Sometimes, having creative friends can be a miserable endeavour, even if, being creative yourself, you have sympathy for their disaffected moods, the lack of satisfaction shown after great effort, the tangenital butterfly mentality which defies logic. However, if truth be told – and given that we can establish what truth actually is<\/i>, it can be – the nonsense is practically always worth it.<\/p>\n
On Saturday I sat, exhausted after a long day on my feet, having said the word “podcast” so many times that the word had begun to lose all meaning – “frogcart” and “poshcarp” being my two favourite malapropisms deriving from this temporary psychosis – with a charming, intelligent and slightly shy clinical psychologist, and we began to discuss the meaning of “creativity”. The restaurant was all show and no ingredients, they didn’t even have COFFEE on the menu (not that I would have drunk it, but NO COFFEE?? How crap is THAT??) but the conversation was calm and logical and gentle and interesting. It moved at an after-dinner pace and I found myself soothed by the traditional views that were present. <\/p>\n
Creativity,<\/i> I said, can be the moment when, rather than sitting tired at a bus stop, waiting for 30 minutes in the rain, you realise that, if only you move around the corner, catch another bus, take a different route, you can be home in 15 minutes. My companion said that she thought Creativity<\/i> meant the Arts – writing, drawing, acting, music, that kind of thing. Having made the case for a wider view, still, I could not disagree with her. She works with brain-damaged people. I ventured just far enough to explain that I didn’t think it necessary to imply to anyone that there was any kind of heirarchical distinction to be made – we’re all monkeys on the face of this earth, scratching in the dust, equally confused, however elegant and sophisticated the level of our confusion. Healing is creative, I said, you are making people whole again. She smiled; I felt enormously better.<\/p>\n
This beautiful video is by one of the most creative people I know, and contains some footage of my holiday<\/a> in Norway<\/a> from earlier this year. <\/p>\n