Making it all worthwhile?

Several times a week, a student or researcher from somewhere in the world contacts me, politely requesting an electronic copy of a chapter of my book. Sometimes they ask for the whole book. This is as a result of my being a member of ResearchGate - a European social networking site for researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. It's rather wonderful that, nowadays, if a student hits a stumbling block in their research and is unable to track down that elusive book or research paper, they can actually contact the author directly and request a copy. This would have saved me a lot of time and trouble over my years researching and writing articles and books.  

Now I'm retired from academia my feelings about ResearchGate are more mixed. On the one hand, it's flattering to think that academics and students from every corner of the globe still want to read my work. On the other hand, sometimes I wonder why I should go on spending my time corresponding with strangers asking for free copies of my work, perhaps having made little effort to search for it in their university library. If you think it's strange for an author to give away his books for free, so do I, but this apparently is the nature of academic publishing and knowledge-sharing in the 21st century. Academics (and presumably even retired academics like me) are expected to share freely and generously. Imagine novelists sending out free eBooks versions of their novels. 'Content marketing' (as it's known) is one thing, but this is ridiculous. Sometimes I think I should close my account with ResearchGate but, for now, I studiously continue to reply to enquiries, usually sending the enquirer what they're asking for, with a slightly cheeky cover note to the effect:

"First of all, apologies if I’ve taken a long time to respond. I’m now retired from lecturing and academia and so I look at ResearchGate much less frequently. I’m now a full-time writer and musician. Thank you for your interest in my work. I’m sending you (the book/chapter/paper) you requested for your private use. I hope you find it helpful and interesting. If so, please recommend it to your librarian. Wishing you all the best with your research/future career."

Of course, if a librarian somewhere were to buy a copy of my book (or subscribe to the eBook) I wouldn't gain personally, but it would mean there are more copies in existence. 

Sometimes, the researcher sends a brief reply via ResearchGate to thank me. But recently I received a message of thanks which almost makes my strange retirement job of giving away free copies of my book worthwhile. A researcher from Indonesia (whose field is Linguistic Typology, Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis,) wrote to say this:

"Please accept my heartfelt appreciation... The magnanimity you have displayed in granting me access to your work is truly commendable, especially in the light of your decision to step away from academia. May your days be filled with happiness and contentment.

Your research is highly relevant to my studies, particularly in the context of how creative writing helps mental health recovery. I am confident that your paper will greatly contribute to my understanding of the subject matter and inspire further exploration of my research endeavours.

Thank you once again for your kindness in sharing your expertise with me. Your contributions will undoubtedly enrich my research endeavours, and I am genuinely grateful for the opportunity to engage with your work."

Well, if you put it like that...

Five years …and fifteen thousand readers later

This spring it will be five years since the publication of my book ‘Creativity, Wellbeing and Mental Health Practice.’ In academic publishing these days the success of a book is judged not by how many physical copies are sold but by how often it's downloaded or ‘accessed.’ This is because the main readership are students, researchers and academics who are usually reading an electronic copy of the book from their university library. This makes it hard for authors to know what kind of impact their book has had so I was very grateful to receive some data recently from my publisher – Palgrave Macmillan – which gave me some details of the book's readership.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that my book has been downloaded 15.6K times since it was first published in 2018. It’s also been ‘cited’ (that’s to say other authors have referenced it) fourteen times in articles, book chapters, proceedings and monographs. Citations are another way of measuring the impact of an academic book. In terms of where my main readership is, in the past 12 months it’s been accessed mostly by readers in the US, Australia, the Netherlands and the UK but it has readers everywhere, from China to Turkey. It’s good to know that readers and researchers globally still find my ideas on creativity and wellbeing relevant, five years on.

The difference between intentions and goals

For several years now, on and off, I’ve been attending yoga classes. I say “attending yoga classes” rather than “practising yoga” because, to be perfectly honest, I’m an extremely poor student of yoga. I tend to only practice yoga at home if I become aware of some muscular stiffness or aches and pains, and then I’ll do a few stretches of poses, but I certainly don’t practice daily between my weekly classes. For all that, I find yoga beneficial in terms of relaxation and maintaining some kind of suppleness.

I marvel at my two-year-old granddaughter who spontaneously flows from one yoga position to another with great effortlessness, without even knowing what yoga is. It makes me wonder whether yoga wasn’t simply born out of observing how little children naturally move, before the pressures of grown-up living cause us to adopt poor posture, to physically seize up and mentally lose our spontaneity. If yoga were part of the national curriculum would there be fewer adults with back problems or needing hip and knee replacements?

One aspect of yoga I find interesting is the concept of ‘intentions.’ Sometimes, our yoga teacher will invite us to ‘set an intention,’ which seems to mean identifying a quality that you want to carry with you through your yoga practice and into the rest of your life beyond the yoga class. Sometimes, it’s framed in terms of “inviting in an intention.” Some describe this as a kind of “miniature New Year’s Resolution,” others as bringing awareness to a quality or virtue you’d like to cultivate for yourself.

I began to ponder on the differences between setting intentions and setting goals. In my career in mental health I spent many hours helping people to set goals – identifying something the person wanted to do in order to bring about behavioural, cognitive and emotional changes. Of course, goals had to be ‘SMART’ – that is, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-limited. I found the whole detailed process of working with people to set goals very rewarding because, if you did it well, people often noticed significant changes in their everyday lives. Not only did I teach service users and their family members how to set goals, but I also taught mental health professionals how to teach people how to set goals! And, of course, I used it in my own life to solve problems and achieve things.

It seems to me that goal-setting is quite an active, methodical process for helping us to do something whereas setting an intention is a more spiritual approach, focussing not so much on what we want to achieve as how we want to be, or how we want our lives to be. This can almost seem a mystical or magical process – more like making a wish or, as my daughter sometimes says, “putting something out there in the universe.”

This summer I fulfilled what was practically a lifetime ambition, to have a campervan. Reflecting on the process of how this came about, I think it had less to do with goal-setting and more to do with inviting in an intention. Yes, I did my research and followed some smaller steps (looking at different vehicles, finding out the pros and cons,) but it didn’t feel particularly systematic. It was more a case of thinking, “Finally, I think I could get a campervan. Yes, I could see myself having a campervan.” I stopped telling myself it was unrealistic, silly, a fantasy, and started telling myself, “Wouldn’t it be good if I had a campervan?”

My intention became to have a campervan and I now have one. And it’s great having one. I’ve also started another blog (that makes a total of three now, which explains why I don’t write a new post very frequently on any of them!)  My new blog is called ‘Travels With My Dulcimer’ and celebrates my love of playing the dulcimer twinned with my love for travelling around in my campervan. It’s very new (I’ve only had the campervan a few months) but, over time, I’m hoping it will become a kind of travelog. And, in a slightly different way to this blog, it’s also about creativity and wellbeing. I hope you enjoy reading all three of my blogs which I think will complement each other with their overlapping interests in creativity, music, writing, travel and wellbeing. You can visit and follow my other blogs by clicking on these links:

Travels With My Dulcimer

Passengers in Time

More Stupid Than Ever – On Psychological Transformation, Grief and Trauma

Speaking from the Rwandan capital, Kigali, last week, the British prime minister Boris Johnson gave his reaction to yet further calls for his resignation: ‘If you’re saying you want me to undergo some sort of psychological transformation,’ he told the BBC reporter, “I think that our listeners would know that is not going to happen.”

Meanwhile, in the i-weekend newspaper earlier this month, Patrick Cockburn published an opinion piece called Today’s World Leaders Seem To Be More Stupid Than Ever. Cockburn suggests that Vladimir Putin, Boris Johnson, Joe Biden and Xi Jinping all demonstrate, in various ways, “plain and simple stupidity” – a factor that is often underestimated in the role it plays in determining the course of history.

Perhaps what makes leaders stupid – if they aren’t already – is the tendency to surround themselves with people who agree with them and who won’t (or can’t) give them sensible advice. In this situation, it would be easy to believe that one is always right about everything and that, therefore, there is no need for change or personal transformation. But believing that psychological transformation is neither necessary nor even desirable is the height of stupidity.

It could be said that psychological transformation is the aim of all psychological therapy. Whether this is achieved through changing how we feel about things, what we think about things, how we behave, or a combination of these, a key assumption is that psychological transformation is a positive, adaptive goal. I’ve recently been reading Louise Harms’ Understanding Trauma and Resilience. Louise is Associate Professor of Social Work at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her book is a clearly written overview of various approaches to trauma. She explores how psychodynamic approaches to trauma seek to reintegrate the Self, how a symptoms-based approach aims to reduce the signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), how person-centred approaches seek to recreate congruence in the person while narrative approaches consider ‘re-authoring’ the narrative of trauma to provide meaning and coherence.

I read the book in the context of what could be called my own personal trauma – bereavement. Louise writes: “Grief also has an important place in trauma understandings. Many traumatic events evoke both trauma and grief reactions. The losses inherent in many traumatic events – of life, world views and beliefs, a sense of safety, places, roles and routines – can lead to profound experiences of sadness and yearning and processes of mourning and remembrance. Despite this, trauma and grief research and theories have tended to remain separate.”  

This is absolutely true and is perhaps because, while traumatic events tend to be viewed as extraordinary occurrences, bereavement and grief are experienced by all of us as part of the natural life-cycle. Louise provides an inexhaustive but sobering list of traumatic events: “natural and human-made disasters, war, forced migration and displacement, forced separations of children from their parents, abuse and neglect, torture, accidents and injuries, health crises and private assaults to emotional, physical, social and spiritual well-being.”  

In this context, my own personal loss could fall into this last category as being a “private assault to my emotional, physical, social and spiritual well-being.” But, as for those people who have experienced “natural and human-made disasters, war, forced migration and displacement, forced separations of children from their parents...” there is no shortage of examples in our daily news bulletins, from the victims of Putin’s war in Ukraine to the refugees that Johnson wants to forcibly displace to Rwanda. It is, indeed, “plain and simple stupidity” to add to the trauma of already-traumatised people.

The good news, according to the evidence cited in Louise’s book, is that most people are able to recover from trauma, whether in the sense that they experience a remission in symptoms of PTSD, or in the sense that they return to their normal, pre-traumatic functioning. And some will even experience post-traumatic growth. I discuss post-traumatic growth in my book Creativity, Wellbeing and Mental Health Practice, as a process wherein people exposed to life-threatening situations experience, somewhat unexpectedly, improved psychological wellbeing.

The underlying message of Understanding Trauma and Resilience is a hopeful one. As Louise writes, “returning to functioning is the most common response to potential trauma, and therefore the processes that activate this return to living, and potentially living and functioning well, need to be understood better.” In the meantime, whether they know it or not, to undergo some sort of psychological transformation is exactly what some of our far-from transformational leaders need.

Living on the ceiling

Avid followers of this blog may have been dismayed to find I haven’t published a new post here for a few months. (Well, I can hope that someone cares that much!) This sounds like a “my-dog-ate-my-homework” kind of excuse but here goes... At the end of last October, part of the ceiling of my attic collapsed. And so began a lengthy process of finding a builder and then waiting a few months for a succession of builders, plasterers, electricians, painters and carpet-fitters to come along, make repairs and renovations and leave me with a newly-restored attic/guest bedroom.

Of course, you can’t repair an attic while it’s full so it also necessitated me moving furniture, clothes, books, bric-a-brac and all the kinds of things you might expect to find in an attic ( - just about anything that you don’t want to keep in any other room and can’t bear to throw away - ) into various other parts of the house, including my office. If you want to stop a writer (or any other type of creative) from working I can recommend arranging for their attic ceiling to collapse as a perfect way to scupper all creative output for several months.

I have managed to write no more than one song and a handful of album reviews since the ceiling first began to fall down. Work on my novel, several short stories, ideas for articles, recordings for my next album and even blog posts has been suspended while, week after week, tradesmen have been running up and down my stairs at unexpected times of the day, turning my electricity on and off as the whim takes them, playing Fleetwood Mac and the Bee Gees at high volume and generating a cloud of dust that covered every surface of the house, only to be renewed the next day after Sisyphean efforts at hoovering and dusting.     

Now that the renovations are complete and I can gradually start moving things back to their rightful places (which, in some cases, is the charity shop or the recycling centre) I feel able to concentrate once more. So you can expect more regular blog posts while I play catch-up on the things I’ve been meaning to share with you. But, first, would you mind giving me a hand with some of these boxes?...

Nursing literary ambitions

My short story Weekend On Call has just been published. I’m delighted for two reasons. First, this is the second of my short stories to be published this year – my story Eastgate Clock was published in the March issue of Firewords magazine. Second, Weekend On Call was shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize last year but didn’t make it through to the final selection. However, I then discovered it had been longlisted for the 2021 Bournemouth Writing Prize and was subsequently selected to be included in The Waves of Change, an anthology of short stories and poetry published by Fresher Publishing. I’m looking forward to reading all the other contributions in the collection.

Weekend On Call is an entirely fictional account of a weekend in the life of a mental health nurse manager. The combination of an alcohol problem, work-related stress and difficulties in his marriage lead to a crisis, as he struggles with his own mental health while being expected to oversee the management of mental health services over the weekend period. In the story, the on-call manager recalls something he was told back when he first trained as a mental health nurse:

                Back inside the house, you put the bleep and the on-call mobile on the coffee table and sit in an armchair, in the dark. You notice you can’t stop crying. When you did your nurse training all those years ago, you remember someone saying that to work in mental health you had to be ‘okay in yourself’. What did that mean? That you had to have good mental health in your own right? That you had to have a stable home life, a secure relationship, a happy marriage?

‘The Waves of Change’ is a remarkably apt title from my point of view. By a strange quirk its publication coincides with my decision not to renew my registration as a mental health nurse. I retired from the NHS in 2016 but maintained my professional registration as I then began a second career as a senior lecturer in mental health nursing. When my late wife became terminally ill I decided to retire from nurse education, ultimately becoming her full-time carer. Waves of Change indeed – retirement followed by widowerhood. But it is only now, as my professional registration comes up for renewal, that I am finally, officially un-becoming a registered nurse. I began my nurse training in 1983 so there hasn’t been a time in the past 38 years when I haven’t considered myself involved in mental health nursing. Relinquishing my nurse registration could be seen as another major life event and another loss. In one way, I do feel like I’m surrendering a major part of who I am but I’m considering it an opportunity to become something else. Now, having retired twice, I feel it’s time to let go of nursing and to focus more on my other lifelong interests – writing and music. That’s why it’s so good to have some of my fiction published instead. And so I begin my third career – this time as a writer and musician. It sounds, somehow, so much more interesting than ‘retired mental health nurse’.   

The Waves of Change is published by Fresher Publishing.

This blog post is published simultaneously on my other blog: Passengers in Time

King and country – a creative approach to public health in Bhutan

King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck

The Kingdom of Bhutan has an impressive record when it comes to creative approaches to health and wellbeing. In 1972, Bhutan’s then king – King Jigme Singye Wangchuck – famously made a half-joking remark suggesting Gross National Happiness (GNH) was as important as Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The idea was subsequently taken up by the Centre for Bhutan Studies who developed policy screening tools which measure the impact of different policies on the populations wellbeing level. Last month, the i-newspaper (26 June) reported that the current ruler of Bhutan – 41-year-old King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck – is walking the nation warning his people about COVID: “Wearing a baseball cap and knee-length traditional gho robe, carrying a backpack, Bhutan's king has walked through jungles infested with leeches and snakes, trekked mountains and quarantined several times...”

It seems, for the past 14 months, the king has been travelling “by foot, car and horse to remote hamlets to oversee measures to warn his tiny kingdom of 700,000 about the coronavirus outbreak that has flared up in neighbouring India.”

Alfred the Great

It’s hard to imagine a member of the British royal family taking such a concerned, constructive and direct approach to public health although, of course, last December the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge did embark on a controversial three-day whistle-stop tour of England, Scotland and Wales to thank Covid frontline workers, despite it being an offence at the time for anyone to cross the borders for non-essential purposes.

King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck’s nationwide, 14-month mission seems somehow much more benevolent and committed – the sort of thing you can imagine Alfred the Great might have done for his people, had he not been so preoccupied with repelling Viking raids.

Be that as it may, Bhutan’s ruler’s creative approach to health and wellbeing seems to be paying off for king and country – at the time of writing, the COVID death toll in Bhutan is reported to be just one person, compared with the UK’s more than 128,000.

‘Creativity, Wellbeing and Mental Health Practice’ celebrates a milestone in a time of pandemic

I can’t quite believe that it’s now three years since my book Creativity, Wellbeing and Mental Health Practice was first published. Since the spring of 2018 so much has happened in my own life and, of course, in everybody’s lives. I’ve experienced three major life events – retirement, bereavement and grandparenthood – whilst, like everyone else, living through successive lockdowns and months of restrictions on travel, recreation and social contact. 

Through these times people have found creativity a solace but also, occasionally, something hard to harness or sustain. It might almost be said our wellbeing has been sacrificed for the sake of our health although, of course, in reality this is a contradiction. In our efforts to avoid contracting and transmitting a physical illness those things that make for physical, psychosocial and spiritual wellbeing have been side-lined. We’ve been denied normal weddings and funerals, trips to the pub and the cinema, companionship, hugs, celebrations. And there is a growing acknowledgment that mental health has been forced to play second fiddle to physical health and that this is surely storing up trouble for us as a society.  

When I first hit upon the idea of writing a book about these three elements – creativity, wellbeing, mental health practice – I thought I was being quite original. While all three topics were well-researched in themselves, not many writers or researchers had considered the connections between these three aspects of human life. Even my publishers (and the peer reviewers and series editors) seemed to agree that it was a novel enough idea to merit publication. So, it gives me great satisfaction – though, of course, I can’t take any credit for this trend – to notice a little flurry of international publications in the past six months which deal with some of the same connections.

Firstly, at the end of 2020, the International Journal of Wellbeing devoted a whole issue to the theme of researching creativity and wellbeing. Writing without the awareness that 2021 would continue in a similar vein, the editorial reflected on the impact of pandemic on creativity and wellbeing in the preceding year:

“Insofar as creativity involves adaptive behaviour that emerges in response to interruptions to previously successful routines and habits (…) 2020 has been the year of creativity par excellence. But the disruptive impact of COVID-19 has also destroyed or damaged many creative social products generated by those old routines and habits, meaning that routines and habits, and not just interruptions or impasses, can also be pathways to creativity (…). The events of 2020 should therefore give us pause to consider the meaning of the term ‘creativity’ and to reflect on the potential role of creativity in cultivating and supporting wellbeing” (Kiernan, Davidson, & Oades, 2020).

I’m honoured to get a name check in this editorial, alongside others including the great Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in the discussion about how creativity research has been brought into domains such as business, education and manufacturing and how, in turn, this has helped “to position creativity as an increasingly important concept in the burgeoning field of wellbeing research” (Kiernan, Davidson, & Oades, 2020).

Next, in the January issue of Frontiers in Psychology, Elizabeth Wilson (of the Creative Arts and Music Therapy Research Unit at the University of Melbourne) writes about using art therapy with creative arts students (Wilson, 2021).  Her research study explores ways of meeting the mental health and wellbeing needs of students through a brief creative arts therapies approach. She found that single session art therapy was able to afford students a novel means to externalise problems, leading them to form a less internalised view of the self. One of Wilson’s research themes is single session art therapy as a ‘novel experience’, and she also cites my book – and the work of Steenbarger (2006) – on the subject of novelty:

“Novelty is described in the literature on creative thinking as encompassing any idea, process or product deemed by a perceiver as offering a feeling of ‘departure from the familiar’ (Gillam, 2018). Within the field of brief psychotherapy, novelty is considered to help ‘disorient clients in positive ways’ through the therapist’s strategic use of techniques that help stimulate a sense of play, humour and imagination in the therapy space (Steenbarger, 2006).”

Finally, also in January, a group of Norwegian researchers published a paper in Medicine Health Care and Philosophy exploring the use of creative writing among young adults in treatment for psychosis (Synnes, Romm and Bondevik, 2021). Again, the authors cite my book, along with the contemporary work of Costa and Abreu (2018):

“Although expressive writing is a clearly defined method that has been researched extensively, creative writing is a much less defined practice, covering various forms of literary writing such as poetry, fiction and storytelling, both in groups and on an individual basis (Costa and Abreu 2018; Gillam 2018). Costa and Abreu (2018) call for greater clarity with a consistent conceptualisation for the application of creative writing in clinical settings; they conclude that at the moment, there are no ‘established ways of assessing qualitatively or quantitatively the therapeutic benefits of creative writing’ (2018, p. 83).”

Although they acknowledge that research on creative writing in mental illness and psychosis is still in its infancy, Synnes, Romm and Bondevik conclude that creative writing groups can be valuable for young adults who have experienced psychosis adding that their findings correspond with previous research highlighting creative writing as part of a recovery process (Synnes, Romm and Bondevik, 2021).

So, three years post-publication, I’m delighted that other researchers continue to explore the links between creativity and wellbeing as well as the links between creativity and mental health practice, whether this involves art therapy with creative arts students or creative writing with young people with psychosis. And, of course, this time of pandemic and social isolation – and its aftermath – will continue to yield new insights into the value of creativity and how best to sustain our wellbeing. 

References

Costa, A.C. and Abreu, M.V. (2018.) Expressive and creative writing in the therapeutic context: from the different concepts to the development of writing therapy programs. Psychologica 61 (1): 69–86.

Gillam, T. (2018). Creativity, Wellbeing and Mental Health Practice. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kiernan, F., Davidson, J. W., & Oades, L. G. (2020). Researching creativity and wellbeing: Interdisciplinary perspectives. International Journal of Wellbeing, 10(5), 1-5. https://doi.org/10.5502/ijw.v10i5.1523

Steenbarger, B. (2006). “The importance of novelty in psychotherapy,” in Clinical Strategies for Becoming a Master Psychotherapist, eds W. O’Donohue, N. A. Cummings, and J. L. Cummings (Cambridge, MA: Academic Press), 277–290. doi: 10.1016/B978-012088416-2/50017-7

Synnes, O., Romm, K.L. and Bondevik, H. (2021). The poetics of vulnerability: creative writing among young adults in treatment for psychosis in light of Ricoeur’s and Kristeva’s philosophy of language and subjectivity. Jan 2021 · Medicine Health Care and Philosophy.

Wilson, E. (2021). Novel Solutions to Student Problems: A Phenomenological Exploration of a Single Session Approach to Art Therapy with Creative Arts University Students. Frontiers in Psychology. 18 January 2021 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.600214

'Hygge', mood and wellbeing – hugging, embracing and relaxed thoughtfulness in pandemic times

Back in March 2018 I wrote a blog post called ‘Wellbeing lessons from living Danishly’. I only mentioned it in passing back then but central to Denmark’s success in achieving consistently high levels of wellbeing is the concept of hygge. If you’re not familiar with this term a good place to start is Meik Wiking’s The Little Book of Hygge: The Danish Way to Live Well.  Wiking is the founder of Copenhagen’s Happiness Research Institute. His best-selling Little Book of Hygge offers a few descriptions of this hard-to-define concept: hygge means “cosy togetherness” and “taking pleasure from the presence of soothing things.” Wiking argues that the relatively high level of wellbeing enjoyed consistently by Danes (compared with other nations) is due to their valuing – and putting into practice – the concept of hygge.

Published in 2016, Wiking’s book could not have anticipated the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and its resulting lockdowns on our wellbeing. If “cosy togetherness” is so important to wellbeing it’s no wonder that social distancing and isolation is having a detrimental effect. “Cosy togetherness” is in very short supply at the moment – especially for those who live alone.

Wiking gives an interesting insight into the origins of the term hygge and its connection with close physical contact. It seems the word appeared in written Danish for the first time in the early nineteenth century but is actually Norwegian in origin. According to Wiking the original word in Norwegian means ‘well-being’, but there’s a connection with our English word ‘hug’ - which comes from hugge meaning ‘to embrace’. There’s also an Old Norse word hygga which means ‘to comfort’ and this derives from hugr meaning ‘mood’. And then there’s an Old English word hycgan which means ‘to think, or to consider’. Wiking uses the phrase “relaxed thoughtfulness” in connection with hygge, (which somehow reminds me of Wordsworth’s definition of poetry:  “emotion recollected in tranquility.”) But what does all this delving into Scandinavian etymology tell us? Well, quite a lot. Namely, that it seems there is a centuries-old acknowledgment that hugging, embracing and relaxed thoughtfulness are inextricably linked to our mood and our wellbeing.

Of course, it’s perfectly possible to experience hygge alone and one of Wiking’s descriptions of hygge is that it’s “like a hug without touching.” You can snuggle up by yourself with a blanket, a good book or a favourite TV programme, have a warm drink in a favourite mug and light a few candles – and that can be perfectly hygge.  But there's no doubt many people must be finding it harder to maintain positive mood and a high level of wellbeing without hugs or the comfort of others.

It sometimes seems that, in the pandemic, people are being asked to safeguard their health (and the health of others) at the expense of their own (and others’) wellbeing. If we socially isolate we are certainly less likely to contract the virus and less likely to transmit it but we are also less likely to give and receive the physical and psychological contact that supports our wellbeing. Of course, you can argue that a good level of wellbeing won’t do you much good if you contract a serious or potentially fatal disease but, to paraphrase the World Health Organisation’s classic 1948 definition of health, the absence of coronavirus without physical, mental and social wellbeing cannot truly be said to be a state of health (WHO, 2021). Public wellbeing is understandably losing out to public health at the moment just as, in wartime, children were evacuated from their family homes and, though this may have been traumatic for many children and their parents, at least they avoided being killed by bombs. 

So, is it possible to enjoy the wellbeing benefits of hygge while locked-down and isolated? Well, helpfully, Wiking provides a ‘Hygge Manifesto’, much of which can be adapted to the pandemic situation. There are ten simple points in his manifesto, most of which can be practiced without others entering your household - though not all of them are completely compatible with other public health messages!

1. Atmosphere – Turn down the lights
2. Presence – Be here now. Turn off the phone
3. Pleasure – Coffee, chocolates, cookies and cakes
4. Equality – ‘We’ over ‘me’. Share
5. Gratitude – Take it in. Appreciate what you have
6. Harmony – There’s no need to brag or practice one-upmanship
7. Comfort – Take a break, get comfy and relax
8. Truce – Try to avoid heated discussions or differences of opinion
9. Togetherness – Build relationships and shared narratives
10. Shelter – Enjoy being in your place of peace and security. 

I'm sure you'll agree that, whilst not contradicting government guidance, these injunctions sound a lot more palatable - and a lot more fun - than plain old 'Stay home, stay safe, save lives'. 

Further reading

Wiking, M. (2016) The Little Book of Hygge: The Danish Way to Live Well. London: Penguin Random House.

Wordsworth, W. (2006) Preface to The Lyrical Ballads. London: Penguin Books.

World Health Organisation (2021)  Constitution of the World Health Organisation. Available at:  https://apps.who.int/gb/bd/PDF/bd47/EN/constitution-en.pdf?ua=1

'Cathedral Thinking' for Writers and Artists

ALCS's recent report 

Imagine you are asked to name ten famous novelists, poets, artists, dramatists or composers. There’s a good chance quite a few of them would no longer be living. The same is probably true, to a lesser extent, of musicians, songwriters and filmmakers. Generally, it takes a long time – often a lifetime ­­- for creative artists to become recognised, let alone celebrated. The writers’ organisation ALCS (of which I’m proud to be a member) last month published a report called Creating a Living: Challenges to Authors’ Incomes.

    The report shows that the earnings of writers and artists are in significant decline globally, despite international growth in the creative industries that make use of their works. Factors in this decline include the impact of digitization and online publishing and a growing demand for authors to work without payment. If it’s so hard to earn an income from the creative arts surely more and more are going to give up trying.

    I’m in the fortunate position of being able to write and to make music without needing to rely on either for my livelihood. But I still feel annoyed and affronted by the normalisation of ‘free art’ – the magazines on sale in major shops that don’t pay their contributing writers, the organisers of music events who hope the musicians don’t expect to be paid for their performance.  The global pandemic and economic recession will have only made this problem worse since it was prevalent even in the ‘good times’ before venues were forced to close and readers began cancelling subscriptions to economise.   

    So why should creative artists go on trying to produce work and find an audience if they may not be properly remunerated - let alone critically appreciated - in their lifetime? One answer might come in the form of ‘cathedral thinking’, a phrase used by Labour’s former environment, sustainability and housing minister for Wales, Jane Davidson. Davidson is the author of a new book One Planet, One Future and, in it, she describes planting trees that wouldn’t bear fruit in her lifetime, but which her children and grandchildren would be able to appreciate. This is an example of cathedral thinking where “long-term goals require decades of foresight and planning so future generations can enjoy their realisation.”

New College, Oxford - built in 1386

    The idea is, of course, that those involved in conceiving and building our great cathedrals knew that they may not live to see them completed, but future generations would. There’s even a website devoted to cathedral thinking which tells the story of New College in Oxford, built in 1386. The story goes that, at the time the college was built, a grove of trees was planted so that, when the beams that supported the roof needed replacing some 500 years later, the trees would be ready - big and strong enough to replace them.

    New College was built when Geoffrey Chaucer was alive. Now, I’m sure Chaucer would be delighted to know his Canterbury Tales is still being read 600 years after his death, but I’m not sure how comforting this thought is to today’s creative artists who may be struggling to find a publisher or a promoter. No doubt one reason artists create is to leave a lasting legacy but, to be able to go on producing work, it's very helpful to gain recognition and appreciation here and now. I’d like to think that the books I have written and had published may be of interest to readers for many generations to come, even if Steven Spielberg has strangely still not yet contacted me to buy the film rights.

    I'm happy to let Steven Spielberg take his time, though, because this month I became a grandfather. It strikes me that parenthood is itself an act of cathedral thinking. We don’t know, when we become parents, what mark our descendants will leave on the world. Specifically, we don't know whether or not we will live to meet our grandchildren. If we do, it’s a great blessing. Meanwhile, I don’t know if the novel I’m writing will ever get finished, let alone published, let alone read, let alone critically acclaimed in perpetuity. But, if I don’t try and finish writing it, no one will ever know that this grandad was also a novelist. Better get on with building that cathedral.

Doomscrolling, doomsurfing and equanimity

There's an old science fiction film - I wish I could remember which one - that begins with a man pulling his car into a lay-by. Just as the news bulletin is about to come on the car radio, he switches stations to listen to some music. Had he stayed with the news he would have been better prepared for the impending disaster (giant meteorites, extraterrestrial aliens landing, or whatever it was.) I think this must have made a big impression on me when I was young because I always believe the responsible, sensible, grown-up thing to do is to make sure you follow the news. Earlier this year, during the national lockdown, I would watch the daily press briefings which would be broadcast just before the daily news. A double-dose of bad news. From time to time during the day more bad news alerts would trouble my mobile phone, via the BBC news app. And, if I wasn't quite sure if I'd properly understood just how bad things were, at bedtime I would catch up with News at Ten followed by Newsnight.

But, while it's good to be forewarned if today happens to be The Day the Earth Stood Still or The Day of the of the Triffids - or even if it's The Year of Covid-19 - too many news updates can be bad for you. There's a new terminology to describe a type of behaviour: you may have heard of doomscrolling or doomsurfing. The Merriam-Webster website helpfully defines the meaning as the tendency to "continue to surf or scroll through bad news, even though that news is saddening, disheartening or depressing." They suggest that, during times of crisis, many people find themselves reading continuously bad news about COVID-19, for example, without the ability to stop or step back. Because many of us doomsurf on our phones, or through our social media feeds, the term doomscrolling has been coined. But, whether it's on a computer or on a smart-phone, this compulsion to spend an excessive amount of time taking in constant predominantly bad news can naturally evoke strong negative feelings of sadness, anxiety and anger.

The Tricycle podcast (the podcast of the Buddhist Review) recently featured an interview with Sharon Salzberg, meditation teacher and author of Real Change: Meditation and Action. In the interview, Sharon makes reference to doomscrolling and suggests that we need to take a rest from relentless bad news, we need to ground ourselves and to feel anxiety or grief in a different way. She believes we also need to be able to "take in the joy, and not to be consumed by our doomscrolling habit." The interviewer, Tricycle's editor James Shaheen, put it to Sharon that finding something positive every day could be an 'antidote' to doomscrolling, but Sharon responded with caution to this suggestion: "That can sound incredibly glib, as if you're being conflict-avoidant or trying desperately to deny painful circumstances you or others are facing. But it's really not that - it's a resilience training; we need some kind of balance." She argues - and I think she's right - that we need to relate differently to suffering, with compassion rather than terror, and to not be so distracted or preoccupied that we aren't able to experience joy - or even to notice it.   

Wellbeing and Utopias

There's a bit of a fashion for dystopian fiction at the moment, even though reality is currently not only stranger than fiction (as ever) but as dystopian as you could wish for (or not wish for.) I've been very, very, very slowly writing a novel for the past few years and nearly fell into the trap myself of creating an alternative, dystopian world as a backdrop, until I thought it might be more interesting to set part of my novel in a utopian, rather than dystopian world. I'd recently read William Morris's delightful 1890 classic 'News From Nowhere' and decided to extend my research into utopias by re-reading the 'Utopia' (Thomas More's 16th century political satire), which I was supposed to have read forty years ago as part of my English degree!

 'Utopia' is one of those books which I've always meant to read (all these years, I've kept my original Penguin Classics copy from 1979) ...and now I have indeed finished it, slow reader that I am. For a book originally written in Latin and first published in 1516, I was surprised to find it both entertaining and thought-provoking.

To complete my reading on utopias, having sampled 16th century and 19th century versions, I brought things right up to date by trying Rutger Bregman's 2017 book 'Utopia for Realists'. Bregman is a Dutch journalist and author of popular books on history, philosophy, and economics. In 'Utopia for Realists' he makes the case for a more productive and equitable society based on three core ideas - a universal and unconditional basic income for everyone, a working week of fifteen hours, and open borders worldwide with the free exchange of citizens between all nations. Brexit and Covid-19 have somewhat scuppered the last of these, at least for now, but Bregman makes a compelling argument for both a guaranteed basic income and a shorter work week. In an entertaining, polemical style he argues that these are necessary and achievable cornerstones for the sustainability of a modern society and for the health and wellbeing of all its citizens.

Bregman points out that the abolition of slavery, suffrage for women and same-sex marriage were all once considered unrealistic, unreasonable and downright impossible. So, why should it not be perfectly achievable to introduce other seemingly utopian ideas? During the pandemic lockdown in the UK, once a week I observed people - including the Prime Minister - clapping in support of healthcare workers and carers. Despite this very recent and very public show of appreciation, the UK government has recently been highly selective with pay awards for health and social care staff. Generally, the lowest paid public servants - including nurses, allied health professionals and care assistants - have not yet seen that grateful applause converted into a tangible pay increase. How can political leaders so easily ignore those members of society who do the really essential work? How can government so quickly forget the debt they owe to workers who have risked their own lives caring for us and our loved ones, often for a very low salary? Bregman rather colourfully describes this situation in his book; as ever, it seems, "the bankers and the lawyers are polishing turds at the expense of waste collectors and nurses."

Bregman partly blames the 'underdog socialists' for this situation; the disempowered left have failed to make the case for a shift in societal values. He even has a go at liberal, left-wing academia: "the greatest sin of the academic left is that it has become fundamentally aristocratic, writing in bizarre jargon that makes simple matters dizzyingly complex. If you can't explain your ideal to a fairly intelligent twelve-year-old, after all, it's probably your own fault. What we need is a narrative that speaks to millions of ordinary people."

The call for a shorter working week, Bregman explains, is not about wanting long, lethargic weekends but about creating more opportunities to spend time on the things that truly matter to us. In keeping with other writers on wellbeing (including me), Bregman is arguing for more meaningful work and more time for more meaningful activity beyond work. He cites, not another aristocratic academic, but the Australian writer and songwriter Bronnie Ware. In 2011 Ware published a memoir, 'The Top Five Regrets of the Dying', based on what she had learnt from her work caring for people with terminal illness. The greatest regrets expressed by people at the end of their lives were, firstly, "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me" and, secondly, "I wish I hadn't worked so hard."

It may seem utopian to live a life more true to oneself and to spend less time working hard. Many people, especially in times of recession, put up with jobs which lack rewards, meaning or opportunities for creativity. Of course, a shorter working week and a guaranteed basic income would facilitate these goals and Bregman is right to urge us to give these seemingly utopian ideas, and the societal structures standing in their way, serious attention.

 

Further reading

Bregman, R. (2017) Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There. London: Bloomsbury.

More, T. (2012) Utopia. London: Penguin Classics.

Morris, W. (1993) News from Nowhere and Other Writings. London: Penguin Classics.

Ware, B. (2019) The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing (Second Edition). London:  Hay House.

Blogging, caring, grieving

I started this blog in October 2017, in anticipation of the launch of my book 'Creativity, wellbeing and mental health practice'. The idea was to provide a forum to explore and discuss these inter-related ideas in an ongoing way, with the book as a focal point. The blog was also, to my mind at least, a companion to my other already-established blog Passengers in Time, which has now been running for ten years. If the 'Tony Gillam' blog was meant to be serious - even scholarly at times - Passengers in Time was always meant to be free-spirited and light-hearted, hence its tag-line "...Adventures with books, music and time travel." If you like, the 'Tony Gillam' blog was the respectable, high-minded blog while Passengers in Time was its fun-loving, slightly wild older brother. Passengers in Time covered a variety of topics from books that I'd been reading to books that I'd been writing, and from music I'd been listening to, to occasionally music I'd been making. Alongside these adventures with books and music has been a third thread - 'time travel', by which I suppose I've meant a blend of reminiscences, social history and real-life travel. These posts were often written in a voice that suggested they were accounts of solitary adventures but, in reality, through all of these experiences I'd been accompanied by my dear travelling companion - my beloved wife Sue.    

In October 2018, I wrote a post here on this blog called 'Working at being of good cheer again'. I explained that the summer had been a blur, "with my wife becoming unwell in July, her being diagnosed with a serious illness and then spending most of August in hospital 49 miles away." I went on to say, "She is now thankfully at home with me, but needing ongoing support and treatment." In fact, Sue had been diagnosed with a brain tumour. Thankfully, she enjoyed reasonably good health through much of 2019, and I muddled on with my occasional blog posts celebrating creativity and wellbeing, although the shadow of Sue's illness of course continued to have a significant effect on her wellbeing and that of the whole family.   

At the beginning of this year Sue's health deteriorated so that, by the time the coronavirus pandemic had forced everyone into lock-down, Sue and I had already stopped going out and about. Sue was too poorly to go anywhere and I had become a full-time carer. And then, on 25 June, Sue passed away. 

The things that normally console, comfort, energise and enthuse me: reading, listening to music, writing, songwriting and blogging, all feel like an effort at the moment, but I know they still hold the power to sustain and renew me. You may wonder why I've written such a personal blog post. Well, it's partly to explain why my posts have been even less frequent than usual. But, more importantly, it's because it would have been disingenuous, assuming I was still able to muster the ideas and enthusiasm, to go on writing blog posts about creativity and wellbeing without acknowledging the loss of Sue - something that, of course, has had a major impact on my own wellbeing. 

Sue was always very proud of my writing and I'm sure she would have wanted me to continue, so I'm going to try to go on with my blogging and other writing activities. After all, I should practice what I preach; if I believe (as I do) that writing can help promote wellbeing then, after my own recent experience of care-giving and bereavement, now is not the time for me to give up writing! So bear with me and slowly, surely, I hope to be able to continue to share with you ideas and insights that can help us all enjoy a greater sense of wellbeing through creativity.  

In memory of Sue Gillam (1965-2020).

Re-imagining creativity in lock-down

(c) 2020 Tony Gillam

Today marks the culmination of Creativity and Wellbeing Week and, by coincidence, also of Mental Health Awareness Week. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, many of the events planned had to be, in the words of the organisers, 're-imagined', which is to say either cancelled or, where possible, converted into virtual online happenings.

I had planned to run a couple of improvisational Music for Wellbeing Workshops in collaboration with mental health charity MIND but, unfortunately, these had to be cancelled as, obviously, such social gatherings are prohibited at the moment. Similarly, last month I was supposed to be giving a talk at the Literary Conference in Hastings. The topic was to be Mental Health and Wellbeing in the Books of Malcolm Saville. (Malcolm Saville - for those who don't know - was a children's author whose books I enjoyed very much when I was young and I've been a member of the Malcolm Saville Society since 1999.) So I'd been looking forward to meeting with fellow members and speaking at the Society's Literary Conference but this too was cancelled.   

Re-imagining a talk is fairly simple - it can easily be converted into an article. And so I've been working on an article - or it may even end up as a couple of linked articles - for a forthcoming issue of the Malcolm Saville Society's magazine. But re-imagining an improvisational music workshop under lock-down conditions is not so easy...

Fortunately, an opportunity arose in the form of an invitation from a dulcimer-playing friend of mine, Steve O'Ryan. I met Steve last October at a gathering of the Nonsuch Dulcimer Club (of which we're both members.) As spring arrived, Steve hit upon the wonderful idea of creating a blog and a linked Facebook group which would feature a new song for every day of the month of May, a kind of virtual musical calendar. As Steve explains, "CMLE Play (Songs for May) is releasing a different May song every day during May 2020. Trad. songs, new songs, instrumentals - mainly played and sung by keen amateur musicians." (In case you're wondering, the name CMLE Play, by the way, is a pun on Pink Floyd's song 'See Emily Play'.)

I was delighted that Steve asked me to contribute a track to this project and, not having any  traditional May songs in my repertoire, I hastily recorded a semi-improvised, one-take instrumental on the dulcimer and called my new composition 'May Be, May Be Not'. I seem to have got away with this, as the track was the featured tune on 5 May on Steve's blog and Facebook group. So I'd managed, despite the lock-down, to improvise some music and to turn this solo performance into a group experience, by sharing it on Facebook and Soundcloud.

(c) 2020 Tony Gillam

All of which goes to illustrate a few important points about creativity and how it can promote wellbeing:

1.  Connection

Connecting is one of the New Economics Foundation's recommended five actions to promote day-to-day wellbeing (Aked et al., 2008). Connecting with others is very conducive to wellbeing so, notwithstanding Groucho Marx's famous quip, it helps to belong to a few groups, clubs or societies (this could be something like a Facebook group, or even something less obvious like a literary society or a dulcimer club!) Belonging to a larger organisation also promotes a sense of meaning - one of Seligman's five elements of wellbeing - since, as Seligman argued, meaning is derived from belonging to and serving something that you believe is bigger than the self (Seligman, 2011).  

           

           

2. Flexibility

Along with risk-taking and humour, I have suggested that flexibility is one of the characteristics of a creative practitioner (Gillam, 2018). Flexibility involves a willingness to try new approaches - so a planned talk can become an article and a planned group improvisation can become a solo improvisation, shared with a wider group through social media.

3.  Collaboration

Even if writing articles and composing music in lock-down might seem the most solitary of activities, in fact collaboration with others is still central to these creative enterprises. I would not have been prompted to write my article if the conference organiser (David Shields) had not originally invited me to give my talk. If David had not subsequently - and quite rightly - decided to cancel the event, the talk might still have existed but the article might not. So any resulting articles on this subject are really a collaboration between David, me and the magazine editor. Similarly, if Steve had not invited me to contribute a piece of music to his May songs project, I might not have got round to improvising/composing/recording and sharing 'May Be, May Be Not', or of hearing the wonderful contributions of my fellow musicians. The resulting feedback - and friendly banter - I've had with my musical friends has made me laugh a lot and has felt a bit like a surrogate night out at the pub with old friends.

These kinds of connections and collaborations are invaluable as we all try to remain creative in difficult times.

References

Aked, J., Marks, N., Cordon, C. & Thompson, S. (2008). Five ways to wellbeing: The evidence. London: New Economics Foundation.

Gillam, T. (2018) Creativity, Wellbeing and Mental Health Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Seligman, M.E.P. (2011). Flourish: A new understanding of happiness and well-being – and how to achieve them. London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing. 

Portuguese academics and real-life pirates

I know there's nothing at all romantic about the reality of piracy but my thoughts have drifted, these last few days, to Sandokan - the fictional late 19th-century pirate created by Italian author Emilio Salgari. In the mid-70s, the stories were made into a rather forgettable but charming European TV series, with dubbed dialogue and a catchy theme tune. You may wonder why, after all these years, Sandokan has bubbled up into my consciousness. It will become clear in a bit.

As the coronavirus continues to affect lives globally, I'm writing, self-isolating, at home. The effects of self-isolation on mental health and wellbeing have become a topic for daily discussion on the news and we've also seen thousands of examples of creativity in action. Musicians and actors, forced to cancel live performances, are offering online performances and tuition instead. Gin distilleries are re-purposing their equipment to produce hand-sanitiser, using the same alcohol they normally use to make gin and vodka. Recently-retired nurses and other healthcare workers are being urged to return to work for the NHS.

Meanwhile, this week I'll be very quietly celebrating the fact it's two years since the publication of my book 'Creativity, wellbeing and mental health practice'. The book may not have been a best-seller but I have the consolation of knowing it has travelled widely and has been well-received by academics and researchers across the globe. For example, I discovered, the other day, that my work had been cited by a  Portuguese academic twice in her work on nursing home care appointments for the elderly and on artistic mediation in mental health nursing. There's no law against referencing incorrectly but the researcher had cited my work as having appeared in a journal called 'Art & Science' (for which I'd never knowingly written anything.) Intrigued, I googled the errant reference and it took me to a complete eBook version of my book, freely available on a certain website. To add insult to injury, my book was not only being given away but was being passed off as the work of a Vietnamese author. I'd never heard of this author - but it's not surprising as my book is his only publication, if you see what I mean.

I contacted the commissioning editor at my publisher and I was reassured that she's passing the details on to their pirating team to investigate. So now I have visions of a gunship, hurriedly dispatched, setting a course for the South China Sea in search of a Sandokan-like character with the aim of retrieving some 'pieces of eight' for my publisher. Sadly, whether they catch the pirate or not, I won't profit from it personally but at least I might be recognised again as the rightful author. Ah, Jim lad! (Oh no - wrong pirate.)

Time to get creative as festivals all come at once

Get Creative - one of three creativity festivals happening in May 2020

The saying goes, you wait ages for a bus and then three come along at once. Well, it seems the same is true of festivals of creativity. Last Friday I was at the magnificent Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery for a creative festivals information meeting. There can't be many places where you can admire one of the world's finest selections of pre-Raphaelite paintings while waiting for a meeting to start.

I'd heard about the event through the Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance. The purpose of the morning was to let people know about not one but three creative festivals taking place in May 2020 and, of course, to encourage people to get involved. The collaborative partnership aims to turn May into a month of creativity and culture through the coming together of three initiatives:

• the Age of Creativity Festival: (which runs throughout May 2020)
• the Get Creative Festival: (9-17 May 2020)
•  Creativity & Wellbeing Week: (18-24 May 2020).

Damien McGlynn, Project Manager for Get Creative, spoke on behalf of all three festivals and explained what each one was about. The ambition, said Damien, is to make May 2020 a month of creativity and culture, involving a series of events across the UK, with the three linked festivals working as a collective. The festivals are supported by a range of partnership organisations including the Arts Council, Age UK, the BBC and Voluntary Arts.

The first of the three festivals is the Age of Creativity (1-31 May) - an opportunity to celebrate older people as creative audiences, participants, volunteers and artists. As Damien pointed out, the term 'older people' (as defined by Age UK) includes any individual over the age of 50. The emphasis here is on creative or cultural events that are free (or low fee) and are 'age-friendly'.

The Get Creative Festival (9-17 May) is about inclusion and aims to give everyone the chance to get actively involved in a creative event in their local area. Again, events will be free or have just a small fee to cover costs, with an emphasis on participation. As Damien made clear, "The festival doesn't programme events but acts as a major platform for events, and sometimes this means shining a spotlight on existing groups and activities."

Creativity & Wellbeing Week (18-24 May) follows on from Get Creative, and has a broad theme of 'Positive Futures' (which includes areas such as mental health and young people, public health and everyday creativity.) With a strong focus on health and wellbeing, Creativity & Wellbeing Week, like the other two festivals, supports creative and cultural activity at no cost (or a low fee to recover costs.)

More events are planned, including a launch of Creativity & Wellbeing Week at the National Portrait Gallery on 18 May and a collective event in York in 15 May, where the question "Does creativity need a public health campaign?" will be discussed. In the meantime, even if the details are not yet finalised, artists and organisers are being encouraged to begin submitting their events for inclusion on the websites of the relevant festivals.

Words of Wisdom from ...Boogie Wonderland

Wisdom is often found in unexpected places. I picked up a copy of the Independent newspaper yesterday and read an obituary for the songwriter Allee Willis (1947-2019) who died on Christmas Eve. Now, I like to pride myself on my knowledge of pop music but I'd never heard of Allee Willis. It turns out she was a Grammy award-winning songwriter who, despite not being able to read music or even play an instrument, co-wrote a string of funky, soulful hits.  She had a hand in Earth, Wind and Fire's September and Boogie Wonderland as well as the Pet Shop Boys/Dusty Springfield collaboration What Have I Done to Deserve This?  She also co-wrote songs for the Pointer Sisters and the inescapable I'll Be There for You - the Rembrandts' hit theme tune from the TV series Friends.

I've recently retired from my job as a senior lecturer in mental health nursing - one of the reasons I now have time to read newspaper obituaries. I've retired partly to spend more time with my wife and family, having learnt in the last couple of years that it's a mistake to take for granted good health as you get older. In the light of this revelation, I've also realised it's best to spend as much time as possible with the people you love the most, doing the things you enjoy the most. So here am I writing about what I choose to write about. There are few greater pleasures for me.  Writing songs is another great joy. Forty years ago I'd write a new song every week; in recent years it's been more like a new song every two years. So any lessons that can be learnt from the likes of Allee Willis are worth noting. How do you get to be a songwriter? Well, Allee Willis happened to have been born in Detroit in 1947 and had the good fortune to be able to sit outside the Motown studios in their hit-making heyday listening to the records being recorded. And that, she once said, is how she became a songwriter. 

It makes sense: the best way to become a songwriter is to listen carefully to great songs and analyse how they're made - and, of course, it helps if you've got a way with words and tunes. The same applies to all types of writer - first, read a lot of good writing, then start writing.

But what struck a chord with me most about the Allee Willis obituary was a quote with which fatalists the world over will identify: "My whole career is based on two truths," she once explained. The first of these is: "What can't possibly happen, happens." And the second is: "What should be happening, doesn't."  These are important lessons, and worth keeping in mind at those times when, as the song goes, it hasn't been your day, your week, your month or even your year.