The quiet early hours, from 5 to 7 in the morning, have always been my most fertile time for ideas. However, there’s a catch: when I sit down to type, I lose the flow of thoughts because I’m still processing them while trying to write. So, this morning, as I sat with my half-drunk coffee…
We got a call just after 10:30am on Wednesday from ITN saying that they had a film crew in Guildford reporting on the overnight snow and wondering whether they could come and film at our Warm Hub. In the late summer, you know when we had a change of monarch and several prime ministers and…
The crafting of an Open Space invitation will be iterative. I like to have an overarching single question as the title of the event. How broad it is does depend on the subject and also how big the gathering is – invitations stumble when their scope is too wide or abstract or else too narrowly…
David Lynch talks about ideas as fish. He says if you sit still and wait and are open to catching one, they’ll just pop into your consciousness, so you right them down and then others come and join it and you write them down too and then you can express them in whatever way seems…
One of the things they tried to instill in us at drama school was the idea that if you’re going to be someone who creates through performance or just your presence in the world, some exercise first thing is really good for you. This was too hard a pill for me to swallow even when…
This was an old joke between my first wife and me, when a discussion or argument that had reached the point where one person wanted to shout “Why can’t you just do what I’m telling you to do?” – the other would pull out this line and defuse the situation (obviously not foolproof as you…
I don’t work for free, that’s a firm rule. But when Helen asked me to help with making a series of podcasts with women in tech for International Women’s Day, I said yes without hesitation. I’m proud of the work we did today, all of us, in collaboration. I know that you’ll get great value out…
Often, if I’m out in town, I will catch a whiff of something nice. Some cologne or perfume or something that transports me to a happy warm childhood place or an image of someone or something or just a feeling of rightness, a rightness that isn’t there all the time. And I think wouldn’t it…
I heard recently about a director having the nasty experience of inviting a journalist into rehearsals and then having an unhelpful (I haven’t read it, it’s paywalled) preview article published just before the show opens. Yuk. Reading about it sent me back to look at what I wrote nearly eleven years ago (!) about using blogging in theatre. I was…
Download .mp3 (7.9MB) Walked by the canal this morning, nice and slow and easy. Reflective, as canals are and encourage us to be. Not much to do except dodge buggies, joggers and duck poo. And think about something Steve Lawson wrote on Facebook this morning. I started here Walking in the woods Songs in the…