Now the tour is over
Some reflections and lessons from a month of reading my stories out loud
Photography by Claire Bullen
Sign up to my newsletter The Gulp to get posts sent directly to your email
One thing I don’t do is have progress reviews. When I worked in offices they used to stress me out like nothing else — being perceived, forced to address the passage of time, no thank you. I live firmly in the present, and while years of working hard to make myself more amenable to ideas of not only existing but affecting and influencing how I will exist in the future has given me a better and more positive outlook, it’s still not my favourite activity. And since I’ve been my own boss for just over 7 years, it never comes up anymore. That’s the thing with being your own boss, you get to do what you want. There’s a second sharp edge to this, however. I don’t get to look at how far I’ve come, at what I’ve achieved, at how I plan to work and live my life in the coming months, years, decades.
I’ve previously described myself as an icebreaker. I slowly churn through tough terrain, making slow but steady progress, without ever looking back to see the impact I have made. The clearing in the ice was made for me, by me, but I’m only ever fixed on the solid white ahead that burns my eyes and seems impossible to breach. So here we are, at the end of what was a huge project for me — a culmination of 12 months of work and a lot of personal growth. It would be easier for me to do what I always do, and feel sad that it’s over, and look for the next thing to focus my attention on. This time, I want things to be different. I want to notice what I’ve achieved, and to convince myself that I am not the same person as I was when I began A Place To Be. I have grown, I have developed, I am changed. I wrote A Place To Be to acknowledge that there is beauty and power in being introverted, in using creativity not only to escape but to create worlds where I am safe to go wherever my mind takes me. The liminal spaces I describe are, to me, freeing. No matter what happens around you, your inner world is yours. Your creativity cannot be curbed.
At each event for A Place To Be, I spoke about the radical nature of daydreaming, and about thinking, my favourite pastime. To sit and think about a subject that has itched my brain is something I live for. It can be as obscure as sacred geometry, or as simple as considering the people who might have built the stone wall I am walking beside. I love the contradiction of experiencing the world around me in a deeper way by taking myself out of it, losing myself in thought until, sometimes, I fall asleep. I do not take hallucinogens. This is all about the free ability to go beyond seeing and accepting that is available and accessible to us all. The view out of a train window is not a flat scene. Who lives in those houses? Did where they stand used to be meadows? What did they look like? Who planted that apple tree beside the track? How long has this route passed by that school — did kids used to wave from the railings in the 50s? 20s?
My favourite story from the zine changes all the time, but currently it’s A Balcony, On Holiday. Zoning out and experiencing a view as someone who is not part of it feels otherworldly. In modern travel journalism, the emphasis is placed on hidden gems and embedding oneself as a local. When I travel, I like to observe. I don’t want to see a place through the eyes of someone who lives and works there, who is bored of its monotony and no longer sees its glowing details — I want to see it through my own eyes. I am not a traveller, I am a tourist, and I am not embarrassed to be enthralled by everyday scenes. In Venice, once, I saw a man using a dolly cart to wheel crates of beer over a picturesque bridge and everyone stopped taking photos. I remember that man more than the exact bridge we were standing on. I hope the story reflects how important these moments of mundane unreality are to me.
I have enjoyed the tour much more than I anticipated. I have never been a good public speaker, but each event I found myself talking confidently about the small worlds I’d built within each story from the zine. My zine, the book I’d written. I should look back and be proud of this. Sharing writing via the internet and on the page is one thing, but reading aloud in the intimate setting of a pub is a totally different experience. I hadn’t heard my stories before the first event — only read them silently from my computer screen. Giving them life in this way showed me different aspects of my writing style I hadn’t considered before, and has offered me new ways to try. In some ways, I inspired myself. Does that sound bigheaded? And if it does, isn’t that the goal?
Thank you to everyone who came to one of my A Place To Be events over the past month or so. It has been a pleasure and an honour to share my stories with you, and to talk about imagination in a world that’s ploughing billions into snuffing it out. Imagination is a weapon. It is yours. You can use it however you wish. This is what I’ve learned while writing A Place To Be — that my “silly little stories about beer and wine” are not useless in a time of crisis as I had been thinking at the start of 2024. Escapism doesn’t have to be ignorance, it can be a chance to reset and create calm. I relearned that writing is both my escape and my activism, and that if my stories keep me going, they are valuable.
Please buy my zine A Place To Be!
