta poems or poetry on Instagram. Go there, look at that. There's plenty of poetry on Twitter as well. Go there, have a look there, plenty going on.

Ben Yeoh:

Great. Yeah. Twitter poetry is a great happenstance thing I've found. So I actually, this, I guess, turned out to be one of the themes of our chat is the fact that poetry is much more alive in the world and in our lives than we might think. But I had a question here about what we thought the social function of poetry is. So that kind of brings it all together that do you think it has a social function? I guess we're going to be arguing, yes, but I'd be interested to see what you think it is, what does poetry do for us?

Rishi Dastidar:

So, and I think it's something that people have been coming back to more, especially over the last 10, 15 years as it's felt that more of our working lives and professional lives have started to get more regimented and more prescribed and more broken up and most of us, especially working on white-collar jobs are in a world of targets and fairly abstracted PRI bloodless language. I don't think it's an accident, but there's all of that going on. People are hankering for something that is a lot wilder and a lot more untrammelled and a lot freer of those sorts of constraints. So I think there's that. I think the wider social role of poetry as a space to actually say things which it is hard to say in pros, to acknowledge vulnerability, to acknowledge pain, to actually articulate emotions, memories, sensations, which if you put them in pros, would be so harrowing and so gleeful that people wouldn't want to engage with that. But by making them poems, people can come in at the site and start to engage almost in a more safe way as well. And so start to open up those things.

So poetry is a form of witness, I think is absolutely vital, poetry as a way for overlooked, unheard voices from unheard communities is another thing as well. You know, claiming space that might not otherwise be achieved through more rational means of persuasion. I think there are all those functions that are there as well. I mean not to recycle Shelly's legislators' line but poets have a role in terms of dreaming of what future scenarios future states might be... Oh, and Pointing to suggesting the weird gaps and abstractions in language, you know, the gap between rhetoric and the truth on the ground. Most good poets that you ever meet, are acutely interested and are acute to those wild gaps between what are corporation claims and what they actually do, what a politician claims and what they actually do, that as well. Poets as canaries in languages  [ ]

Ben Yeoh:

Yeah. I think that's a very coherent argument for the vitality of poetry and its function today kind of never more important and maybe never more alive. I hadn't quite thought about it like that. So yes, for sure. Great.

Rishi Dastidar:

One more point. I was just going to add one more point to that as well in that, yeah, If you think about the internet being such a text-driven medium, you think hypertext markup language is what it is and yeah, we read so many web pages. Twitter is a text-driven medium, as much as it is anything else. It is therefore unsurprising that the oldest form of putting words together, which is poetry, suddenly has a renascence as well. We're living in a much more language-driven age. So the oldest form of putting language together, having a [ ] I think those are absolutely connected

Ben Yeoh:

Instagram tried to get in there with their visuals, but actually visual poets got all over that as well. So yes, and actually audio because even in the audio thing, you've got this clubhouse and all of that. Going back even further or the oral poetry and all the rhetoric and stuff, so yeah. Poetry, the original social media. So coming to our last, I guess a couple of questions here, what I'm going to put on one of your other hats which is your copywriting hat, I guess, and how that links. So I didn't really know there was such a thing as brand language. So I'm interested in that. And I didn't know that there were grammar memes either, and I didn't know that verb should be a superpower. So I don't know whether you want to comment on grammar means brand language, verbs as a superpower and what the world of copywriting has to say about the world.

Rishi Dastidar:

Right. So I have lots of views on lots of those. The grammar memes I think is probably, so let's recast it this way. When you look at an average day on Twitter and you look at lots of memes flying around, how do they actually work? Why do they actually work? It's because they're fucking around with syntax, to put it crudely, they're doing something interesting with syntax that just jolts you out of your comfortable reading. And so that's the property that suddenly makes them [ ] so that's yeah, exactly. It's a poetic effect. Brand language, I think commercially in corporate land, we're very familiar with the idea that a logo of visual identity is something that all organizations should have as a means of carving out some sort of unique distinction, unique visual distinction. Brand language is an attempt to do that verbally for the language that an organization might use in written communications and in spoken communications as well. Now, is it a lot harder to cast something out that is unique and distinctive through language? Yes. But at the same time, I can say to you, for example, if I sent you an email so how D Ben, this is John Lewis polymer. You would know instantly, hang on. That's not right. That's not how John Lewis speaks. As it was John Lewis you would expect them to say, dear Mr Yo, hello, how are you? 

And that's all brand language is. It's finding the way or the particular vocabulary, but also the grammar and syntax that actually starts to make that organization's personality come to life. And you can geek out on that sort of stuff as much or as little as you want. But when you start to look at that world, you see those organizations with stronger, better, more creative brands have given as much thought to the words part of the communication as much as they do to the design and the art direction part of the communications as well. And this is why there is absolutely a cross over between copywriting and poetry as well. I presented a documentary for radio four last year, which investigated those links between advertising and copywriting and how you can find lots of poets tucked away in advertising. And again, to bring us back, right now there's a moment where brands are using poets as a means of their interest as a means of actually communicating sincerity and death. But also it points to the fact that we are, again, poetry is diffuse. If the commercial world is using poems, it's there for a reason.

Ben Yeoh:

We should definitely write to Nike and say, the chief poetry officer, we've got one here. And verbs as a superpower. Do we not pay enough attention to our verbs?

Rishi Dastidar:

Yeah, we definitely don't pay enough attention to verbs. And if you want a quick tip to improve your writing, no matter what you're writing, it's to use more verbs. And I think people don't because they're doing words and subconsciously that means that they know that they're on the hook to actually do things, rather than be obstructed away in various other verbiages. But if you're struggling, just actually, what happens when I change a verb, what happens when I use a different verb and you'll suddenly start to see whatever it is that you're writing, lift and change.

Ben Yeoh:

Great. Okay. And so coming to our final question, which is what does being productive look like for Rishi? What does a good poetry writing day look like? Well, it could be a good copywriting day as well. I don't know if you mix and match the two days as well, but maybe if you've got a good poetry writing day, you know, does it include running as a food, everything, what does your very best day look like?

Rishi Dastidar:

My very best day? I mean, I don't think I have separate copywriting and poetry days because my style as a writer is to get first drafts out very, very quickly and then continually work on them as we go. And so poems, especially are things that arrive in-between times. And in that space between meetings in that half-hour between briefs or something like that. So it's rare that I have a special day where this is a poetry day. But a good day, a productive day probably features a run at the beginning of the day, hopefully, features a decent breakfast. And then hopefully at my desk by nine and maybe one meeting, maybe no meetings and a relatively quiet on slack and email. So I can just actually knock around for a couple of hours

Ben Yeoh:

Does that involve reading as well? Would you read a bit, does that help the writing? And there was one person, I can't remember who, who said a good writing day actually starts with the first half of the day as reading, again, in an ideal world.

Rishi Dastidar:

No, so for me, I know that my productivity dips after lunch. So after two o'clock is going to be reading, admin and that sort of hopefully subconscious, deeper thinking. Rare is the good thing for me that emerges after two o'clock. It does sometimes, but generally speaking, I find better words in the morning.

Ben Yeoh:

Sure. And do you have a... In the previous place, was that your writing desk, do you have a writing desk or? I kind of know that actually, cause I've seen it on Twitter poems because they will hit you anywhere, you know, little phone poems done on like whatever notes or stuff around is also a favourite kind of medium, but I guess you'll get back to your writing desk and transcribe it if you can.

Rishi Dastidar:

Yeah. I mean, I've written first drafts on tops of buses. I've written first drafts on tubes. I wrote most of the title poem for Ticker Tape on a journey from our front hole on a bus, on a tube, in the foyer of a cinema, in the cinema seat and then all the way back as well. So they can arrive anywhere. But at some point, there has to be some sort of consolidation and that has to happen at the desk. So even if the act of creation isn't happening at the desk, the act of moving into production, that has to happen there. 

Definitely.

Ben Yeoh:

Great. Okay. Well, thank you so much for this conversation. I learned a lot and maybe quite thoughtful about poetry in the world today. Please do check out Rishi's books, which we'll have links to. And if you're interested in finding out about poetry, I think our theme is just do it, please do it.

Rishi Dastidar:

Absolutely. Thank you, Ben.

Ben Yeoh:

Great. Thanks.

Mudlarking on the river Thames

There is a strange connection hunting for the lost detritus of decades and centuries ago. 

A pipe, a coin and a pot all lost to the river many years ago and now found in the squelching mud of the river Thames.

There is a wondrous sensation stepping on the shore and in the mud. While the hunt is mostly for man-made objects there are many fascinating objects of nature also along the squelching path. There is a mind cleansing feeling coming so close to the river water and the ducks and the shells and thes tones and the mud these earth made objects right in the centre of the city. A connection to nature. I had recently spoken to “birdgirl” also known as Mya-Rose Craig. She observed how you can feel nature all around if only you stop and look or engage. When you see the bird fly in the street or garden that’s engaging with nature and walking along the river felt like a very nature thing despite being so close to the built-up industry of humans. 

There were these mounds of stones which I think were built years ago to help stabilise barges and other ships. They echoed as almost alien objects on the river popping out from the mud at irregular intervals. 

The sun was beaming brightly. London was still mostly in lockdown. People were out traipsing jogging and walking along the river path. A few walkers and dogs had also made it to the shore but mostly people walked on by upper path along the tow path. Children delight in the mud and the water and found objects. Detritus that passes the adults by. ... regular and irregular shapes out of place pieces of plastic, iron bolts, shards, packets, packages are all noted and sometimes obsessed over..

 Hunting for out of place lines or circles has both the thrill of the unexpected find amplified by the lottery feeling of potential treasure. What exact treasures are hard to know ancient coins Neolithic axes, beads, coins, toys, pots anything that might of fallen in the river over the last thousand years might appear. 

Mud larking now for fills a social anthropology and archaeology purpose as well as a sense of adventure and fun although in previous centuries it was a way for the poor to earn money and much the way that rubbish dumps now provide that same job for poor people around the world. 

We found lots of pottery bits, a part of a modern day watering can, bolts and aged iron pieces. 

The best finds: an old clay smoking pipe with the head intact and a half penny dated to 1960. The Halfpenny is a form of real treasure although not worth very much perhaps 5p in today’s money if it was in very good condition. The pipe although a common find on the river has a richer history. This is what I’ve found out about pipes:

“...Pipe finds are so common because over the centuries they tended to be only used once and then were thrown away. They were often sold prefilled with tobacco (called 'Penny Pipes') and were redundant once smoked. Sailors, dockers, ship-builders and passers-by would fish their pipe out at break time or even worktime, have a good twenty minutes puffing and then, perhaps, snap the stem when finished, rather like people today crush a coke can once they've drained it.

...pipes were probably originated by native Americans around the middle of the 16thcentury with clay pipes being made in England in the 1570s for men, women and children who wanted to take up the art and pleasure of 'tobacco drinking'. You can recognise the early pipes of the 17th century because they usually had a small bowl with a flat base, the stems were still chunky and there was often milling/indentations around the rim of the bowl. By 1650 there were a thousand itinerant pipemakers in London, it was a highly competitive trade with vastly varying standards of quality. …Shortly after 1700, pipes were being made with a smoother finish, a thinner bowl, a more slender stem and a higher degree of brittleness. In 1750s extra long pipes became fashionable and these were called aldermen, and then later, simply straws. In the 1800s, decoration of the bowls became more widespread featuring hearts, faces and decorations and later in the century adverts appeared on them. In the 1800s, factory production started which saw the decline of the pipe trade as a cottage industry.

It was also during this century that short clay pipes became popular. The shorter pipe had the advantage of reducing the load on the teeth which allowed a man to smoke and work at the same time. This changed the tendency of the longer pipes which were more likely to be smoked at leisure with the stem supported in the hand. The shorter clays were often referred to as nose warmers.

A few details here. My friend Florence has been mudlarking for years and has a great collection on instagram.

You need a license now to be on the thames foreshore, and you must check the tides, but it’s a very worthwhile adventure for the day. Both to feel connected to natural elements in the city and for a chance of treasure!

Mya-Rose Craig, Birdgirl on joys of birding, activism and accessibility to nature

I chat to Mya-Rose Craig, aka Birdgirl, about her love of birding touching upon birdsong and the mysteries of migration. We discuss accessibilty to nature, activism what in birding terms is a “lifer” and how to “pish”.

There’s a transcript ( unedited) below and a link to a podcast version of this chat, plus links to topics we talk about. Links:

Black2Nature, Charity fighting for equal access to nature for Visible Minority Ethnic people.

Mya-Rose Craig’s website.

Get Birding, podcast.

---

Ben Yeoh:

Hi, everyone. I'm super happy to welcome Mya-Rose Craig. She is one of the youngest British people to be awarded an honorary doctorate, an activist and a campaigner. She founded black to nature focusing on minority communities. She's currently hosting a podcast, Get Birding, on no surprises here on birding, with a host of celebrities and conservationists. And we're here to talk about birding, her life and what is happening in the world. So thank you. Welcome.

Mya Rose Craig:

Hi, thank you for having me.

Ben Yeoh:

Great. So I'm a real city dweller and I kind of think in this maze that is London, we have some birds, these green spaces. But I think it's kind of not the same necessarily as getting out into the countryside in nature. I was wondering, could you give us a sense of the joy of watching birds in the wild, particularly for those of us who maybe haven't experienced it before, or how it kind of came to be that you became so passionate about this area of nature?

Mya Rose Craig:

So I think nature's always played a very important part in my life. My parents are birdwatchers and my older sister was a birdwatcher and they've always taken me outdoors. And I live in the countryside but I'm also half Bangladeshi and as I got older, I really started becoming aware that there was just no one that looked like me in the countryside out in nature. And that was really upsetting. And that's kind of why I started doing activism, it was because of that magical feeling that I had when out in nature. So when I was little, it was always very fun and very exciting and my parents were very good about making it into a treasure hunt for me or something like that, where we were going to go and find the next bird. But I think as I've gotten older, I've really, really gained an appreciation for just sort of the peace that you get when you're outside. Cause you're separate from the stress of everyday life. You're separate from sort of the hustle and bustle of everything. It's just you and the outdoors. And I think that that's a really unique feeling that everyone should be able to appreciate.

Ben Yeoh:

I guess, in popular culture, there's been a strand of thinking that kind of makes fun of birdwatching or birding. And I guess there's been the sense that you mentioned it that has been very kind of old white man dominated and maybe a bit anoraks. I mean, what do you might say to those who might want to experience this joy you described earlier, but maybe the sense that this is not a community for them?

Mya Rose Craig:

I mean the funny thing is that the stereotypes aren't entirely wrong and I can think of like a hundred people off the top of my head who completely slot into that. But that's just like one tiny, probably quite fanatical subsection of a really large group of people. And they are the ones that would go out and say, I am a bird watcher, but there are lots of people who would never really think of themselves that way, who are in fact, bird watchers. Like if you have some bird feeders up in your garden that you like watching sometimes, you're a bird watcher. If you notice the birds flying over as you walk to work, you're a bird watcher. And I think for me, well, like the word birder really means is just someone who is aware of and appreciating the nature around them. And I think that that's something that a lot of people enjoy when you peel that label away.

Ben Yeoh:

So your suggestion is actually we're much closer to it in everyday life than we might actually think.

Mya Rose Craig:

Definitely. But I also think that stereotype does make people feel like they aren't green enough if that makes sense. Like one of the reasons I started my podcast was just because a lot of people said that they felt a bit too intimidated to get into bird watching because everyone seemed to know like they knew everything and they didn't even know where to start. Well, I've always stuck more with the viewpoint that like, you don't need to know the names or the Latin names or the calls of by heart. You just need to go out and appreciate it. But I also think there are so many different ways of enjoying nature and the outdoors that we don't really traditionally think about in the UK.

So I guess that typical way of engaging with nature is putting your binoculars on, putting your anorak on, going down to the local nature and staring at some small brown birds for a few hours. And I'm not going to lie personally, I do enjoy that, but there are a lot of people who don't. And one of the big things that my organization, back to nature does, is just sort of widen that perspective of what engaging with nature is in the first place. If you're playing football with your friends in the park, you're in the green space, you're still engaging with nature. If you're feeding the pigeons during your lunch hour, you know, we might not think of them as nature, but they are other animals and that's still nature. And I think as soon as you broaden that perspective, it takes the stress off and it makes you appreciate just how much nature there is around you, basically.

Ben Yeoh:

Yeah. I had a moment like that earlier this year, where was on the banks of the River Thames, which not in London, you don't sort of think about that, but you can walk on the foreshore and there's all sorts of nature around that, even in the middle of the city. I was wondering, do you have any favourite, I guess, birding moments or experiences, something which you kind of feel was kind of pivotal in finding your enjoyment here?

Mya Rose Craig:

I mean, I think that they've almost been like, this is very corny, sorry, but genuinely, I think they've already been like a countless amount of moments that I have loved over the years that I think when I was a child, there was a real just wonder still when looking at everything. I loved watching (Inaudible 06:23) that flown across from America as much as I enjoyed watching the ducks hanging out in my garden. And I think that that was just really magical because everything about birds and nature was exciting to me. My charity, back to nature, we run nature camps for kids from minority, I think backgrounds and we're bringing them out into nature quite often for the first time ever. And I think as someone who's always spent time outdoors and always spend time in nature, I think that really opened my eyes as to what an amazing experience that is for people to be experiencing the countryside for the first time. Cause a lot of these kids are having such a good time and they're again, filled with that sort of wonder that you are when you're a kid. And I think being able to relive that sort of childhood magic of being outdoors over and over and over with all of the kids that I work with is really special.

Ben Yeoh:

That sounds amazing. I've noted the same in some business people who I meet with where if they do reconnect with nature in some way, it often kind of changes the way they view things and you see the impact of what we do or our companies and things have on the world. And you can see that through reconnecting with those elements around us. So I learned some specific birding words recently, which I didn't know existed or what they were. And I was wondering whether you could tell me from your point of view. So one is a kind of technical thing, which is, tell me about ringing because I believe this is something that you are qualified to do from quite early on. And what is it? Why is it important?

Mya Rose Craig:

Yeah, so ringing or banding in America is basically a scientific study. So what licensed ringers do is they catch the birds in some shape or form. They take lots of different measurements from them, like weights, like how much fat they have on them, how much muscle, how long their wings are, how old they are, stuff like that. And they log all of that data and then they put a ring, a metal band around the leg of this bird. And it has a unique number on that. And that means that when another ringer catches the bird, at some point, there'll be able to access all the data that we've logged about it before. So basically, we're building up this massive database on information about birds and we learn all sorts of interesting things about loads of different species.

For example, it's been really important just in terms of figuring out where birds go when they migrate, which we know a lot less about than people think we do. But personally, I started it when I was very young. I was nine when I first started going and just sort of watching and wanting to take part. And the personal appeal for me was just being able to physically handle wild animals and just see birds at a completely different perspective. Cause obviously, we're not hurting them or even particularly stressing them out when we're catching them. But it means just for like five minutes or less, I'm able to sort of look a wild bird in the eye and it's very special. I really loved it. So in the UK, you can get your license when you're 16. So as soon as I was 16, I got my ringing license. And I've been doing lots of ringing since. This morning I was actually doing Raven ringing. I ringed, I think five different Raven chicks this morning and it was really nice.

Ben Yeoh:

Excellent. So what can you tell us about migration or what I guess ringing has told us about that? Is there some unsolved mystery that you would think, you know what, it would be really great if someone solved this, did you know that we don't know where these birds go or how they fly?

Mya Rose Craig:

Migration is just a bit weirder than people think it is. So for example, well, things that we would have thought historically that seemed very obvious have actually been disproved. So if we talk about black caps, for example, there are relatively common UK birds, you get them in hedges and gardens and just in the countryside and you get ones that you get in the winter. And the assumption would be, Oh, just like lots of other birds in the UK, they're here in the winter, they stay, they breed, they live here year-round, but it turns out that there is a population of blackcaps that migrate to the UK every winter and then they leave. And there is a separate population, the black caps that migrate to the UK every summer. So you've got weird things like that going on that we just never would have realised otherwise, but they're also were just genuine mysteries. So for example, the cookoo, which is like a very famous spring bird in the UK, for a very long time, we just had no idea where it was migrating to, what its migration route was. And it was probably only 10 or 15 years ago that we finally found out that they're migrating to the Congo of all places. And again, like we're discovering all of these things because of ringing.

Ben Yeoh:

That's amazing. I recall reading somewhere that we're not sure how birds do their complex navigation because you have birds who, they know where to go back nesting and they've never been there before. Like if in their first year of life. And you can partially confuse them if you move them from their nest and things. And we're still discovering things about that. I don't know if you know anything about that.

Mya Rose Craig:

I don't know. I'm not an expert or anything, but I do know that birds navigation or just birds, in general, are really interesting. I think it's sort of a very normal like human thing, but there's always a human assumption that we are the cleverest [ ] But birds can do so many fantastic things and there are loads of different hypotheses. So for example, people were trying to figure out if birds literally just using landmarks to figure out where they're going. Some people think that it might be like magnetic forces that basically creating like a little compass inside their head so they know where they're going. Whether it's just like a generational thing they're showing each other the journey. We're not a hundred percent sure there's loads of great ideas. They might all be true.

Ben Yeoh:

Yeah, I was reading, I think just this week there was a paper out showing that the crows, Crow family, has human-like intelligence is just, we need to ask them the right kind of questions. We don't have to speak in their language, so to speak

Mya Rose Craig:

You know, I love that take cause for various reasons, I ended up like researching quite a lot about Ravens last spring and it was so interesting and it was partially because that was a raven nest near my house that suddenly popped up during lockdown. I was suddenly very interested about Ravens. And there were so many fun facts where I was like, these birds are so, so smart. Like for example, even just the fact that Ravens have fun. Like they do things purely for enjoyment. I love that. Or they're sort of social, the way that they interact with each other socially. But the thing I found most interesting is the fact that Ravens have been proven to use tools which is interesting just because sort of tools is one of the ways that we as humans and maybe like chimps differentiate ourselves from other animals in terms of intelligence. So I don't know. I just thought that was really interesting, but Corvettes brilliant, they're great birds.

Ben Yeoh:

Yeah. It's really fascinating. And so I'm going to put you on the spot here as well. Cause I don't know necessarily you're going to know anything about this, but I realized I knew nothing really about Birdsong. So I was wondering whether, I know birdsong, sometimes they kind of use kind of for social learning and also kind of communication. And is also one of the things that we hear around. What would you have me know about birdsong and why it happens or anything about it?

Mya Rose Craig:

I also didn't know anything about birdsong until I did an episode on my podcast about it.

Ben Yeoh:

So we should all listen to that.

Mya Rose Craig:

But genuinely, I didn't know that much before. I've never been like a bird song person. I only knew a few songs. But I was talking to someone who is a Birdsong person, called Lucy Lapwing. And she was saying that a lot of the times, especially during springtime, what we hear as being very beautiful bird song is really a very sort of macho display from various birds as they all try to prove that they are the strongest and the most resilient and they're the ones that the female should go with. And they can get very, very territorial about it all. And it's the same with the Dawn chorus, which again, we're like, Oh, the Dawn chorus is so beautiful, but all of these birds are like shouting over each other. Again, trying to prove that they've made it through the fight. They're the loudest. They were strong enough to last through the cold and they're here to survive the next day. But one thing I did read about recently, which I thought was really interesting was just talking about how scientists were measuring birds brainwaves while they were sleeping and how the brainwaves were doing the same as what they do when they are singing, basically. And these birds were dreaming about the songs that they sing or their calls that they make during the day, which I thought was pretty interesting.

Ben Yeoh:

Okay, great. So I've got two more birding phrases or nouns I've heard about. So what is it, the expression “lifer” mean?  

Mya Rose Craig:

So for lots of birders, birding is all about list, not that it's all about the list, but it gets very competitive and they keep lists of what they've seen and they're aware of what they haven't seen. Then you keep like country list, local area list, the world list. And like I said, it's all very competitive. And so a lifer is basically just a bird that you have never before seen in your life, a new bird in your life, I guess. But the sort of undercurrent tool that is like, yes, got another bird on my list.

Ben Yeoh:

Great. And then the last phrase I had or read about was “pish”, which I believe is a kind of sounds that some birders can make to attract birds or something like that.

Mya Rose Craig:

Yeah. I would love to know where you've heard that cause I've never even seen that word written down.

Ben Yeoh:

I may have made it up, during my research on birding. Maybe it's a myth, is it a myth?

Mya Rose Craig:

Oh, no, it's a real thing, but I can't even do it very well. So this is going to be very embarrassing, but pishing is basically, birders making a funny sound that makes the birds around you go, what's that funny sound. So they hop out into the open to try and figure out what that funny sound is. And weirdly there are not many sounds that do this, pitching is one of the few that pretty much always works, at least with lots of birds. And this is going to be very embarrassing now, but it's basically like a, pshh,pshh,pshh like over and over louder and quieter. And for some reason that always gets the birds out.

Ben Yeoh:

There's a scientific paper on that. Why are the sounds of... Maybe that's like the proto bird language that we haven't understood yet and is one of the things, he's like, Oh, they're asking us about the meaning of life. That's interesting. I'm going to find out about that.

Mya Rose Craig:

Yeah, it's funny because pishing is a very like age-old birding tactic. Like people would be doing it in like the sixties to try and get birds to hop out with bushes even back then.

Ben Yeoh:

That's the other thing about, I guess there's some thought about birding being a particular kind of British occupational, though I've seen that there's global birders. And there's been quite a long tradition that goes back this century, but it seems to go back even further in kind of nature writing, but it's kind of this long tradition of being close to nature and things. And I guess there's also been a tradition of nature writing in this country continued by the likes of, I guess Robert MacFarlane now and sketching back I think we've had people like Roger Deakin talking about wild swimming and things like that. Are there any particular books or works that have inspired you? Cause I know you're somewhat of a writer yourself.

Mya Rose Craig:

Yeah. I think Steven Moss, who is a nature writer wrote a very interesting column in the gauzy in maybe a year or two ago about nature writing and the British legacy of nature writing. Because he was basically asking, in the UK, we have this very, almost important tradition of nature writing, but is that now outdated? And do we need something better to represent the British public? Which I thought was very interesting but in terms of.

Ben Yeoh:

Nature YouTubing.

Mya Rose Craig:

Yeah. but I think a really good example of that new type of nature is Doris book, diary of a young actress, which obviously everyone adores but with good reason, it's a really good book and it's really beautiful. And I think most importantly sort of touching on what Stephen Moss was talking about is also really accessible. It helps you to understand why he loves nature so much without the assumption that you are also an expert in nature, or you have also spent your childhood wandering through the idyllic countryside and I think that's where things are going in the future. I also really love Stephen Moses writing. But yeah, you're right. I think nature plays an unusually strong role in sort of our sense of place and our sense of national identity within the UK compared to most other countries. And that's a very historical thing. Like not to go slightly off piece, but during my A levels, I had to study various Victorian poets and things like that. And that was one like it was someone who was living in India and he had painted this beautiful idyllic picture of the English countryside with the country manners and the rolling green fields. And I was like, that's what people think of when they think of the UK. That image is so strong within how we identify ourselves, I guess, even for people that never even been to the countryside. Which I don't really know why. It's definitely a thing.

Ben Yeoh:

And I think, I mean, talking about connecting to current and future generations, you know, through writing or through some new forms of writing is definitely, I think one way we could do that. So definitely recommend those books. But I think you've helped edit or collate a book yourself recently with a lot of other kinds of young voices connected to nature. Do you want to tell me a little bit about that?

Mya Rose Craig:

So I have a book coming out in September called we have a dream and it was something I actually really loved writing. It was very special to me. And the idea was essentially, there are so many amazing young activists around the world, especially young activists of colour or young indigenous activist that are just not getting the platform and the promotion that they deserve for the amazing work that they do. And I wanted to, I suppose, give them the opportunity to talk about the work that they were doing, and there was amazing range of the types of things. And there were people from literally all over the world. And so I spent about six months interviewing all of these different people and it was fantastic. And you went from really great grassroots, or what was once a very grassroots project that has become very big. Like there's a boy tackling deforestation via football in Kenya to have a very broad sort of system changing projects, like Alton Peltier in Canada, who's fighting for indigenous people's rights, especially to do with water. And I don't know, it was just amazing to speak to all of these young people about what they're doing because they're all so inspirational. And a lot of them are younger than me. It was fantastic

Ben Yeoh:

Now you know how other people feel when they look at you and you're younger than all of these others. That said, there's always kind of someone younger than you and there's always someone who kind of knows more than you, but that's okay. That's all good too. So do you have a particular maybe process as a writer, what does kind of a good writing day look for you?

Mya Rose Craig:

I think honestly like writing, cause I'm also writing another book at the moment, which is much more of a traditional book, but writing this book, we have a dream, was actually a very pleasant experience. And it was very structured and I was literally just recording Zoom interviews with people. Cause you know, we're living in the age of COVID, recording these Zoom interviews with people and typing up a profile about them afterwards. And I guess the most difficult thing really was like reducing these amazing conversations down to like

Ben Yeoh:

A few hundred words.

Mya Rose Craig:

Yes. Cause these people were fantastic. But I think in terms of what a day in life, like in terms of writing looks like, very messy, very disorganized writing whenever I have the time or the energy basically, which can be all over the pace. I have, actually just once, but I have jumped out of bed one morning thinking like I'm going to write now. But more common I've also stayed up very late suddenly with the energy to write. So it's, I don't know, it's been a really nice experience, very different.

Ben Yeoh:

Great. And then on non-writing days, I guess, what does a typical kind of birding day look for you, you sort of get out and then you've got a place to go to and some birds on a list or idea of what to spot and are you out there for a few hours with binoculars on eyes and things and how does one of those days look?

Mya Rose Craig:

I think it's totally flexible depending on what the goal is. Like not to be annoying, but I think, so quite often in lockdown, I've been doing a lot more like birdwatching. So just going out on a walk for half an hour for a few hours just walking through the fields and woods and stuff, seeing whatever birds I happen to stumble across. Which I didn't do that as much before lockdown. I think that that's definitely something that I've grown sort of an enjoyment of a patience of much more than before. And I think that's more what I'm talking about when I'm saying how I feel like nature is very meditative and how it was very peaceful and things like that. But there are also certain occasions where a very rare bird has turned up in the UK. Those are not peaceful days when my parents are getting up like at like three o'clock

Ben Yeoh:

To go a hundred miles this way

Mya Rose Craig:

Drive across the country to catch this bird just as the sun is rising. And hopefully to see it immediately and to celebrate seeing this new bird. And that can take between a few hours, to days. There are occasions where we've gone back over and over try and see a bird until we finally have.

Ben Yeoh:

Like famous celebrities, spotting, famous celebrity, bird spotting.

Mya Rose Craig:

Yeah. Basically.

Ben Yeoh:

And you've had some great travel adventures, cause I think you've seen like loads of birds around the world. I think I was reading, did you go to East Malaysia Borneo once, did you spot any birds there or I can't remember whether I misread that.

Mya Rose Craig:

No, you did. I'm very lucky, I've been to all sorts of countries. I've travelled quite a lot for birds, which we travel for birds to see birds and anything else we do along the way is just an extra. So when I went to Borneo Malaysia I did see an awful lot of birds, actually, it was a wonderful trip. And it was actually one of the, except Bangladesh, it was the first time I'd ever bird watched in Asia as well, or ever really been to Asia. And yeah, it was a really special experience. It was very different. But yeah, more importantly, the birds were fantastic. There were so much birds there.

Ben Yeoh:

I asked because it's one of the places that I've been to, but when I was in Borneo, I think they probably were sort of birds in the jungle. And I remember one and two, but it's not an element that I particularly paid super attention to. And I kind of now wish that maybe I did. I do remember seeing, it must've been some sort of bird of prey. I don't even know which one, but fly across and catch a fish in the river in front of us. And that was quite a moment. But it was also one of the trips for me that really understood how lucky I was, you know, having grown up in this country because passing through particularly, I was in some of the pristine jungle and around Kinabalu and places like that, just incredibly poor. And I can, in that time, this was over 20 years ago, you know, there was no running water and you camped where you were sort of camping. And that was kind of quite a revelation for me. I was a late teen. I was probably about your age, a late teenager seeing that. I don't know how you feel having experience with that and talking with sort of activists around the world and any observation on your kind of global travels there?

Mya Rose Craig:

I think, again, sorry, slightly off piece, but important. Something that was very important in terms of the creation of back to nature, was definitely like travelling and going to other countries because it gave me a much broader, much more international perspective in terms of getting people into nature, how British people think about nature, why people aren't getting into nature. And something that was particularly significant to me was that I went on a trip to Bangladesh. And I met so many Bangladeshi birders, naturalists, environmentalist, campaigners, who all really loved and cared about nature and the environment. And there wasn't a single one in the UK. And that was the moment where I realized that this wasn't like an international issue, Bangladeshi people don't just magically not care about nature. There is something very broad and very systemic going on within the UK or within Europe. 

And I think that that was definitely a massive turning point for me in terms of going about setting up Black's nature. And I think more on the general point that international perspective almost always comes into play when I'm talking about the issues that I care about. Like one thing within the UK that I'm very aware of is biodiversity loss. Purely because I have been lucky enough to go to other countries and it has absolutely put into perspective how little by diversity and how little we have left in the UK, which is one of the reasons that I personally feel like biodiversity loss is such an extreme issue. I also talk quite a lot about indigenous people's rights and indigenous... I'm trying to amplify indigenous people's voices in terms of the climate change movement and the environmental movement and conservation. Partially because again, I have been lucky enough to go and visit these places and go and see their projects in action. And I've actually, I became an ambassador for the organization, survival international, which advocates for indigenous people's rights against conservation organizations, because that is such a big issue, in and of itself

Ben Yeoh:

Yeah, I was reading, there's a big project called project drawdown, which looks at some of the world's climate solutions and they sort of list sort of 50 or a hundred of them of which one of the most important is actually defending indigenous land rights. If indigenous people look after their land and have done much better than usually other owners of land. So by giving them back their land rights, that's actually a huge positive climate solution that we could look towards. So maybe the final question also, wrapping up is what other projects for the year or looking forward that you're kind of excited about. So we have your book, we have your podcast, we have another book coming up and you're an ambassador for various things. Anything else you'd like to highlight?

Mya Rose Craig:

I think genuinely the most, well, I guess there are two things, firstly Black's nature is going really well. We've gotten loads of funding to run camps this summer, partially because of coronavirus and lockdown and the effect that's had on people. We're going to be running so many camps this summer and I'm very excited about it. So I think that that's going to be great. Like we're going to be working with kids from London for the first time and things like that. And running longer camps. But I think on a more personal level, the thing I'm most excited for this year is genuinely just going to university in the autumn. Cause I've been in the gap year this year and I've been doing lots of work and stuff. But you know, same as everyone I've been in locked down. And then I'm just really excited to go off and study and to live in a new place and all that sort of thing. And that's in October so yeah, lots look forward to this year.

Ben Yeoh:

Great. That sounds amazing. So do everyone lookout for her book, we'll put links below, black to nature as well. If you're interested in any of the work that Maya's doing around that and get birding for the podcast as well if you want to find out any more about birds. So this just leaves me to thank you very much. It was really great to speak to you and I wish you all the best in all your future endeavours.

Mya Rose Craig:

Thank you so much. It was lovely to speak.

Ben Yeoh:

Great. Thanks, bye.

Fuschia Dunlop, understanding China through food

-understanding China through its food

-Sharks fin and Sichuan pepper a memoir travel book by Fuchsia Dunlop gives subtle and deep insights into Chinese thinking through food

-oppression of Uyghurs through food

-understanding the rare and exotic and why increase meat consumption is a trend is likely to continue

-understanding the sheer range and complexity of Chinese food

-How Buddhist  thinking is expressed through food

-why understanding a little about the culture or cuisine of a food  is necessary to appreciate whether it is “good” or not

Fuchsia Dunlop's travel and food memoir of China, Shark’s fin and Sichuan pepper, is one of the two best books I’ve read in recent years in helping me think about China today and its history.

(The other book is by Julie Lovell: Maoism a global history. Lovell has also recently translated an abridged version of the monkey King which is also really worth reading. The Monkey King is one of the four great classic novels of China the others being the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, and Dream of the Red Chamber. A great number I would go so far to say that the majority of educated Chinese people would have read or at least know the stories in all four books this observation indicates a quality infused in Chinese culture)

Dunlop immerses herself in Chinese food culture and commits to eating everything. While grappling with the tapestry of Chinese food and culture on its own terms she does not lose sight of her own British upbringing and lens insights to those of us who have never visited China to understand why some practices might be.  Through the stories and experiences one can see how food and cuisine are culture and how  they travel through the country and through the world

This is meaningful to me as the British born son of a Chinese Malaysian father and a Chinese Singaporean mother and I see this in the story I’ve related of how the dish of chicken rice came from roots in China via immigrants to Singapore, Malaysia and SE Asia and where it is now handed down to me in London.

Take the topic of eating everything and the potentially  unsustainable food trajectory that the world is on

“...The Chinese do you seem to eat everything one must admit.  But in a sense they are just a distorting mirror magnifying the voracity of the entire human race the Chinese word for population is people mouths and in China there are now over 1,300,000,000 mouths all munching away… it’s the same with timber, minerals and oil which feed Chinese economic development. China has become the worlds largest consumer of grain meet coal and steel. It may look rapacious but the Chinese are really just catching up with the greed of the rest of the world on a dizzying scale.

There is an equally rich and ancient strain of Chinese thought more than 2000 years ago the sage Mozi wrote of ancient laws regarding food and drink.

Stop when hunger satiated, breathing becomes strong limbs are strengthened and ears and eyes become sharp. There is no need of combining the five taste extremely well or harmonising the difference with orders. And if it should not be made to put your delicacies from four countries.

Confucius living at around the same time did not eat much and took care that amount of meat he ate did not exceed the amount of rice. His example has been used as a model for generations of Chinese children urged by the parents to eat up their rice or noodles and not be distracted by meat or fish…. And while businessmen and officials in early 21st century China stuff their faces with meat, fish and exotic delicacies, many people live at home on a simple diet of mainly grains and vegetables.

For the irony is that despite the conspicuous consumption of Banquet culture...the traditional diet of the Chinese masses could be a model for the entire human race.

...the way the older generation and the poor still eat... steamed rice or boiled noodles served with plenty of seasonal vegetables cooked simply, beancurd in many forms, very few sweet meats and small amounts of meat and fish that bring flavour to the table.

The traditional Chinese diet is nutritionally balanced and marvellously satisfying to the senses. After all my gastronomic adventures I don’t know if I can think of a better way to live...”

(Dunlops cookbook Every Grain of Rice is a tribute to this frugal healthy and delicious home cooking idea).  She addresses the culture which values the “banquet culture”, and how rarity or the exotic is valued. And in parallel what has happened to the environment, and to some traditional “old” things - like architecture and building and “wet markets” - disappearing under “progress”.  I can see from this that these trends seem very likely to continue. 

In other parts of the book, Dunlop evokes in vignette the clash of cultures and riches within China that she sees.

This observation stuck with me.

“...As I waited in the courtyard for my lift to the bus stop the local butcher was doing his rounds. A slight scruffy man bearing two bamboo trays on a bamboo shoulder pole he shouted out “meat for sale, meat for sale''. He paused in the gateway and I caught a glimpse of his wares.

He didn’t have much to sell just a few rather mean looking hunks of pork and some bones. At the entrance to the roundhouse next door he discussed prices with two elderly men one of them frail and dignified in his threadbare Mao suit , ended up coming to a deal and then walked home clutching his purchase, wrapped in his hand. It was a single pork bone, a small one, with a knuckle at one end to which clung a few ragged threads of meat. 

I thought back to the vulgar extravagance of [a meal]] in northern Fujian and the easy abundance of a rustic dinner the night before - the plentiful dishes of duck and chicken the steam pork that we had barely touched and my heart stuck in my throat…”

The challenges of China echo in the west and UK. Inequality, the meanness of western abbatoris and our own food supply. Dunlop also touches on how you need to engage with a culture, with a food or cuisine to be able to tell or appreciate it.

One aspect for me, is how Chinese value texture in a way that the west does not and a wastern palate does not appreciate bones, cartilage, cold, gloopy jelly fish textures (although the west has them eg oysters). And it goes both ways, this from a later time when took super accomplished Chinese chefs to one of the best western restaurants in the world (French Laundry)

“...it was a most difficult, a most alien, a most challenging experience.

We begin to talk about it in Chinese. They explain that they find the creaminess of the “sabayon” in the first course off-putting. And surprisingly, given the Chinese penchant for strong and salty pickles, none of them can stand the taste of the sharp Niçoise olives that accompany the lobster. “They taste like Chinese medicine,” they all agree.

They are shocked by the rare flesh of the lamb, although it’s the most perfect I’ve ever tasted. (“Dangerous,” says Xiao Jianming, who refuses to touch it. “Terribly unhealthy.”) The sequence of delicious desserts is an irrelevance for these visitors from a food culture without much of a sweet tooth. (The only dish they relish, curiously, is a coconut sorbet.) They are also mystified by the custom of serving tiny,personal portions of food on enormous white plates, and find the length of this meal served à la russe interminable.

I am struck by how much, at some abstract level, Thomas Keller’s food has in common with the finest of Chinese cuisine, in its magnificent ingredients, intellectual wit, and delicate sensitivity to the resonances among tastes, textures, and colors. But the physical facts of its expression, the sequence of dishes before us, might as well have come from another world.

“How am I supposed to eat this?” asks Yu Bo, puzzling over the red snapper that has sent me off into flights of ecstasy. He is as confused as a Westerner faced with her first bowl of shark’s-fin soup, plateful of sea cucumber, or serving of stir-fried ducks’ tongues. I’ve often seen this scenario in China, but this is the first time I’ve witnessed it from the other side.

The chefs are not as arrogant about their own prejudices as many Westerners are in China. Lan Guijun admits, “It’s just that we don’t understand, it’s like not knowing a language.” Yu Bo is even more humble: “It’s all very interesting,” he says, “but I simply can’t say whether it’s good or bad: I’m not qualified to judge.”

That last line sticks with me “It’s all very interesting,” he says, “but I simply can’t say whether it’s good or bad: I’m not qualified to judge.”

Not only does this apply to food but a range of cultural arts like parts of theatre and art, this can be applied to. But, interestingly when applied to food - you might think that food - high end food can be universally appreciated. I don’t think that is the case. Perhaps more particular high end food can be harder to understand without knowing the traditions it is working in.

Dunlop also examines the prejudice and tensions in China through food. Take a topic that has become increasingly controversial which is the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region 

“....I began to notice how often the Uyghur’s loathing week of the Han Chinese coalesced around the matter of pork for the Chinese of course porkis the staple meat to eat it on its own or stirfry with vegetables - they wrap it in dumplings, they use its bones for stock and its fat to flavour almost everything they eat. When the Chinese say meat. they usually mean pork unless otherwise specified.  To the Uyghur, as Muslimsthe idea of eating pork is abhorrent. One taxi driver cocooned with me in the privacy of his cab assured me that if a true Muslim eats pork his his skin will erupt into blood-spouting boils that can be fatal.

...And Chinese have occasionally use the pork taboo to inflame Muslim sensibilities.  During the cultural Revolution Chinese Muslims were reportedlyforced to eat pork and  to drink water from wells contaminated by pigs. Although the Chinese authorities in no way condone such crass behaviour, many Uyghurs  feel the government does not try hard enough to protect their feelings. 

The Muslim taboo on pork reinforces strong social divisions between Uyghur and Han. Most Uyghur won’t patronise Chinese restaurants even those that claim to serve food in accordance with Muslim dietary laws.

You can’t trust the Chinese not to use any pork products whatever they say, a shopkeeper told me. And as for the Han Chinese they tend to see Uyghur restaurants as dirty. And so the two ethnic groups dine separately and don’t talk to each other.

Revulsion at the pork-eating of the Han Chinese is the focus for general anxieties about cultural assimilation and contamination….”

There is so much thoughtful observation in the book and of course fascinating detail about food.

Here’s a YT of Tyler Cowen and Dunlop plus guests, dining out and talking about her book and Chinese food in the US. Of note is Ezra Klein who is a notable vegan as well as media commentator and NYT op-ed writer.

Amazon Link to book.

Theatre, inequity, post-COVID build back

Short thought on theatre inequity: There are thoughtful threads from theatre peeps thinking about how the industry might build back better or differently as the pandemic has highlighted challenges (inequity, digital, freelancers). But, my 30,000 foot view is that this is not going to be the case. “Financial Winners” in theatre and performing arts are concentrated in a small number - reflecting other industries, but potentially even more acute - and the vast number of entry level jobs are difficult to access if you are poor or otherwise disadvantaged. Skimming the industry structure and entrenched stakeholders, I do not see this changing, so post-COVID I think it’s likely the industry settles back as before, with at best moderate change. Maybe that’s a reflection of many other industries too although - maybe strangely for an industry focused on creativity - I sense there may be even less change in theatre compared to other sectors.

Part of that might be because of the challenge of moving theatre to a digital format, or not - being mostly a live experience art form.

Education: formalists vs progressives

There are two divergent lines of thought about education:  Should we be telling children facts and ideas and telling them to learn them or should we be encouraging them to discover knowledge for themselves?

How should we view knowledge? Is there a stock of knowledge which we need to record accumulate and pass on to the next generation or is knowledge fluid and transitory made useful when it is personally discovered and acquired?

How should we view learning? Is it demonstrated by the proven acquisition of facts and skills over the demonstration of a faculty with reasoning and solving problems?

And how should we view children? (Rightly or wrongly this is often about children)

do we see them principally as members of the society and participants in an economy for which they need to be prepared as adults in the making? Or is our role in their development to think less about preparation and more about cultivation? 

For the progressives education is about supporting the ability to think critically and should be child-centred and focused on problem-solving for the formalist though it’s a process of importing and acquiring the skills and knowledge necessary for well-being and success in life it’s about instruction and acquisition of information and skills needed for the success of the society in which you live.

For progressives learning is natural it’s happening all the time and it’s what humans are programmed for children learn to talk for example without any teaching at all. For the formalists  learning can be a hard slog. They contend it’s just a fact of life that there are some things you need to learn the hard way. There is complex information that we need to know to which there is no easy route. If you want to learn to write for example you need to understand the ways in which language is put together you need to know the glue that binds sentences the rules for making language work. This is not easy and you don’t “discover” it.

Does Khan academy, Udemy and “mastery” learning say anything about where education may go?

Thoughts on reading (3 mins, FT) Luck Kellaway: What is the point of Schools? Link here.

(3 to 5 hours) Education, A Very Short Introduction by Gary Thomas. Amazon link here.

Beautiful Young Minds, X + Y

I don’t get round nowadays to watching much tv/movies  but I made some time to watch X+ Y and the documentary that the film was based on. This was partly because James Graham is one of the most admired British playwrights and partly because the film dealt with an autistic spectrum character.

Of note are the parts of the film directly inspired by the documentary. The mother character is well written and portrayed with great humanity (if that’s the word) by Sally Hawkins. It also has a sympathetic ASD character as well as a less sympathetic AS character although even there the less sympathetic character has some redemption (in the audience eyes, at least) with an entirely cringe-worthy and socially inappropriately timed Monty Python skit - he can’t fit in socially - he seems to not even like maths and you have an impression his “gift” as perhaps as much curse as gift.

If you’ve met one person with autism then you’ve met one person with autism.

This adage is popular as it hints at the truism that all humans are individual and knowing one label won’t necessarily tell you anything much about that person. It riffs on that idea as many of us fall into stereotype thinking - quick pattern formation that can turn out wrong.

What unites us is greater than what divides us

We’re all different, all unique, and all equal. No one in our societies should be left behind or pushed aside because of who we are, or where we come from. Yet some of us are still treated differently and unfairly simply because of who we are.

And so the counter point is that many characteristics on the autistic spectrum are shared and can be understood together.

“People possess different points in an N dimensional space where N is a reasonable large and positive integer.”

This - to me - is hilarious and true and tragic and comes from the original documentary. People with a reasonable sympathy with a certain level of maths will understand that language but the average person is lost.  This makes the phrase coming from someone atypical in social interaction as partly profound and partly tragic. He describes a truth of the world in a logical language to a typical audience who do not understand.

In England, “being clever, you are rejected” - this is another comment from the documentary partly echoed in the film. 

Interestingly, I find this is reflected in directly in the English language. English has so many phrases for being “too clever”:

• Smart Alec

• Clever Dick

• Too clever by half

• Clever clogs

• Smarty pants

• know-it-all

• Boffins, nerds, eggheads 

And even crafty, sly, cunning - come with dark overtones 

Is this a jealousy of “otherness” or this type of intelligence and knowledge ? Is it a fear of characters or things we can not understand - the unknown ?

To me, it’s likely a mix - a spectrum - of these items we fear and disdain things we do not understand and we belittle them to make ourselves feel better.

The documentary and hence the film suggests that the Chinese do not have this same disdain of cleverness, nor the same disdain of maths.  The film has this as a small sub-theme. Although I’m unsure.

The film ends on a romantic high. True life has not followed such a straight path, where the real girl has left back to China and not stayed married, although as of recently the boy seems to be happily with another.

While the documentary and film only looks as a small slice in the rich humanity of autism, it’s an accessible and charming slice and it is a part of our untold stories.

Coda, my maths grasp is enough that if I recall correctly scored about a bronze (it might even have been silver)  back in 1995 in the Junior Mathematical Challenge - this was a score in the order of 20 out of 50 in maths problems that look a little like this. 

A 2015 interview of Daniel Lightwing.

Details on X + Y. Wiki

The Youtube of the documentary Bright Young Minds.

A look at smart alec words.

Jane Bodie, Ben Yeoh in conversation, writing, art and life.

Jane Bodie and Ben Yeoh talk about creative processes, how they have ended up as makers, the impact of the pandemic what does or doesn’t make great art. For Ben the importance of travel (having travel agents as parents) and his early work as a photographer (when the photo world was analogue see some here). For Jane, on teaching, family - having a mother as a brilliant artist, and understanding what makes a for a brilliant writing day.

See the transcript below or watch the video (about 1.5 hours).

Ben (0:01): Hey, so we have Jane and I'm just going to do a very quick intro to Jane. Jane Bodie is an amazing writer; a playwright primarily, has got prize-winning stuff all over the world. She's also a brilliant mentor and teacher, probably more important to me and one of my dearest friends. So we've got together here to have a chat.

Jane (0:29): And I think I should do an intro to you then, which is that Ben is a writer, playwright, environmental and sustainability guru (sorry, Ben) you're a philanthropist, a performer, and a public speaker. And also, one of my dear, dear friends.

Ben (0:45): Makes me sound really posh, right?

Jane (0:47): Makes you sound well posh.

Ben (0:48): So we had this idea for having chats around, you know, post-pandemic and all of that. And we were going to call it something really fancy. And then we've decided not to.

Jane (1:00): I wanted to call it 'Ways of not being', because we both been obsessed with Ways of Seeing (by John Berger) and talked about it for years and years. And then I think ways of being sounds a little bit yogic, and a little bit like a sort of self-help thing. So we were chatting about it the other day, and you said why don't we just call it 'Chats with Ben and Jane during Lockdown', which is what it kind of is. So let's call it what it is.

Ben (1:07): Yeah, so exactly. So these are chats with us. I guess we, we were really interested, well, I was really interested when we were talking about, you know, our own creative processes and creative processes of artists, you know, in the widest sense, and then obviously, our own kind of experiences. So that was one of the genesis for the idea of having these chats.

Jane (1:46): Yeah, and I think there's a huge amount of these on at the moment, people doing interviews with playwrights or creatives, or artists because we're all in lockdown and we can do it. So I suppose we also wanted to make it a little bit different. And what I'm really interested in, is talking about creative process, how that's been affected by lockdown, but in the bigger sense, how one might have come to be the artist you are and what led you to it, the sort of how and why because I find that really interesting, you know, people become playwrights or writers or artists for a whole range of different reasons. And I know that our beginnings were very different. And I've always found it really interesting talking to you about how you became what you are, and how much that's got to do with your family and your background and your education and the places that you studied. So it's something I'd like to talk about.

Ben (2:32): Yeah, so we start there. So we'll maybe ask it first to you then because you got to trade it back to me, which was like, yeah, how did you, did you fall into being a writer? Or did you always know? It's funny, I'm going to segue, we're going to do this a lot because when I speak to a lot of directors, it's very rare that they said at 15, oh, I really know I want to be a director, right? It happens maybe to a couple of them, but it's something that you discover, often a little later on.  Whereas sometimes I find people, you know, teenagers, or when they think back to when they were teenagers, or even younger, and they kind of always knew they wanted to be a writer, and they were always going to write in some fashion. And so that was always that kind of thing, as opposed to actually, typically directors I find, haven't and then act to some people kind of always knew that they wanted to act or whatever. 

Jane (3:22): Yeah, I wonder if with directors, they just know they want to be involved in theatre, I think often, probably when we're kids, and we want to be involved in theatre, we just want to be on stage. And then, later on, we perhaps realize that our skills lead us towards a different element, or we fall into like directing at school or at university. I mean, I wrote my first play when I was seven. It was shit, because I've still got it, my mom gave it to me and my 30th birthday. But there is a line in it that I used in a play about 20 years later, which to me is fascinating, much more fascinating than the play itself. Because it's almost like there are things going around in my head that are just waiting to be used. 

They're waiting to kind of fall off the conveyor belt and find a place. So there was a line about a woman wearing makeup, and it suiting her, and it turned up in a play of mine called Still about 20 years later. So I reckon I must have heard that line and thought it was interesting, as a human being, not necessarily as a playwright at seven, you'd hope because that would make me very terrifying. But I was writing dialogue when I was seven. And that may be and I've made jokes about this many times in reference to my mother, but it may be because it was quite hard to get a word in my house because there are a lot of fierce talkers. And so maybe I went and wrote dialogue as a way of having conversations in which I didn't get interrupted.

 Ben (4:39): Yeah, as good a reason as any.

Jane (4:41): Yeah, indeed. So yeah, I did want to be a playwright from a very young age. And I'm interviewing Annabel Arden on this in a couple of weeks, which I'm very excited about from Theatre de Complicite and I saw a Complicite show with my mum. I was lucky to have a mum that took me to the theatre, and she took me to see a play at the Almeida, and I must have been like 13 or something because I remember fancying people, some of the cast, I was just thinking they were kind of grotesquely beautiful. And I saw that play, and I remember just going, Okay, that's what I want to do.

Ben (5:17): Wow. Okay.

Jane (5:18): So you, what about you? 

Ben (5:20): Well, I guess we'll get towards that. So I probably did always do some writing and I see thinking about it, I did when I was around 9 or 10. I did write a short play. And it was for the so this is the kind of upbringing I had. It was for a competition where you, it’s a Latin play, so it gets translated in Latin. And, you know, London independent schools have this kind of Latin play. 

Jane (5:48): Yeah, we didn't have that at Islington Green.

Ben (5:50): So that was what I was doing.

Jane (5:54): In Latin?

Ben (5:55): Yeah. So we performed in a kind of Latin play competition. Can you imagine this, and it still goes on to this day. But usually, they take excerpts of actual things, but the play won, but we only won because we were the only ones who were barmy enough to have actually written our own play. I don't even remember what it was about. I think we all dressed in togas, and it was, you know, that type of thing. But it's kind of...

Jane (6:23): Sorry to interrupt, but had you seen a play? Did you know what a play was?

Ben (6:26): I had seen a play and things, but that was a little bit later, as a teenager. I saw Pygmalion at the National and I remember thinking like, oh, okay, and I think I'd seen maybe the movie or kind of vaguely knew about it. And I went in with really low expectations. I think I went with my godfather or someone who's like, oh, we should go to the theatre and I wasn't, I didn't think, oh, this is going to be brilliant or anything. And I'm just thinking like, wow, they've actually, they've actually done something quite good here.

Jane (6:59): Yeah, you'd probably seen My Fair Lady with the worse accent ever.

Ben (7:02): And then I remember, actually then, okay, so skipping forward a little bit. So I directed the play at secondary school high school, so about 16 or 17, which was Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf. And I was much more into directing than writing at the time, and then later on I saw Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf, but I had a very positive experience with a playwright at that time. So we had an issue that Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf was going to go on in the West End, the next year, to this was to be in around 1995-96, something like that. And so, being the good school boys and girls that we were, I wrote as a director to the publishers, agents saying,' Can we have amateur rights for three nights a week during the school play?' And they wrote back saying, 'No, you can't do this play, because it's going to go on in the West End.'

Jane (8:06): As if your production would affect a west end show...

Ben (8:15): People are going to come and see our production over the one with Diana Rigg in it, so then I was like - oh my god, and we'd already started setting up and so we've invested too much for it to kind of go...I didn't think I could pivot at that stage. So I thought well, you know what you're not in charge of this, Edward Albee's in charge of this, I'll write to him and see whether he has any comments. So I wrote him, yes I'm 16, 16, 15, 16. And so I wrote him a letter, kind of nice one. I guess those are you know, you didn't really have email anyway.

So I wrote him a letter and I just sent it. I didn't have his address, so care of the New York publisher something, I think it might have even been a penguin or fable or whatever. Then I said, okay, let's hold and just see what happens. And actually quite quickly, like two or three weeks later, I got a wonderful letter back saying 'Yeah, of course, you can do my play'. 

Jane (9:17): From Edward Albee? 

Ben (9:17): From Edward Albee saying, ‘Of course you can do my play a really good luck with that you've chosen a really difficult play to do' which I hadn't really appreciated.

Jane (9:47): That is the most glorious story! I doubt the playwrights today would be so generous what a divine thing.

Ben (10:03): Later on, I heard that sometimes he could be quite grumpy with some people, but that was my only real interaction with him but I think, and I wouldn't.

Jane (10:12): He probably quite liked the fact that you'd written him a letter.

Ben (10:17): Yeah, like someone famous playwright bothers to write back to you.

Jane (10:41): My version of that story is much shorter and doesn't have such a wonderful ending, which is that I was going to do Betrayal, which is still one of my favourite plays by Pinter, although I think it's got become quite dated. But I was doing Betrayal in a place called The Cheese Factory, which was a place in Hackney. And I was in it and I'm slightly worried I was directing as well. But anyway, and we had to apply for the amateur rights and we got an absolute no. 

I mean, no one was going to see it because no one was going to treck to this Cheese Factory in Hackney. It was quite good, actually. And yeah, I'll probably get into a lot of trouble now saying this, but I think we did it and didn't sell tickets, or we sold wine, we did something. But you know, hilariously at the time, I was older than you and I thought if I rewrote the letter, but put a lot of pauses in it maybe I'd get a yes. 

But anyway, later, a few years later, and my mum's a painter and he bought a painting of her and I really wanted to write to him and say, 'You didn't let me do your play at The Cheese Factory, but I didn't.

Ben (11:53): I suspect why mine got through is because I wrote to him directly, albeit care of.

Jane (12:04): What a lovely early story about your first kind of furore, you know, your adventure into playwriting. 

Ben (12:11): Yes, at the time I was studying well, Double Maths, Physics, Chemistry, although I did an Art A-Level as well, so I was very, still very interested in that. And then I did Science at Cambridge University, although I did mainly directing there and obviously, there's a big theatre tradition. But then I went to Harvard, where they have a much bigger tradition of teaching both Dramaturgy and Playwriting, I think, has changed in the UK and Europe a little bit. But particularly at that time, there was a definite feeling that you can teach the craft of playwriting at least to a certain extent, and, you know, still debates about that, and I had a really positive experience that I did also do some directing work there. And I had a very inspiring poet teacher as well and also a photography teacher, kind of a fine art photography teacher. So I was very much involved in, like, the debate, although it's kind of very East Coast, US, you know, people are very well to do around, around Harvard, you know, taking the Arts seriously, both as a potential career and also, you know, a money thing or, or a calling, and that type of thing.

Jane (13:26): And we've talked about that before because my mother was the reason why my mum kept my play, my albeit shit plays that I wrote when I was seven, was because she was a painter. And my father was, I mean, he was a builder, really, but he was also a musician and had at some point made his living doing that. So that, you know, that question that sometimes people ask, you know, how did your parents feel about that? And I feel that you probably did Double Physics, Maths because there was an expectation on you from your parents, or is that a terrible assumption I'm making?

Ben; I was good at it, yes. I was definitely better at it than the equivalent in English. But except that, I mean, as you see, you don't really teach creative writing in secondary school. I mean, you might do a bit, but you're teaching practical criticism and literature and close reading, and you might do some plays. And even if you do drama, you're sort of learning about drama and all of that.

Jane (14:25): Sorry again, to interrupt, but unless you have a brilliant English teacher, which I had, who I think probably wanted to be an actress and she was Miss Tersighni, and she gave us plays to read.

Ben (14:38): Yes. Well, I mean, I'm sure you were reading it and doing it, what I meant is that it wasn't in the curriculum, there was no test.

Jane (14:43): No, sure. 

Ben (14:44): But I think even at 16, I probably wouldn't have gone that way anyway, because I was always much more interested in the sense of doing and I did photography, I did sculpture, I did other practical arts of which I was interested in, and I don't think I quite considered, I hadn't considered the playwriting thing in the same way. And then coming to Harvard, particularly with all of these arts, you know, teacher practitioners, I think a little bit like you, someone who actively teachers, but also practices their art. Yeah, and I find that that, that was quite influential for you know, 20–21-year-olds. 

Jane (15:30): Yeah and we've talked about that, you know, you have had many influential teachers

Ben:Not that many

Jane:  but you had a few, perhaps enough. I remember we talked last week about this about the, was he, a photographer, the teacher?

Ben (15:48): Yeah, so my photographer, mentor, Chris Kilip, his name, we had him and there was a little bit of this also in terms of poetry as a career, because a lot of poets, most poets actually do something else, as well as write poetry because it's virtually impossible to be a poet as your career, make money out of it. And even if you are a poet, you often have academic posts, But he, we did a lot of reading other people's photographs, particularly modern, practicing modern photographers, and you know, what are they trying to do?

How are they doing it? And then photography hasn't got as long a history as other things. So the history of photography is in there. But one of the things which came out was this, and some of us were really thinking about perhaps taking up photography, or fine art photography, particularly as a career, because Killip had things in MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art, and we'd had those photographers come and teach us and talk to us about it.

Jane (15:51): And you were a really good photographer, weren't you?

Ben (16:47): Yeah, I guess I was, was good enough to go straight into this. I won photography prizes at university and exhibitions elsewhere. And you've seen a couple of them.

Jane (17:00): Yeah, the travel ones.

Ben (17:01): And, and I took some that with very high quality. But the message came across from this, like, week-long session, that there were these photographers who we could see who we all agreed were really great artists. And then, I guess, most of us, were very surprised that they hadn't made very much money, and we're continuing to not make very much money. And then there were other photographers who, say, had mixed reviews, some like, oh, that's quite good, but there wasn't that huge consensus of saying, look, this is definitely great work.

And their photographs were worth a lot of money and continue to be a lot of money. And then we saw some photographs, where they're saying, look, these are people who were photographers, but they never really exhibited much, never really had a public profile, and were never going to have a public profile. 

Ben (18:01): And the conclusion was that there was limited correlation between great art and being paid a great amount of money at that time, at the same time. 

Jane (18:14): Yeah.

Ben (18:15): And you could very easily be a great artist, you could see great artists work, you could see that, and they, they were probably going to never make any money and I think one or two had died as a pauper. So...you kind of know this because you had great artists in history, right? Who died with no money because art wasn't paid for, but actually, there was a very high chance you could be a great artist, and make no money. Or perhaps even worse, you could make quite a lot of money and your art might not be very good...

Jane (19:07): Very interesting question, which is worse and of course all artists, would say I'd rather be a great artist and make no money. But I think the reality is, we would probably rather make some money and some of our art be great. And sometimes, we just have to make the art that we make, although, you know, during lockdown, my running joke is I'm going to have to get a job in a shop because I've lost a lot of work. And my husband will say there won't be any shops anymore soon, Jane, so that I can no longer say that. 

The interesting thing is that when you told me that story last week, I thought, this guy said that to you and you had a particular reaction, which I want to hear in a minute, but I mean, I knew that I just wouldn't make any money, because my mum (as a painter) certainly didn't make any money.

I tell people that I played the steel drums, at school and people think how cool. I did it because it was the only free instrument to learn because no one wanted to play it, well actually girls didn't want to play it. So we didn't have any money and my dad didn't certainly didn't have any money as a musician. So I don't, oddly, there was no pressure put on me (to make money) not that there was on you necessarily. But also, I think if someone had said to me, you could be great and never make any money, I wouldn't think I'm not going to do it. 

And oddly, I probably I did work out that I wasn't going to make a lot of money at some point. I mean, I've been a playwright, really, since I left school in my 20s. I've made a semi-living, and sometimes made a very good living, but normally, that's when I've been writing telly. And I've had one or two kinds of jobs related to playwriting, I was head of playwriting at NIDA (National Institute of Dramatic Art, in Australia) and I worked at the Royal Court teaching playwriting, both fantastic jobs and wonderful to do. But I've got to the stage now where I'm old enough where I go, this isn't going to make me a huge amount of money and I don't have much of a pension either. And now I can't really do anything else. But for you, it had a very different effect, which I think is really interesting, because of what that guy said to you.

Ben (21:00): Well, yeah, maybe it was because probably my primary artistic practice at the time, was photography. So I thought, well, I've got other things I'm interested in. And I'm always going to do personal photography work, although digital changed that a little bit, so it just shows how much we know when we're 20. And so I thought, you know, what, I'm going to maybe do these other things. And I think there was also a part of it, that, maybe this is unfair cause you've got very high standards, but I thought, you know, people tell me, my photography is very good, and I can read it and I could see it was good. But was it of the standard that it would reach the Museum of Modern Art? Well, at 20, no.

And there were all of these other things I was interested in, but I kind of always knew, and this is also where the poetry and playwriting was emerging. And maybe this is the other artistic practice like I'd kept, because of doing A level Art and always kept a sketchbook, actually until the age of 21-22, I still keep a sort of notebook, but a sort of drawing, practice sketchbook. And I'd always had a personal practice and I thought you know what, that personal practice is always going to be really important to me, and I'm going to keep that going. And that was more important to me than a public practice. And I could already see that I was going to be influenced least in the photography world by saying, Well, if this is the kind of photography, which sells maybe I should be more interested in nudging my work that way if you want to make a living, and I decided to.

Jane (22:45): So practical Ben. So practical.

Ben And then I thought, you know what, that's not what I want to do with the brain space that this occupies.

Jane (22:54): You're a professional multitasker as well, you do and you often advise on how to do eight to nine things at once. But perhaps for you, you thought I can keep that personal private practice going but do something else. I mean, your parents were Travel agents, and did you make money to help them?

Ben (23:25): Yeah, like I think this is maybe an Asian tradition type thing from very young. Well, there are two or three things that my parents told me one is to travel is to be educated. So we did a lot of travelling, although that's maybe because they were travel agents. But there was a sense that I was going to take care of them. And I was going to be much better able to take care of them than they were maybe even then themselves with all of this education and qualifications.

And I guess one of the other things I like thinking about, there you made me think about things I haven't thought about for a little while, is we had a great family friend, called Ibrahim Hussein.

he was what we would call Malay as opposed to Chinese Malay. He was a friend of my dad's from the 1960s, and actually he was at art school in the 60s, went back to Malaysia, and then ended up being one of Malaysia's most famous and celebrated abstract art painters and was just painters' full stop. And he came with his family every year through London. And I guess I saw two or three things. One, I saw him in painting clothes. So one day there was like I need to paint and we got him wallpaper, which is all we had, and we went to the hardware shop and just got somewhat paint they had and what brushes they had, because he was... 

Jane (24:43): Needs must when the artist... 

Ben (25:04): yeah, and so and so he painted, which was quite inspiring. And then also, he made a living from his painting. So and so he was reasonably well off, probably from by Malaysian standards well off. So I've actually seen that painters could do that, which I've come to realize is actually quite rare and is actually very rare in Malaysia, to be a painter who could sell paintings for 10s of thousands of Malaysian dollars in fact probably hundreds of thousands of Malaysian dollars towards his later career. Maybe that was also influential, my A-Level Art was being inspired by him.

Jane (25:57): I mean I've said to my students across time, don't become a playwright because you want to make money. I mean, obviously, some playwrights do make money and you know, the first time a lot of actors, read your first play or early plays, you're just excited if the sentence holds together, and, and the jokes are funny where they're supposed to be, you know, the sex scenes aren't too cringe-worthy, although I always cringe at sex scenes, I don't know why I put them in anymore. But I think what's really interesting about that is, you know, your expectation, you talk about an idea quite early on, but your expectations do get kind of higher.

You know, like I did write about my own experience, my first few plays, as I think many playwrights do, because we probably need to write our own stories, but later on you want to do more with your work, and you want to be bigger, do more. But yeah, I don't think that that thing of making money or not to make money or whether it's a living or not, it's so interesting, I always wonder if it's if I'm too old to start another career when I worry about playwriting not being a great living, but I just am a playwright through and through. And actually, when I was teaching, I would love teaching for a period of time, and then I'd get to a point where I'd want to stop talking about it and just do it.

And one of the lovely things about teaching, because the conversations that you have with your students, hopefully, and often are so inspiring, and the work they make is, but at some point, you want to stop talking about it and do it. And I'm very miserable, if I don't write, which you know. And there was a great thing on Radio Four yesterday, a woman was writing about, talking about writing a very sexy book. And the interviewer said, rather boringly I thought, how do you write the really full-on sex scenes? And I thought, well, she just does. 

But what she said was, I just imagine, no one's ever going to read them, which was such a great answer. And in a way, you know, perhaps we it's like that, you know, that crap quote dance like nobody's watching, perhaps in a way we need to write plays sometimes from the darkness of our soul and think it doesn't matter if nobody watches or loves them.

Ben (27:57): I think I certainly respond to that. I just remembered one last thing on where we come from writing from your life experience. So, we were taught when I was at Harvard by a brilliant photographer, brilliant, called Nan Golden. 

This was it, because part of her work was kind of photographing her life and my life certainly didn't compare. So I was kind of like, well, I couldn't even do it from that thing, because if I were to photograph my life, it just seems really, really boring. So there was that element like I couldn't even do that, I couldn't. 

Jane (28:32): Yeah, yeah. She photographed her punk friends in bedrooms, didn't she kind of?

Ben (28:35): Yes and it felt more purposeful and everything. But on your thought about writing as if nobody's looking. I do remember when I was learning under you this, that sort of thing, particularly when it comes to sort of first draft or ideas, or that impulse, that you sometimes have to hold back the editing impulse, or the kind of person who says like, in your head - what you're writing is completely rubbish, because you can't know at that stage, whether it is or isn't rubbish at all. 

And part of this is maybe coming to your writing process, do you still have that where, particularly when you come in, sit down and write, you need to write a big chunk of it out? Or do you do a kind of planning thing? Do you do a bit of both? How do you approach writing today? And has it changed much over even over the last 10 years, but I was thinking over like 10, 20, 30 years of your writing career?

Jane (29:32): (I'm not that old!) Well, so many good questions, Ben, so many good. So I think through teaching, I've clarified my process, which has been a lovely sort of second-hand bonus from teaching. I do plan like a fiend, I plan now because I wrote a play called A Single Act, I think I wrote it while I was teaching you at the Royal Court, or perhaps it went on then. So I wrote a play called a single act, which had a very complicated timeframe, and that one couple went forward and one went backwards. And I'm not very good at Maths, so when I was writing it, I thought, I'm going to get horribly stuck here, structurally. And the short answer to that bit of the question is I did a sort of map of the timeframe of both couples so that I could stay on track, and also so that it could feel relatively seamless in the unfolding because, I think it plays become too, you know, when plays are like, very kind of self knowingly complicated in their structure, they can feel confusing, and I think plays shouldn't confuse us. 

You know, we don't want to have that David Lynch thing, where he's sitting somewhere going. I really fucked you up when I made you confused there - ha!. So I think plays should feel simple in their unfolding, even if they're nonlinear. So I wanted the structure to feel simple, so I did this kind of map. And ever since then, I've mapped out my plays. So I do plan and by that, I plan kind of the central characters, the perspectives, the story, which I think, you know, is really central, and the structure and by the structure, I mean, when does it happen? Where does it happen? 

Over how long a period of time? And I plan what each of my scenes are, or might be, and then I will say to my students who pull faces at me when I say that, like because they're like, you're just taking all the fun out of the creativity, I will say to my students or any writers that I'm talking to, or with, mentoring, you know, there are no playwright police, no one's going to come around and say, you said that that scene was going to be the scene where the couple split up, but now they're getting it on, you know, no one's going to do that. And you may change that, but you've got something to sort of hang off.

So that kind of foundation is good, and then interestingly, when you get lost or go on to sort of what sort of wank fest if you'll pardon the phrase. And by that, I mean, you just have a day, when you just write and you just sort of free-fall, and you lose your way, you can always go back to that Foundation, which I find really helpful, because it means that I can, I can kind of free-fall or free form within the structure and then go back and knowing why did that in the first place. So I do plan, like a fiend. But I've also written maybe 19 plays now, you know, so I need to.

Ben (32:13): Did you always plan with your first one or two less than you thought, you know what they didn't go as well as my latest one or two? 

Jane (32:20):  No, I didn't plan because I think my first few plays came out, like sort of showers of bullets and I think plays should, you know because I think, when we start, we are writing our own experience, when we write our first few plays I do, whether we are aware of it or not, we're writing sort of who we are and what we want and what's going on in the world and we often write about our age, you know, as in the age we are in the age we live in when we first write, but I think as I've got older and written more plays, I don't want to do that anymore, or not so overtly. 

So the planning for me is a kind of a support structure that I put in place to help myself because, because the process in some ways becomes easier as the right place or a very long answer to this question, the process becomes easier for me because I have more skills and more craft. So I know how to shortcut problems that will cause problems, things that would have caused problems for me in the past. But also now I want to do something new and different and exciting every time. And that becomes harder and harder in some ways, I think.

Ben (33:25): Yeah. That makes sense. And so has locked down, changed your process or nothing obviously, like a lot of creatives? There is limited time to workaround. I mean, obviously, there's some, but it's really diminished, which I think has been really hard on our industry and sector. But it kind of knocks.

Jane (33:47): Yeah, I mean, it's like.

Ben (33:48): What, what do I write with all of this and all of that?

Jane (33:51): Yeah, it's catastrophic. And I've been talking to a few writers back in Australia, where I lived and worked for a while. I mean, some writers, luckily have work and depending on where they live in the world, you know, some things are going on. Interestingly, I've got a tour opening, well rehearsing at the moment in Australia. My play, Lamb, is about to tour nationally and I talked to them yesterday on the first day of rehearsal and then today, they've gone into lockdown. So yeah, I don't know. I can't bear to get in touch with them actually. 

And it was the first bit of work I've had for a year. But you know, it's in Australia, it feels kind of far away and I can't be there. I think from my limited talking to other people or some talking to other people, but I think that a lot of people found the first lockdown, terrifying, but then interesting creatively, creatively because I think that they had time to themselves and quiet and the lack of looming deadlines and time to think. So friends of mine that are painters or, or designers or artists or poets actually said suddenly they had this time and this quiet and that was both daunting, but also quite freeing.

I feel like now people are going, is there any point in using that quiet time to work? Because is anyone ever going to hear it or listen to it or produce it again? So it's really, I think the most interesting thing for me, and I want to ask you about this as well, the most interesting thing for me is you go, what am I making work for? 

Like, my husband is a musician and I said to us both the other day, let's use this time where we've got nothing on, we've really got no work on, let's use this time to make some new work. But then what's the end game? You know, what are you making it for, for your own sense of expression, which of course, in some ways, as an artist, that's what you're doing. But I'm used to now writing things that then go on and are produced, and at the moment, I'm not sure if they will be so it's whether you then choose that time to write something you've never normally write because you think fuck it, it might never go on or whether you end up doing something else entirely. It's really interesting. So for you, what's this time been like, what's locked down been like, broken your work, but also for your creative work?

Ben (36:13): So I'm going to answer this askance and then come back, like you're very interesting, long answer as well. So I remember reading during lockdown, first lockdown that Pushkin when he went into lockdown, he was amazingly prolific. And I was a little bit suspicious, because it's like, yeah, maybe, maybe not. So that's one thought. Another thought as to specifically in this area of the Creative Arts is I think, musicians, to some extent, playwrights particularly, is all work often isn't really finished, until it's finished in front of an audience, that's the thing which completes it, actually going full back around sort of to Ways of Seeing, or ways of being, this idea that art is completed with the viewer or the participants. 

But you know, you could, you could paint for a while, and paint for your own thing, and then feel that okay, at some point that will be exhibited. 

But for something like the live arts of playwriting and musicianship, that disconnect, the longer it goes on, I think the more we feel it, because I think for a lot of it isn't quite complete like that, you know, the play is there, but it's not being performed. So it's not got its ultimate expression. So I do think that the thing, and then I also think that, I do wonder, so there's a lot of talk around, can we reset? Do we come back better? And all of that and the pandemic, around Theatre Arts, so we could talk about it in the world. Yeah, broadly and widely, which is also an interesting question.

And I'm not sure it's really going to do this reset, I'm now more worried that what's going to happen is you're going to have a generation, or just a lot of people who to your last point, are going to end up having to do something else. For a huge variety of reasons, might be money might be things you might have given up, you might feel it's whatever. And actually, that is just going to end up as a creative loss. So I've got a little bit more pessimistic on that. On the other hand, I do acknowledge that these types of crises have often produced a kind of flourishing sometime afterwards. You know, this adversity produces a sort of creativity.

Jane (38:35): Yeah, roaring 20s coming up. Yeah, I wish. My husband says, you know, that the roaring 20s came after the last crisis, and yeah, they flourished. But that wasn't a disease.

Ben (38:47): No, and I do think it might happen, but it might not happen for the same people. So the people who get to flourish are not the same people who got hit really hard here. So this is kind of transferred. Yeah, I got to go really askance. It's a little bit like we would like these coal mines to stop and we would like them to become wind turbines. But to tell the truth and you have to tell the truth, the coal miner, the typical coal miner...

Jane (39:12): Will not be able to work?

Ben (39:14): Will not be able to work. Now his or her son or daughter might well do that, so there's a intergenerational shift, I mean, this is kind of slightly fairy tale, but the example would hold that that might well happen. But if you're an old-time coal miner, it probably isn't happening for you. So there's this interesting intergeneration you can see on the system's level, now there's a new breed of maybe artists coming through particularly if you could be supported by some money, so you don't have to like scrabble for your rent. And then there might be this other flourishing when it comes to flourish.

But I, I worry for those now who, let's say don't have money to support themselves, and so have to retrain and do something else, or those are over a generation older and who might, we might get lost. So I am sort of slightly optimistic because I do think flourish, things do happen. But I am actually now more worried that they're the kinks shift in time will be a little bit more will be a little bit more damaging.

Jane (40:12): Yeah, and I think also the work that will be around will be more scarce. So, you know, like, applying for sort of art jobs at the moment, normally, where there would be, you know, 50 people applying, there's now 500 people applying because they've lost stuff. I think what will happen is that artists will have to work in new ways, or they'll have to do new things. You know, we've all had to learn how to use Zoom, is the very simple version of that and I did some Zoom teaching, which I just thought I was going to loathe. And lots of people signed up when I did it last year, and I loved it, actually, partially because I could wear my tracksuit.

Ben (40:47): You should definitely do more of that. But there's nothing like digital theatre, until recently. 

Jane (40:53): It leaves me cold. 

Ben (40:55): Also, people have not prepared to pay as much for it. So this is the whole. And it might be because actually, you’re the whole shared experience element is less. I mean, there is obviously something in it, because people are watching and you can get millions of people who watch a series on TV, and then we can talk about it. But there is something about actually this is something in common maybe with the music gig scene, right? That there is something about that live shared experience

Jane (41:21): Yeah, totally.

Ben (41:24): Which is different from it online.

Jane (41:26): And I mean, I think I'm sure when I taught you a lot, and this includes you, I used to at the first lesson, I don't think this was original, I think Simon Stevens used to do this at the Royal Court, and it's probably Steven Jeffries anyway really, you know, I'd ask what is the fundamental difference between theatre and film? And we get the writers to kind of get a list on the board or the students to get a list on the board and that was so we could talk about what we should embrace when we write plays, you know, that plays can be set anywhere, or that can be set in someone's mind, in one location, play with time, all of those wonderful imaginative things.

I think what's really interesting is that, you know, one of the reasons I love going to theatre is for that kind of being in the dark room sitting next to someone I don't know experience. But I also like the risk of that. And, and going to see theatre can be amazing and I can be transported or I can just spend the whole time thinking about what I'm going to have when I get home for dinner. And, and you know those, those kinds of polarized experiences. But I kind of love that you take that risk, it's like going to the live comedy, right? You kind of sit down, you don't know what you're in for, bad or amazing. 

But I don't want to sit down and watch the telly and it be that. I'd rather watch something I know is good. So if I'm not all in, sitting in a room with a load of people, I don't know, and the lights go down and the adventure begins whether it be good or bad, I'd rather watch something I know is going to be good if I'm sitting on my couch and just turning an ON button. So it's problematic for me, and I'm really trying to watch theatre on TV, actually Sky Arts, which is free now which is brilliant has been showing some theatre. And I watched Jane Eyre the other night, which was brilliant, the National Theatre production it was I sort of felt like I was there, but I was on my own in a dark room on the couch, there was no one around and so and I sort of very consciously committed to it but and it was very long.

 But I'm worried about digital theatre. And I thought, what I'm really interested in I spend all day thinking about it at the moment is how can we write plays that embrace digital theatre, so we're not just putting on the plays that we were seeing before, as digital, you know, how can we embrace the form? And the other thing is sorry, 98 answers...the other thing is, can we now write things that don't acknowledge the pandemic? And do they feel contemporary? Like, if I'm going to write something, a TV idea, or play they're about now, does it have to be post-pandemic? Or are we going to get sick of those post-pandemic plays?

Ben (43:47): So I think so this is one question that we've been discussing, I haven't got the answer on this. So do you think what makes a good play is going to have to change post-pandemic slightly? I get that plays in a time of climate change is one thing, but I do wonder, I think that thing you hit on like the incursion of digital, which is its own form and space, but it plays still have to be a different thing. They can't try and squeeze themselves into digital because then they're not plays right in the same way. Do you think its going to change or not change?

Jane (44:25): I don't know because unlike you, I don't understand how money works because I've never had any and I don't know what the pressure is on theatres to, I don't know...it's such an interesting question to me and I...I still secretly smoke cigarettes and I often stand on my back stoop having a cigarette, sort of staring into the sky thinking, you know, what's going to happen to theatre? Like, what's going to happen? I don't know. I don't know.

And I don't know what we'll be clamouring for.

And the last Zoom teaching I did the last lesson I did, I said to my students, I want you to write the play that if this was the first play that people were going to see when the pandemic ended or when lockdown ended, I want you to write that. So is it that that plays then about, you know everyone with masks on in lockdown? Or is it that we want to see a play where people can licking each other's faces with gusto, the great joy of human contact and exchange bodily fluid, you know, it's like, what is it? What's the, what are we going to need from theatre? But I suppose you're asking what will theatre need to be? Which is a different question. It's really interesting. Yeah, yeah.

Ben (45:34): Yeah. So on the one hand, sometimes these things happen, and they, we don't change that much, you know, there's been swine flu, there's been other things, you know, we still, I speak to a lot of people on Zoom, something like men misunderstand. I was speaking to a lot of women on video call and they're still putting on perfume, right? Because it's not, it's not for the video. It was cool because it's for themselves and for all of these other things. And that's probably not actually going to change for people to use perfume and all of that type of thing.

Jane (46:07): But make up sales have dropped Ben.

Ben (46:09): Have they?

Jane (46:10): There was a whole thing about it on the radio this morning. They went up because everyone was doing Zoom, like Oh, my God, I look terrible. And now they've gone down because people just like, yeah, yeah, can't be bothered. So we're all going through it, up and down.

Ben (46:21): Maybe that's like it with writer's creativity went up in the first couple of months. Like, oh, and then it's like...

Jane (46:28): I don't have to go out tonight anymore. Also, I think people's timetables went all skew which is great for creativity, if you're a new writer or not a morning person. But yeah, and then in the way that mental illness and, and sort of trauma and stress and anxiety has gone really up this lockdown because we, we just feel like is it just going to be an endless series of lockdowns. So do our plays have to acknowledge that we are in a time of no fixed plans? 

Or should our plays you know, it's so interesting for me like one of the, it's so interesting when you watch TV at the moment, I think like I watched something the other night, it was about a DJ who died tragically, or no, not tragically, but he died. And you know, there were just crowds of there was just it was only a few years ago, there was footage of people in crowds, you know, dancing and sweating, touching each other. And it feels like another era already.

Ben (47:30): Although, so on this, so this on this is the wider pandemics. And I think there's going to be really interesting geographic splits as well because so we can have an arm about the UK response and there's probably quite a lot to criticize. But the half the country will probably be vaccinated quite soon.

Jane (47:49): Yeah, you keep saying that, I love it.

Ben (47:52): Actually, our lockdown, if you think just about the UK, which we'll come to, but by summer, call it June, July, there should be 70 to 80% immunity coverage across the country, which is enough to actually exit from lockdown and all of that. But if you compare that somewhere like, yes, it is, well roughly, let's say approximately, it is. Yeah. It approximately is within sort of, you know, a lot of these forecast errors, but it, it is particularly is for the vulnerable. Mass majority over 80 will be done and overseas.

Jane (48:30): Yeah, yeah. 

Ben (48:32): But if you look at even places like France and Germany, they're quite a way behind. And before you even get to, say, Africa or India, so you might have well, London if it wanted to, might be able to escape lockdown and maybe you, you know, this whole thing like, okay, and people from other countries aren't really aren't really coming. So you have this, you have this partial reopening and, and maybe you could get on with it, but only in a kind of more localized way. And I don't know, so maybe then that will be that for the UK. The pandemic flashed, flashed away in a year to 18 months, and not so many changes, except that you had a generation who couldn't earn anything for two years, and therefore, they disappeared.

But yeah, I do wonder then about and that is that broader movement, that we've had kind of globalization for quite a while. Now that's the signs that you've got, what I would call relocalization. So the local corner shop has become quite important now and you always had a place in the community and all of these exhibitors A lot of localization effects, as well as globalization effects. And actually, you'll have these two things coming together. And I don't know whether that will encourage creativity, or

Jane (49:46): It's like everyone's going to set all their plays in the supermarket? Is that the only place we go? There'll never be any food in restaurants again. Oh! Yeah. It's such a yeah, there's an advert on at the moment, which is quite incredible, I don't know if you've seen it's not an advert, it's not advertising anything, it's a very beautiful kind of public information. It's a woman, who goes to the supermarket with her child, have you seen it? 

Ben (50:11): No.

Jane (50:11): And she is sitting in the car and there's voiceover, which is her saying to her partner, it was just really busy, as the queues are really long and you know, because of the pandemic, and when is it all going to stop. And then you realize she's just sitting in the car with her child. And obviously, she doesn't want to go home. And you're thinking, okay, is there something wrong? And then when she gets home, there's a just a beautiful, which is incredibly subtle where you realize she's potentially in a violent domestic situation. And, yeah, so she's been lying to her partner, and they've just been sitting in the car for two hours just to get away.

And then the line that comes up is like, you know, during lockdown, for some people, home isn't always a safe place, or something like that. And that for me, has been the thing that's risen about the pandemic that I want to write about, but I don't know what yet, as in this idea of people, you know, the idea of the domestic being wrong, or hard, but actually, during the pandemic, that underscoring of the kind of underclass, or people that are not safe, they feel like the people that we should be writing about. And, yeah, if I had my way, what I would do is somehow go into those parts of society now and say, we need to hear from you.

Ben (51:29): This is the untold stories element, right? 

Jane (51:32): Yeah. 

Ben (51:34): Actually, their stories always resonate. But yeah, that's one of our purposes of storytelling. 

Jane (51:39): Indeed. And, and perhaps that's what's changed for me in my career is that I, I wanted to tell my untold stories, and I've told all my stories, they're all told, and I'm really interested not because I want to like speak for the masses, because I'm really interested in the people that aren't Zooming and don't get to have these, you know, places to talk and what the pandemic is like for them. And I have a brother who lives partially on the streets, and I have a mother in care, so I'm obviously thinking about them, and, and, and what their stories are during the pandemic. 

Yeah, so I'm doing that thing that I do, Ben, which is that I'm trying to work out what matters to me during this time, and therefore, what do I want to write about? And kind of what is it? How do I do it? And I did a session in my Zooms, which was called Writing in Time of Crisis, which was me saying, do we write about the pandemic or not, as I said earlier, but it was also like, how do we sort of authentically respond to what's going on now as writers. And in a way, we all have to do that very individually, I think, you know. We will be so sick of Zoom the Musical in a few months' time, so how do we write the plays that metaphorically matter, I suppose, if that doesn't sound too wanky, respond to what's going on now, which is really interesting for me.

Ben (53:00): Which brings me to my question which was related to that, what would you say to us, or people, writers now? Like, is that good advice of the moment? Or what kind, is it changed? What was your advice generally? I kind of feel like your advice was a little bit like my advice a while back which was you need to write, right. And I've always felt this is one of the things there's a period when I felt like I wasn't writing I might not write again. But I've started a writing practice up again, and I've written again, from it. But I wonder whether you know, there is, there's more to that, that has to be a bedrock, like, if you're not writing, then that's a bit tricky, or seeing stuff or being involved.

Jane (53:40): And when you tell them you haven't been writing. Like you, you're often busy with your life and work and your family, as you should be because that's your life too. But if we meet up and I say, Have you been writing? And you often go a bit like, you know, No, I haven't been. So you feel, I think, a sadness when you aren't writing.

Ben (54:01): Yeah, and I think you're going really back full circle, compared to like when I was young and thinking about that, because I didn't, I didn't feel that sadness was when I wasn't directing. Whereas this broader element of creativity, drawing yeah, and writing, writing for sure (I need to do that, in some way). And I still get like small scraps of time, but I've also realized that now I probably do need half days, maybe full days; I tend to be a night-time writer. Like I kind of dwell on things during the day, but it really only comes together towards night and actually, my eldest son is definitely a night person, as well. But yeah, I guess, what's your advice to writers or writers now? I guess we can't necessarily talk to ourselves that much. 

Jane (55:02): Well, the only thing I say to myself at that moment is no, it will come back (creativity) because you've done it for too long, I've done it for, you know, most of my life, I know that it'll come back. I used to go away on kind of writing retreats, or yoga retreats, creativity retreats, when I could afford it! I used to go and I'd never do any work on them. I'd never do any work. I'd always just sleep and cry, or walk or get cross. And then when I came back, I'd always start writing. And interesting I said to John the other day (my husband) it's almost like, I like a bit of like, a bit of chaos to write in, but not this much world chaos.

It's like, some people like to respond to a deadline, my equivalent of that is I like a bit of kind of world chaos, but there's much chaos at the moment that I feel overwhelmed. And I suppose my advice to writers at the moment is to, to not allow the pandemic to, to heavily influence what you're writing, just write what you were going to write anyway, or want to write anyway, and see how the pandemic kind of naturally influences it. Because I think that's when the great metaphor plays happen.

You know if we think of The Crucible by Arthur Miller, I mean, I think he definitely wanted to, I think he was probably really fascinated by the story of The Witches of Salem and then it probably came to him that he wanted to write about The McCarthy Witch Hunts, and that those two things beautifully sat together. Yeah, and I suppose the other thing is to find the time of the day when you find it best to write, don't try and...it's like people that are not morning people trying to be morning people. It just doesn't work. Ben does it? No, we both know that. 

Ben (56:42): I was really, I reading that He was a Pace man. You read the part, novel series. But he writes like this is whatever, 100 over a year ago, but he wrote everything from 4 am to 7 am, or whatever, and wrote tons of novels and did really well on like, no sleep.

Jane (56:59):. But I reckon it's like physiological, it's sort of blood sugar. You know, for me, I cannot write first thing in the morning, I can just about do my emails, but I'm much better like making coffee, cleaning the kitchen, I kind of have to potter a bit. But I'm sorry, I keep saying this, but I would say to my students, and it really worked for them over the years and they were all really different, my strange brood of children, and I would say to them, find the time in the day when you find it best to write and it probably has to do with blood sugar or something like that and, and have that as your time, and for me, it's an afternoon and night thing.

So if I get all the stuff done I need to do in the morning, and then I sit down after lunch I can write from 2 to about 10, which is about as much as I can do now without getting bad back and a bit sort of twitchy. But then you know that time is for that. It's like knowing when you're best to eat breakfast or knowing when you're best to go to sleep. I think that's a really good bit of advice because days at the moment are just stretching in an untimely fashion aren't they, and time loses all sense.

Did I give you any great advice when I was your teacher? Was there anything you held on to? 

Ben (58:15): Yeah, what I think a lot of it for me was about thinking about structure and form and things like that, and your actual story you know, turning points and things, things I have really been dwelling upon. So a lot of it I guess, well that's craft, so it was just another level, and then the craft saying look these are some guidelines and then this is where, you know, your brilliance, or your complete opposite of brilliance, will go outside the guidelines, it will work or it might not. And so that that sort of thing, I think I took away, I took away that this is, go on.

Jane (59:02): No, but that when you asked me about structure before, and then my advice, I mean, I'm very big on structure and I love teaching structure and I think it's something I do well and I love it as well. I'm like a structure kind of fruit loop, that's my technical term, in that I get very excited about structure because it kind of opens up doors for me and it's like, it's like wrapping a present beautifully, or just functionally, I get very excited about it. But I think what's really interesting at the moment is that time and space are not normal, at the moment. 

So, for example, you know, when I was teaching structure on the Zooms, I ended up, everyone was in their room, you know, like, normally, I would say, 'How do you feel about location? And how does location affect your scene? And if you think about putting characters in different places, what does that do to your characters?' And, you know, some characters like being in a closed, neat room, or like being outside...etc 

And at the moment, of course, we're just thinking about space in a much more interesting way, because we're all in the same four walls, essentially and we're also thinking about time in a really interesting way, because we can't plan anything. And days are kind of monotonously the same. So I think my advice would be to think about placing your play in a time and place that somehow sticks two fingers up to COVID. So like, build a play that sits outside, this time and place, you know. Or really acknowledge the sort of guidelines, the restrictions that COVID has placed upon us in your play. Like, at the moment, I just bought loads of books on, on astronauts, because I'm really interested in writing something about astronauts, which you'll go what, as you know me you'll go, why Jane? And it's because I'm really interested in writing about the kind of quarantine that astronauts would go into in the past, when they got back from space, as a way of looking at how that affects us now. Have you gone quiet?

Ben (1:01:02): I'm just, yeah. Astronauts, yeah, that is really fascinating. I'm aware that we could probably talk for ages. 

Jane (1:01:08): I know we could.

Ben (1:01:09): Maybe we need to...because I kind of felt we went into some on our creative processes and processes by hand. We felt we want more, but I might ask my last question then.

Jane (1:01:20): Okay, good.

Ben (1:01:23): Yeah. Well, maybe we're going to, maybe my last question would be if you weren't writing, what do you think you would doing or should be doing?

Jane (1:01:35): I love that question. It's so full of possibilities. But at the moment, I'm so terrifying unemployed, so. 

Ben (1:01:42): Let's say a fantasy job to have then...

Jane (1:01:47): Can I have three answers? So I'm, so I'm really obsessed with food as are you and cooking and I found cooking during lockdown really healing for whatever less annoying word. I've really missed cooking for other people. So I've started cooking in lots, like way too much food for me and my husband. Like on Valentine's Day, I'm made cake and delivered it to people where we're living. 

So I think I'd probably run some kind of thing where I had to cook for people. And I did a playwriting retreat in Australia when I was living there, where people pay a lot of money to come and have me teach them, I was mentoring them for the weekend. And I also organized the food and I enjoyed doing the food more than the teaching. So I'd do something to do with food. I would be in a band is my fantasy job because my dad was a musician, I'm obsessed with music. 

I would sing in a band, though I'd probably be dead by now if that was my career. And I think I would have really liked to somehow gone into law, but I don't think I was clever enough, not in the right way, but I've just got a very strong sense of justice and I get very arsy about stuff, but I don't think I'd have been very good at it and I'd have probably failed. Okay, I'm going to ask you

Ben (1:03:14): You'd want to be a lawyer, really? Then I'd be a politician. [Inaudible 1:03:18]  

Jane (1:03:20): Yeah. But you can make and change law with plays, I think, change the way you see things. 

Ben (1:03:27): Probably maybe even to a greater extent with stories, then you can work with actual legislation, the stories would shape the legislation and shape people.

Jane (1:03:36): Yeah, and I did say that to my students. If you could change the world with your next play, what would you write? Which is a bit sort of lofty and hefty I know, but why not? So I was going to say if you were not a playwright, which you are, and you are many things, what are the other jobs that you would be doing? If you weren't doing the jobs that you are doing?

Ben (1:03:57): Well, food service is something we have in common. I, I don't know exactly, quite what. So this is kind of sort of fantasy because it doesn't really work, but I would maybe do this thing where I would be the chef maker, but I would, a little bit like these very high ends. 

Jane (1:04:16): What's a chef maker? 

Ben (1:04:17): Well, so I'm going to describe, so like, that's very high end. So chefs nowadays, like, they direct their sous chefs to do all of the things and they stand around their plate and they do a bit of cooking, but they don't really do cooking. 

Jane (1:04:28): Yeah.

Ben (1:04:32): So this chef maker, I have is like these master sushi makers, but I wouldn't be doing sushi, I would have maybe eight seats and I would cook something personally for all eight of you and we will probably have a conversation, whilst we're cooking about this is why I've chosen that and this. And so I guess that's like a dinner party, but I'm doing it as cheffing and fooding. And we would eat all together and they would not, be more than, maybe eight. So you could come in couples, or it could be two fours. And you wouldn't also really get a choice. I mean maybe I'd have to do like a veggie thing or not veggie thing, whatever. But it will be basically, you turn up. And this is what you get.

Jane (1:05:19): I am so coming around your house for this, when we're allowed to [Inaudible1:05:23].

Ben (1:05:25): So that would be my foodie thing. As of late, I do wonder whether something along teaching, but not, I guess for very non-traditional teaching. Like, I don't quite know how it works, but essentially, they would be like little salons and things over sort of topics but where we get around, and you know, discuss, you know, the things that we know or have discovered, like, I guess if it was in playwriting, right, although on me other.

Jane (1:05:53): Well that's kind of what this is what I suppose. 

Ben (1:05:55): Yeah, but this is we, playwright collectively, although we might argue about a lot of things, there are some aspects about our craft, which I would say unknown, or we might still debate about them, but you know, there's 50 or 60% of things that people would agree that this these are ingredients.

Jane (1:06:13): Can you hold it? Someone's knocking on the door with a parcel I knew that was going to happen. Oh. Hello. Yes. That's very good. Thank you very, very, very much. That was quite a good moment because he said Brody, and I just thought I'm not going to say it's Bodie.

Ben (1:06:38): I'm doing a little bit, but I do wonder whether that's, that's the thing, that's the thing you, that's the thing you could do. I might have gone on to be, with my scientific training parker career. I know, my professors were disappointed that I didn't go on into science. And I do wonder whether I would have made maybe more of an impact in science. So actually, I had a conversation here, kind of circle back with my science professors as well about careers and things.

And my science professor at the time, who was one of the youngest professors in this area of neuroscience, and he said he spent, although he didn't mind, maybe 50% of his time doing funding application type science or funding applications, 20 or 30% of his time teaching, which he really enjoyed and then only 20 or 30% of his time left to doing the science he wanted to do. And I'm not sure that was the split I wanted.

Jane (1:07:38): That's really a good question for future, for these conversations, the kind of percentage what, because I think one of my questions was and interestingly, we haven't gotten to them because we've had just as interesting a conversation around other things led brilliantly by you, but one of my questions is, you know, what's your ideal creative working day? And sort of the in brackets like does any of us ever have that? And I suppose like, what's your percentage? So what is from you? What is your ideal creative working day and I'm not involving your children, your wife in that, because that's a given.

Ben (1:08:16): Would probably be, so this is the fantasy because I don't think this happens right would be two hours work. Okay, so the super fantasy would maybe be two hours work in the morning.

Jane (1:08:29): Work on other stuff to make money?

Ben (1:08:32): No, no, no. This is a creative day. 

Jane (01:08:34): Yeah, perfect.

Ben (1:08:37): Two hours creative practice, although that might not all be writing this, that might be reading, right? Or something else. Then, unfortunately, a light lunch because if it's a big lunch, really let's be honest like you can lie to yourself, but...so light lunch and then another couple of hours and then probably if it's a writing day, it probably is a lighter dinner as well and then a couple of hours after dinner as well. I don't think I've ever achieved such a day.

Jane (1:09:11): I completely love, you have your creative day also involves your meals.

Ben (1:09:17): Oh, yeah.

Jane (1:09:18): I love it, I love it though. Because I'm like, 'What's your idea of a creative day?' You're like a light lunch for starters...

Ben (1:09:31): But so I think the practical one would probably be only having two of those sessions. But I think in all fairness, I probably have only ever managed one, I think I probably managed sessions where one or two hours and maybe spent reading thinking, and then another two or three in a writing but I don't think I've had a 10-hour breakthrough writing day or. 

Jane (1:09:56): Never?! 

Ben (1:10:00): Well, I probably have I wouldn't have considered them good creative days, right?

Jane (1:10:10): That's really fascinating. Yeah, so you asked me a brilliant question which I answered terribly. So my advice would be to people at the moment or just at any point, would be to observe your own creative process and the days where you are really productive in the days when you aren't, which are partially chemical, part other things, you know, rain, sun... 

Ben (1:10:31): Yeah, this is why keep on talking about food. Because I know, so I don't if I'm going to have a good creative day as well, I try not to eat a very big breakfast.

Jane (1:10:39): I love it. I love it.

Ben (1:10:41): But it's really true.

Jane (1:10:43): So I basically when I'm having a really good creative day, I don't even eat, right? Look at me, like I look like I don't eat, yeah, right. So I know what my perfect creative days because during lockdown, I've really observed it and I've got one of the days down, knowing when it works, which is really good. So I get up having had a good night's sleep, which isn't always because I'm menopausal. But, ideally, I get up having a good night's sleep. And I have an hour in the morning where I have no pressure on, no phone calls, turn the phone off, I listen to radio for music, which is very good for me pre working, make myself breakfast, coffee, have a few cigarettes, apologies to peeps, kind of look at the sky for a bit of dream time, like an hour or so.

And then, I've worked out here that I need to go and do something physical for an hour, whether it be a walk, or some yoga or something, which is kind of getting rid of the nervous kind of and the fast energy for me. And then I sit down and either read or read through what I'm currently writing, or read through my research stuff, though I don't do a lot of research, but at the moment, something I'm writing is taking some; so that's my astronauts. So I look through some stuff that kind of gives me some dream time, write some notes, whatever. 

Then I will have my lunch, I will have some lunch because otherwise, I'll get so hungry, I'll start kind of eating myself. And then I need to sit down at two, which pisses me off because two is The Archers on Radio Four and also The Radio Play, which is sometimes really good, so sometimes I don;t then start till three if the radio play is good. And then I work solidly three to eight, or if I'm going well, three till ten, I just write. 

And that is my perfect creative day and that is when I can get whole scene done, or rewrite something and make it loads better or fix something that's not working, or if my creativity that day is reading a play, I can get a whole play read and write some really good notes, so that I worked out it's like two till eight or two till ten. And then if I'm having an amazing day when I'm writing like the last play I've written Tell Me You Love Me, I'm having an amazing day, I'd eat at nine and then I'll keep going, because then I think this day is so good, I have to harness it. But I don't have children like you.

Ben (1:13:01): I've not had days where I say I can do all of this writing. So I think I probably don't know what's actually the best one. So I'm going to take your advice, I'm going to think about what it is. But also I don't think I can achieve it anytime soon. Because I'm doing stuff.

Jane (1:13:17): You could try doing something like it?

Ben (1:13:19): Well, maybe, I don't know. So, we were discussing my wife, who has to go and she's writing creative nonfiction at the moment. And she goes to the car for two hours at a time to get out of the house to be able to write, because there's just, this is the whole...I don't want to say...the tasks of home in their widest sense, just infiltrate everything, to be able to have that space. 

Jane (1:13:54): Thank your wife. The fact that she goes and as I said to you when you told me that a couple of weeks ago, I just said normally, the stories I heard that people are going to drink in the car. It's people that are like, so devoted to drinking. But she is amazing, that's real dedication. That's because it's the nearest space she can get to that is quiet and private.

Ben (1:14:15): Yeah. 

Jane (1:14:16): And that's like at the Royal Court, the Writers' Rooms looked like toilets, I think they probably had been toilets. When I first got there, I thought no one could write in there, but you know, if needs must when you want to write and you want a quiet space, you just want a desk. You don't care if you've chairs ergonomic. Like, because I always end up writing at the kitchen table anyway. So I would say to you, you need to, in your notepad, you need to observe a day where you get some really good writing done, or just writing that feels like it, it worked well for you that day. And you need to observe what that day was, and make a note of it.

Ben (1:14:51): Yeah, although actually, that first thing. I know. It's all supercharged when I have really great sleep, so.

Jane (1:14:57): Yeah, indeed, everything is.

So maybe should have two questions, each quick ones. I'm going to go through my list. And we're only we have to answer them quickly, which I know that I am the person that can't do that.

Ben (1:15:25): Go on.

Jane (1:15:27): Um, so I have many questions, but have you got through your questions?

Ben (1:15:33): For me, it's a bit of a conversation. I've got a bazillion more that I could ask.

Jane (1:15:41): I don't know what bazillion, well so. 

Ben (1:15:44): Bazillion is more than a zillion.

Jane (1:15:47): I didn't know that. 

Yeah, so I suppose my first question is, what are you dreaming of creating when COVID is over, as a piece of art, and it can't be a meal menu?

Ben (1:16:12): Yeah, so I am working, I think I might have mentioned it a little bit about. So my current show, which is still going on in a digital form, it’s called Thinking Bigly and is about an.

Jane (1:16:23): It's brilliant everybody.

Ben (1:16:25): It's kind of what we call a performance lecture, because a lot of it is about what happens in climate and sustainability, but it has a lot of other elements too. And I'm actually doing one I've just started, so this is a lot of R&D time, and I haven't sat down to piece it all together. But I've got a lot of Post-its on it in the similar vein on essentially on how we die. So taking a lot of elements around death and so this is I started this pre-power.

Jane (1:16:53): How can we, plan for that better?

Ben (1:16:56): So it's quite all-encompassing, that is one element. Another element or you know, what are the risk factors which cause us to die. Like it's very different in the UK than it is in Africa and then it's also through time. So how we died 150 years ago is different today. And then those that splits into those various elements. So what we died off was very different in 1800 to today, but they were also much closer to death, right? They actually probably understood it more, because you might die by the time you were 20. So you would have multiple, you would enclose people, people in your neighbourhood, it would have been an ever-present item and actually...one of the things around the pandemic. 

Which is quite, interesting is sort of the wrong word, is that it has borders, a lot of us are closer to death in our in our everyday lives. Which has shocked us, but actually, in some way should not be shocking us because it is actually always happening around us everywhere. And I know with your mum and everything, that's sort of present, but so this thing about that, and then we plan for it really badly. Partly because we as humans probably don't want to face up to mortality and all of that, but you know, these are the layers.

Ben (1:18:08): Why haven't we sorted out those questions? So I've got a kind of performance lecture in me around that where some of it is my own thing.

Jane (1:18:17): I'm just going to say one thing, is that not a play as well then?

Ben (1:18:24): Maybe, but I haven't found the play format because it was too much. So this is the whole thing about drawing on your own stuff, it draws too much on

Jane (1:18:32): On your own stuff.

Ben (1:18:33): On my own stuff, in a way that I don't want to transform it into another and also I want it to draw on other people's stuff. So Thinking Bigly, you've got me talking now. So Thinking Bigly, you start with, you write your own climate confessions and own climate actions and in the same way, I'd probably open up how we die, something like, so I will ask you what is the song that I should play at my funeral? But you can write that for me. But then what is the song you should play at your own funeral, if you've got to choose? So you should write that down. So there is the opportunity to input some of their thoughts, you know, what is the reading you choose for yourself? I mean, how, why haven't we thought about that? And we should we think about that.

Jane (1:19:18): I know my Desert Island Discs, so you'd think I'd work that out.

Ben (1:19:22): Yeah. Why? And I don't know, I don't know what the piece of music would be. So this was like, the thing is like, oh, I'm writing this, I have no idea what my piece of music would be, what my reading, I have now a little bit of it because I thought about it and actually, I have two or three choices. It's like, well, how should you shape what the funeral is, you should check for me and that's I guess, the theatrical gimmick around the around it, we have a little bit of that. So that is the piece of work I'm actually currently working on, as well as kind of all of the other stuff. So I've actually got a shape for it.

Jane (1:19:54): But also its really good that the piece is like looking at how we die. Because we've, as you said, become closer to it because of the pandemic. So in a way, that feels like your response to the pandemic.

Ben (1:20:05): Yeah, so it is and maybe one of the reasons I've delayed, putting all of it out there is that.

Jane (1:20:20): And, and my answer to that is that I want to write something about sort of confined spaces, which is partially about the pandemic, but it's also to do with my mother, who lived in a big house and was a traveller and an adventurer, at the end of her life being in a care home and those two things have kind of come together in a COVID way for me, so I'm going to write, I'm going to read about what I'm really interested in, in the first people that had to quarantine, which is astronauts, and what that was like in a time and that was really understood and what our understanding of that was, and I'm interested in, in someone having come back from space, being in a quarantine situation with, with their family and, and, and so looking at sort of quarantine in that way. 

Don't nick that idea anyone because it's really good, Jane Bodie said it first. And really you've kind of answered my questions, because really, I was like, What are you going to make next? And you've said what you're going to do.

I suppose, what's the best piece of work you've seen during COVID? And it can be a response to COVID? I know that's annoying because then you'll be like, oh, I can't think, and then you'll remember it while you're making a cup of tea, or some food knowing you. But have you seen anything during the pandemic, other than that brilliant Zoom meeting the other day where that guy shouted at that women? Have you seen anything that you've loved?

Ben (1:21:45): I haven't. There has been stuff on, but like it's been on, it's not been a covered pandemic, like related piece of work. And this is interesting because I have felt that, and this is to your earlier point that I don't think theatre has produced a piece in response, either digitally or in some other way, I don't know what the other thing, so this is this is where we probably, this is where we probably struggled. And so there have been things, but it's kind of I think the kind of interesting question is, have you seen a piece of art, something theatrical somehow COVID pandemic of its time, form, or shape from where we are and has made you go, wow? Actually, I haven't. I don't know what I was expecting to see. But maybe, this is maybe our tragedy is that we've, we've not done it yet.

Yeah, there's Netflix and digital theatre and all of that, but yeah, so my answer is No, no, I haven't.

Jane (1:23:07): No, okay.

Ben (1:23:08): There's been some artwork and there's been some good work on different sort of levels. But if I were to say, you know, is that a theatrical COVID response? No. And this is interesting because I want to say that we've maybe had two or three moderate responses. But I would say theatre hasn't also done a particular climate response, either. Partly the narrative of things and so it's kind of interesting that you do a lot of echoes of pandemic and big system-wide things, and of climate.

Jane (1:23:43): Is he called David Finnegan, that you do Thinking Bigly with?

Ben (1:23:50): Yeah, we've done some and he actually his view is that all are at the moment is climate art, actually, because we're living in a time of climate change, and therefore art is that, without having to be. 

Jane (1:23:59): That's a bit generous to art.

Ben (1:24:01): That interesting. So maybe theatrical responses don't work on big systemic things in the same in the same fashion? I don't know.

Jane (Or, like, like, like my play a single act, no, like, after 9/11, I felt that the plays that were immediately, there are a couple of immediate responses to it, that were incredible. That were kind of very knee-jerk. But then there are a spate of very terrible plays about 9/11 because I think playwrights fail if we're not writing about 9/11, like, Who Are We? But I feel like actually, those events, those happenings, those presences, those present times they need to kind of percolate and drop a bit in. You know, Joe Penhall talked about writing a play about his father's death, and then it just being a terrible experience for him, and everyone else, and just a sort of betrayal of, you know, like, things need time and distance, I think things need to percolate and drop in and sort of be digested in a creative sense before you...it's like bad love poetry otherwise. Give it a bit of space.

Ben (1:25:15): What about you? Have you seen anything?

Jane (1:25:17): No, and I agree with you totally. I've seen moments of things. I think the strongest thing I've seen is the advert, which everyone should see, the woman sitting in a car, because you just go, fuck, she can't go home and yet she's in a pandemic, so she has to. So she's going to supermarket pretending that she's been there, that is so powerful. And that just maybe does what good art does, because it made my heart open up to someone else's...reality, possibilities, what was going on for someone in a way that just made me think all afternoon about it. And made me think, what are the stories that we should be writing? So I think that's probably the best thing. I've quite liked staged with Michael Sheen and David Tennant, but it's a bit kind of, of the moment light on.

Ben (1:26:02): So let's finish with the kind of contact blah blah spiel. So if people are interested in you know, maybe you're going to do another online tutoring thing or Zoom teaching, or just want to find out more about you. Is there a Twitter?.

June (1:26:22): I don't do Twitter, I do have a Facebook, but I don't really check it. Yeah, we should probably give our email. So I am going to be doing some Zoom teaching again, we haven't really talked about it, but they went pretty great and were really well attended and people loved them. I do a five-week playwriting course. And I'm going to be starting that again in March.

Ben (1:26:39): If you're interested. 

Jane (1:26:41): If you're interested. 

Ben (1:26:43): Ask me.

Jane (1:26:45): Yeah, ask him! 

Ben (1:26:46): You can get hold of me like, everywhere I go. So I keep a blog, thendobetter.com. And you can contact me through that.

Jane (1:26:52): It's really good. your blog, Then Do Better.

Ben (1:26:56): Yeah, thendobetter.com, because the idea is if you think you can do better, then do better. So don't just complain about stuff, do stuff. I'm on Twitter @BenyoBen, you can find me sort of everywhere. 

Jane (1:27:10): Thinking Bigly?

Ben (1:27:12): Thinking Bigly actually, so Thinking Bigly, there's got another showing in April, but I'm not sure it's going to be a super public showing. So I will find out when the next public one will be, but there's nothing immediately on the cards.

Jane (1:27:26): And the How To Die show is currently percolating?

Ben (1:27:29): Yeah, work in progress. Though, I have got a couple of things... 

Jane (1:27:33): In between your meal breaks. 

Ben (1:27:34): Yeah, exactly. And there's a project that I've gotten going, that will be something called Climate Unconference or Sustainability Unconference. And so I don't know if you know, or theatre people listening to know that the theatre world has devoted and disgruntled, which is kind of run by improbable, which is a participatory form of conference discussing the state of theatre, that just actually happened not too long ago. And essentially, I'm interested in a participatory form of talking about climate and the intersection of creatives and also policy and finance people. And I'm hoping that will go on, maybe around about June. So that is of interest you can also get in contact with me that's.

Jane (1:28:23): You dropped that pearler in at the end, as you do. Juicy bit of stuff there. I love talking to you, Ben.

Ben (1:28:35): I really loved it. So, yeah, we'll do, we'll do some more, we'll do some more.

Jane (1:28:40): I'm talking to Annabel Arden, actor and director, formerly of Theatre De Complicite next, and today I got an email from playwright Francis Poet, who's just been shortlisted for the Susan Blackwood prize. I'm going to also be interviewing her and that is what we've got so far, and there will be more...

Ben (1:28:59): So, look out for it. Thank you. Bye.

Jane (1:29:02): Bye.