11.01.25
Been so busy lately. Last week was my first week back at work after the Christmas break, and I am training up the new starter who is going to take over my job when I leave :’)
My last day at work is the 16th, and I am purposely not thinking about it too hard. I could write a book about my time at Jerwood — all eight years of it. It has been the one constant whilst I’ve moved around in London, ended and started relationships, made new friends and bid old ones goodbye, produced my first EP and debut album, lived through a pandemic, had so many successes and not-yets, and small wins and losses.
My little Instagram experiment is slowing up a bit, as my motivation wanes and the initial ‘boost’ in visibility wears off. But it has been really interesting — more of an experiment in telling my story and not being afraid of the “again, again, again” involved with self-promotion. My album had over 700 streams last week on Spotify alone, so that’s something.
I have a month and a half to come up with an abstract for the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research’s conference in Oslo. This is such a stupid sentence, but it’s honestly something I’m pursuing right now because, why not? This is an area I am interested in. I want to create a piece of music or theatre related to Antarctica and the way we think about it in relation to ourselves. It’s a place which is very real but also has an imaginary quality to it. I just hope I can formulate something quick enough to submit in time. I’m not entirely sure what I want to do but my first idea was ‘Scales of Change’ — selecting one local place in Scotland and then using it as a comparison for the continent of Antarctica, perhaps the way they may change in the next 10,000 years, just using one measure? Or perhaps even looking 10,000 years back, or longer, which means I’d have actual data and things to work with to create a piece of music. It feels so big and way above my comfort zone but there’s something about it being so outlandish for me — me! at a scientific conference! — that it actually feels like play. Playing to get there.
