hello,
It’s been one of my busiest weeks this year and I am feeling it. I can’t remember spending as much time on trains since my final year of French rugby.
Fortunately, things should ease off from the weekend but I am not going to make any bold predictions of special time to myself. The best laid plans of mice and men often turn into getting punched in the face or whatever the quote is.
On the plus side, I’ve had some excellent mince pies. There is nothing quite like them.
the books📖
It’s been an amazing week for the books!
Firstly I spent the weekend at Hay Festival, capturing content, speaking on panels and watching author talks. I even made a paper daffodil that was surprisingly not absolute shit and we stayed in the beautiful treehouses at By The Wye, right by the raging river.
The Winter Weekend is a nice quick trip to Hay, unlike the stag do style bacchanal of the summer edition, and the events take place around the castle and the town centre instead of further out on the festival site. It’s smaller, colder in weather but convivial and warm in feeling and I’ll definitely look to be involved next time around, whether that’s with TikTok or the festival itself.
Then I came back to London, made some #content for the National Gallery, went to my book club and then headed to the TikTok Awards, an evening gala event celebrating creators from all across the app, not just the bookish bit. It’s always interesting to puncture your own bubble and see what’s going on more broadly and TikTok is so diverse that there’s plenty of inspiration there.
Luckily I took it relatively easy at the TikTok Awards as on Wednesday I was up early and off to Manchester to host and keynote an event for UK Sport at the National Cycling Centre, addressing career transition for their elite athletes across a range of sports. It was very cool to speak to World, Olympic and Paralympic medallists, I sold a bulk load of Endgame books and my talk went down great at the close of day.
All of these endeavours, excepting perhaps the daffodil, feel like they’re downstream of previous work that I did quietly on my own. It’s been a tiring week but it’s felt great.
for your interest
a rizzle kick and sliding (dino) doors
a rizzle kick
One of the Hay speakers I saw was Jordan Stephens, formerly half of the Rizzle Kicks.
I started reading his book the other week in preparation for Hay and while what I read wasn’t for me, he was great on stage and I loved this Substack post he shared recently about men complimenting other men.
We shouldn’t feel a way about highlighting positive behaviour. For whatever reason. Men calling each other beautiful is a reclamation of authentic masculinity in my eyes. Intimacy isn’t supposed to derive entirely from sexual encounters or lie solely with partners. We are in desperate need of finding intimacy in male relationships. I believe that brotherhood, fatherhood and paternity is a communal responsibility.
Lots of people and media assume a negative position when it comes to men at all – Stephens says (and I agree) that for many people, masculinity and ‘toxic masculinity’ have ‘blended, become enmeshed’ – and have only bad things to say but a lot of men assume ill intent when they do actually get a compliment, particularly from another man.
When I played pro rugby, one of my very smart teammates bantered a guy for a week or two by just earnestly complimenting him with no seeming agenda. It’s always stuck with me because the idea a man might just say something nice about another man to him was so impossible that it was unsettling for it to happen.
Stephens isn’t only speaking about highlighting softer sides of masculinity either. He sees and celebrates,
Men stepping up as fathers in the absence of their own. Men who lift boulders and live peacefully in the woods. Men who run into burning buildings. Talk people off ledges. Fix the wifi. Clear the rubbish. Go down sewers. Donate to their community. Grieve publicly.
Where I would disagree with Stephens is when he says that it’s men’s responsibility to fix this particular situation. It definitely is. But isn’t it also [in] everyone else’s [interest]? The range of people interested in a solution is why I find the boys’ literacy work so encouraging.
Recently I lightly mocked a friend of mine by saying that he wanted ‘to be admired’ but once I got my easy laugh from everyone and thought about what I’d said, don’t we all want that? Someone to admire us? For any reason? Isn’t it important to have mutual admiration in your close relationships?
I was right about him. He probably does want to be admired but then so do I. And I suspect you do too.
sliding (dino)doors
One of my friends was a rower for Great Britain u23s. Despite being 6 foot 7, having all the physical gifts and looking like he was on track to the full squad, he was told by the coach that he would never select him. He left, did a master’s degree and after being spotted playing university rugby he got offered a professional contract.
My friend is not the only one to be hard done by in a way that turned out ok.
During his time at Harvard, eventual Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton suspected his professor was grading him unduly harshly and so, after informing another professor, Crichton submitted an essay from George Orwell as his own.
For Orwell’s work, the 18 year old Crichton received a B-minus. He said,
‘Now Orwell was a wonderful writer, and if a B-minus was all he could get, I thought l'd better drop English as my major.’
Crichton switched his major to biological anthropology and he is still the only writer to have a #1 bestselling book, tv show, and film at the same time. Maybe without switching courses, he’d never have had the idea for Jurassic Park and we’d all be a lot worse off.
We’ve all been blessed with a final bit of fortune. Crichton was 6 foot 8 tall so perhaps the world would be a much worse place if the Harvard rowing coach had ever got a hold of him.
a book
I’ve not had time to read much of anything over the past week so you could take the advice of one of the GB judo athletes/ruffians who told me in dulcet northern tones that he’d gotten bored of feeling uneducated and has been reading ‘some classics, Dostoyevsky and Camus and that.’
a listen
Been enjoying this lowkey little number.
a quote
‘Rightly or wrongly, it seemed to me that sincerity was the thing that mattered most: the stamp which gave the coin its true value.’
– Malcolm Pleydell
lastly
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Lovely paper daffodil!