the outlier №237 - ballooning
why childhood felt so epic and how to get that back
What a beautiful week of weather here in the UK for me to be on my travels. I’m fortunate to be spending time with family around work commitments back in Bath before hitting the road for a little adventure over the weekend.
Last weekend, I had a really fun chat on Substack LIVE with award-winning children’s author Alastair Chisholm.
Alastair was nominated for this year’s Carnegie Medal and more importantly, he’s a lovely guy who I’ve been fortunate to do some narration for a few times now. There’s a whole host of insights in this conversation on writing for children, whether boys require a different approach with books and how he blends his own experiences into his fiction to make the books feel real, despite featuring huge techno-organic animals fighting in a dystopian wasteland. I had a great time.
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the books📖
My two UK Sport projects are coming to an end and I’ve really enjoyed the variety of it. I’ve met fascinating people and flexed a few different muscles in presenting, interviewing and content direction. Today’s letter is a little later as I had to finish it after hosting another event for them at Bath University – walking into the Sports Training Village, where I spent countless hours training as an aspiring rugby player, was a nostalgia trip.
Creating educational content has been great fun and I admire how UK Sport are innovating internally for the athletes under their wing. The people I’ve spoken to have been really inspiring and it’s got me thinking about whether other organisations would do similar things.
Otherwise, I’ve been working on more content stuff for myself, taking notes for various writing projects and I’m receiving a fair few pitches for authors to come and speak on Substack. This kind of thing is really fun but you need to be careful not to do too much work for free so on that front, I’ll have to see what feels right.
the epic experience of childhood
This week, at my friend’s house, a balloon (pictured above) landed in the next door garden.
It was one of many balloons in the clear West Country evening sky and I thought as I saw it descend, this has never happened to me before. We went over to see it, like we were looking for a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, excited like children.
Our school lunch breaks used to roll on for what felt like hours. In the summer, when it was too hot, we’d cross the enormous meadow behind the classrooms and sit under the trees, wind rustling our white shirts through the canopy. Football matches on the hot, hard, sandy astroturf felt titanic, the flashpoints living on in our collective folklore, recounted for the rest of the day until it was time to play again.
Is there anyone who feels that their childhood passed by far slower than their adult life?
Speaking to Alastair Chisholm, we spoke about the epic experience of youth – the melodrama of childhood – and then as these things tend to go, I discovered a piece from Yana Yuhai which told me why it happens like that.
Yuhai writes that childhood’s momentous feeling stems from three things:
Something called the oddball effect means novel events linger in our brains and in childhood, most things are novel.
In proportional terms, a year for a child is a huge chunk of their life. As you age, each year weighs less, liable to flutter from your memory on the lightest breeze.
Then there’s predictability. As we succumb to routine, our mind saves us the labour and puts life on autopilot.
Life as a child feels vivid for these reasons but I’d add when children are small, the world feels big. The lawn becomes a meadow, the pool becomes an ocean, adults become giants and animals become mythical beasts. Life is epic.
Alastair also pointed out the feelings of control and consequence that arrive during childhood, feelings that lend grandeur to the days:
‘You think that, you know, for the first 10 years of your life, pretty much everything around you is controlled and arranged and done. And then you're starting to do this thing where suddenly you're actually having to make decisions and you're having to accept the consequences of the things that you've done.’
That youthful wresting of control contrasts with the abdication of choice that our adult habits can be and Yuhai recommends cultivating presence as a solution to time’s quickening pace, ‘returning to the body, to sensation, to the moment’ and I agree.
But perhaps we should also seek scale. We can find places where we’re reminded of how large the world is, of how epic the everyday can be. Sometimes, wandering around London, seeing the flow of people, the arcane architecture and the size of everything I feel a sense of the epic. I find the place entirely miraculous, grand, huge and strange.
Like a balloon landing in the next door garden.
a read
Traumaland by Josh Silver is so far, brilliant. Each chapter I finish I feel compelled to go again, the story rumbling forward with each revelation. I’ve left it for a couple of days because I feel like as soon as I pick it up again, I won’t put it down until I know what happens.
In the last three decades, youth culture has moved from a deep suspicion of commerce to a passionate defense of anti-anti-commerce to an entire generation of "creatives” who leverage the commercial market… to do even more commerce.
For something shorter, try The Age of the Double Sellout by W. David Marx and see what you think.
a listen
If you prefer to listen to my chat with Alastair Chisholm, it’s here. Otherwise, I enjoyed this interview with Hector Bellerin, conducted by Gary Lineker and Alistair Campbell. Bellerin had his potential cruelly curtailed by an injury which robbed him of his track sprinter speed but he remains a hugely impressive and successful young man, bright and curious about the world. I’d love to write for him but unusually for an athlete, it sounds like he’s doing that himself!
a quote
‘Children at that age, they can cope with that sophistication and these big questions. But they're also still willing to step out there and actually just imagine a different world.’
– Alastair Chisholm
lastly
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