Radical Sabbatical

In the months since I last wrote to you, the sands have shifted somewhat. All the small steps I have been taking towards rebuilding a life began gathering speed out of view in my slipstream and now I find myself on the other side of what, perhaps from the outside, presents as one, effortless leap. I played my first proper gig in 11 months and then quickly another. I wrote one song and then another in accordance with my new-song-for-every-gig policy that I have enshrined in my revised T&Cs. I spent a week at Middle Farm Studios in Devon making an album in a week with an entirely new group of musicians and songwriters which was as utopic and delightful as it sounds, not least because I was acutely aware that 6 months prior the opportunity to play music with a group talented strangers would have left me cowering and crumbled in the corner.

At Middle Farm Studios being my usual studious self lol

It feels as if someone has picked me up and put me back in my life, like coming to from a bad dream or a brief loss of consciousness, of which I am familiar. But the loss of consciousness was not brief or absent of toil and tempting as it is to attribute these shifts to some omnipotent force, I know they are the fruits of many deliberate days of planting, untangling and repotting. Nonetheless, it is a great joy and relief to discover that all those hours I spent scrabbling around with my fingernails in the dirt have borne fruit.

It is energising to have air back in my lungs and the wind at my stern, but I am aware of how quickly it will luff and die without my continued participation in the various wind harnessing strategies that I have cultivated over the last fallow year. Blue tacked to the wall behind my desk is a list of all these things that helped bring me back to a place where I could write music again and ‘Writing my Substack’ sits right at the top. So here I am, back at the laptop, ready to resume my weekly letters to you so we can muddle through this hilarious pursuit together. It’s good to be back.

An attributing factor to the sudden bursting of the bank is that I bagged myself a new job! It’s an online gig teaching software to university students which I hope will give me the freedom to pursue music whilst remaining physically free and financially buoyant. The catch is that the unpaid training only commences in mid-August with the promise of cold hard cash sometime in the early (or mid?! Lol) Autumn. So, I find myself in an unintentional two-month sabbatical impregnated with three-hour bookshop shifts and cheese markets where the lion’s share of the clientele are of the summer holidaying class and thus conspicuously absent. And although I imagined that I would spend my first sabbatical holed up in a whimsical bothy on the west coast of Scotland, it feels like quite the immense privilege to have a long, empty summer preceding a period of guaranteed employment and my only plan is to make music and spend as little of my tax savings pot as possible before I become gainfully employed. So, strap in for weekly instalments of the sabbatical diaries documenting my radical sabbatical (working title) from my lovely albeit roasting home in North London.