Welcome back. After some consideration, here are some thoughts for 2024 in the form of reminders, not resolutions. Does it go without saying that any reminder shared is also a note-to-self?
Five reminders for 2024
1. Remember why you do what you do
Money, time and energy are going to be abundant but unequally distributed in 2024. The people who have been lying and deceiving for decades are going to do it even harder this year. (Yes, I mean elections, but not just that - see also homicidal and genocidal wars in multiple countries.) It’s going to get even more murky than it has been.
What drives us - the force that through the water through the rocks and, as Dylan Thomas continues, drives our red blood in opposition to the dessicating forces that seek to shut our mouths with wax - drives us even if the landscape disappears. Keep your eyes peeled, use every scrap of intelligence to navigate by, and keep going.
Your goals are still there, even if the fog descends.
2. Don’t the bastards cheer you up
The photo above is the invite card to an exhibition of Harland Miller’s paintings at BALTIC in 2009. I keep it on a shelf in my office as a small rebuke to my inner Pollyanna, the asset-based bright-side seeker. Miller comically reimagines the credo of Alan Sillitoe’s anti-hero Arthur Seaton - “Don’t let the bastards grind you down” - for our era of gaslighting-as-electioneering. As 2023 turns to 2024, I am resolutely un-cheered-up by the state of many English towns and cities, by our degraded rivers and coastlines, by our education systems, and the deliberate starvation of vital public services and even of the local authority infrastructures that have historically maintained them. Newcastle was the first frog in the slow heating water of Austerity to cut its arts funding back in 2012 (read my blog from that only partially successful campaign here) and each week currently sees another local authority seek to balance its budget by cutting culture funding.
You only have to drive any distance (or try to travel by train) to know the parts of this country that ordinary people use - or used - most are being allowed to fall apart so investors can get their dividends. Of course there are positives - campaigners, investments, creative corridors and grassroots activism improving their communities - but if we let them cheer us up too much, as the truisms of advocacy tempt us to do, we risk only working on part of the picture. It does not take the predictive power of a super computer to see that 2024 is going to be even tighter financially than previous years. That said, clear eyes are needed to focus on the key factors. No likes a grump or a curmudgeon. (Actually, that’s not true: some people love a curmudgeon, just not me.)
3. Walk Tall
As the Rev. Jesse Jackson says on this immortal recording by the Cannonball Adderley Quintet: "...No matter how dreary the situation is, and how difficult it may be, the storm really doesn't matter, until the storm begins to get you down. So my advice to you, the message that the Cannonball Adderley quintet brings to us is that it is rough and tough in this ghetto, a lot of funny stuff going down, but you got to walk TALL. WALK TALL. WALK TALL."
I’ve written about this recording before, but I keep coming back to it, so forgive my repetition. This is the reminder to make the case, staring with the case for your own creativity. To be confident (or act it). To be ready to act as if the world can be changed, no matter what the policy weather, and no matter how the rule makers play with the rules.
When we get a new UK government the cultural sector will need to walk tall if it is to influence new policies as they are developed. I am concerned at the prospect of a flip away from the place-based policies we have seen make over-due if at times clumsy change in England. That field where community and creativity meet will need to renew its stories and its arguments and to think long-term. What is needed from a second term of a Labour government may perhaps be a more fruitful question than what will happen in 2024.
One More Thing
4. Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think)
My end of year reflection was sadly too full of loss, and just before Christmas came news of another loss for the creative sector, with the death of Sarah Weir. Sarah was, amongst many other things, former CEO of the Design Council and an Executive Director for Arts Council England. The obituary on the Birkbeck website describes her career well - Sarah having studied there as a mature student.
I have such vivid memories of Sarah - unsurprising really as she was such a vivid person. I picture the two of us heaving 86 (approx.) research reports on artists’ conditions into an Exec Board meeting in what history proved to be a vain attempt to put a stop to such reports. I also often think of her as I park my car on the hard-standing at the back of my house, and a crucial, crucial pep talk she gave me on the phone after a big disappointment.
In my memory at least it very much chimes with advice I see she gave graduates when she received an Honorary Degree from University of the Arts London: “Don’t worry if you feel like a square peg in a round hole. Don’t worry if you feel as if you don’t fit, because sometimes you will and sometimes you won’t, and it’s good to not fit, because we need people who say different things at different times and without that we just have vanilla ice cream.”
I envied Sarah’s ability to navigate different worlds while being absolutely her self. She also knew when and how to leave one world for another, accumulating experience and insight. I doubt she knew it, which saddens me now, but she was a big influence on me.
Such unfair and early losses always make me think of the Specials version of the song written by Carl Sigman and Herb Magidson, “Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think)” I take it not as a reminder to do less but do more, more effectively and enjoyably. To do the work the world puts on our plates, especially the work that we are each uniquely placed to do, while we can, while we can enjoy it alongside the time away from Work-with-a-capital-W in which we also do the work of living a creative life, however we do that. Here’s to it.
Tactics Tomato
For the regular listeners, here’s a pomodoro playlist for work-to-do fun, hence a little longer than 25 minutes. It’s just a few of my favourite songs of the last year with relevance for the coming one. I hope you sometimes have the feeling the great Iris Dement describes: “I get up in the mornin' knowing I'm privileged just to be/ Workin' on a world I may never see.”
Thanks, Mark. Just lovely memories of Sarah. Very much chime with my own and the reminder as a result to be me, to do my work with my whole self and to live life well.