To me, that is far more exciting than commissioning arts as arts. I saw UNBOXED as articulating something about the creativity in all of life – if there is creativity in STEM, there is surely creativity in business, sport and parenting too.

EPILOGUE

Several years ago, before UNBOXED was even a thing, I was working on a project that involved helping people to identify if they were creative.  “I have a fundamental objection to this,” I said. “I believe that everyone’s creative.”  I was a lone voice and so I quietly withdrew and accepted that the image of creativity as a river that flows through the cosmos, the earth and every human being was just my personal little quirk. Having worked at UNBOXED, I returned to the project and had a similar conversation with colleagues addressing the same issue. This time I didn’t back down.

I love you UNBOXED.  X

It was also great fun. I was climbing aboard See Monster, a decommissioned gas platform that had been brought from the North Sea to Weston-Super-Mare and transformed into a garden, waterfall and showcase of renewable energy; I was lying back in Dreamachine, listening to music specially composed by Jon Hopkins, and seeing a dazzling array of patterns, all with my eyes shut; I was dancing with Dandelion under the stars as it inspired the people of Scotland to grow their own food in schools, on windowsills and in unexpected gardens…

Much has been written about the £120m UNBOXED programme that originated in Theresa May’s 2018 Conservative Party Conference announcement of a year-long festival of British creativity and innovation. There’s been a lot of noise about whether UNBOXED was or wasn’t a festival of Brexit, which has been tedious.  Soon there will be an independent evaluation of the programme by KPMG, which I expect will be interesting.

I want to write about what UNBOXED has meant to me personally.

UNBOXED’s claims about creativity

UNBOXED: creativity in the UK was a celebration of creativity and as such it made some clear claims about what creativity is. It said creativity is about science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) as well as the arts.  It said everyone’s creative. It said creativity changes the world.

I have been working in (what we now call) the creative industries for all my professional life, but I have never come across an organisation that stands for creativity in quite the bold way that UNBOXED does.

Even within the creative industries, I have come across some who see creativity as an extra – the sprinkling of hundreds-and-thousands on the trifle of life, rather than the source of life itself. I have encountered the idea that some people are creative, and others aren’t. There are plenty who still see creativity as the preserve of the arts.

What set UNBOXED apart, for me, was the premise that there’s creativity in STEM as well as in arts and culture.  The whole programme was built on that. UNBOXED commissioned ten teams to make work around the UK that brought together STEM and the arts in creative collaboration. It commissioned astrophysicists, neuroscientists, engineers, software developers…

To me, that is far more exciting than commissioning arts as arts. I saw UNBOXED as articulating something about the creativity in all of life – if there is creativity in STEM, there is surely creativity in business, sport and parenting too.

My understanding of creativity

I first become aware of the creative process through writing books. When I wrote my books and sent (what we still quaintly call) manuscripts off to the publishers, I had the sense it wasn’t me that wrote them.  I mean, I did write them. Obviously.  No one else had even read the manuscripts, much less written them.  And yet the books had a feeling of surprise on completion: “Oh so, THAT’S what they were about.”  Even I hadn’t known. I found it humbling, as though in writing l had been part of something bigger, participating in something that was mine and not mine at the same time.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, a storyteller and psychoanalyst of Mexican heritage, offers an image that helps make sense of this: “Always behind the actions of writing, painting, thinking, healing, doing, cooking, talking, smiling, making, is the river, the Río Abajo Río; the river under the river nourishes everything we make.” (Women Who Run with the Wolves)

I have come to imagine creativity as a “river under the river” that flows through the cosmos, flows through the earth and flows through each and every one of us. Being creative involves the discipline of working at your craft, honing, practising, showing up at the page. But it’s also about attending to the river, working with it rather than against it, paying attention to its rhythms and flow, knowing when to keep working and when to let go into dreams, when the ending has come and when you just have to begin.

I never heard anyone at UNBOXED talk about the Río Abajo Río as such. It wasn’t a phrase that was used in the DCMS Select Committees. It wasn’t how we talked about creativity around the office either. But in claiming that everyone’s creative; in funding teams to come together even before they had an idea; in investing in maths and science and tech as much as arts, UNBOXED came closer to my understanding of creativity than any other organisation for which I have worked.

What I gained from UNBOXED

I had a blast working at UNBOXED (see third paragraph). I got paid (of course).  I developed new skills (natch). I made friends for life (UNBOXED people were the most brilliant, kind and hard-working I have ever come across). I now have two stripes of grey on either side of my head, like a badger, that my hairdresser has confirmed appeared during the latter part of 2022.  I will never know for sure, but I reckon I earned my stripes through the intensity of the way we worked.

I cherish all of those things, even the badger-bit.  But what I am most grateful for is the way UNBOXED helped me to be true to my core. I was used to working in places that saw creativity as product, rather than a process; the visual bit rather than the words; the nice stuff rather than where the real work was done. My commitment to the “river under the river” was therefore a private part of me.  It was something I would speak of in a whisper, jot down in my journal, share on walks with close friends.

UNBOXED helped me to build a bridge between my core beliefs and the wider world. By placing the centrality of creativity firmly and squarely in the public realm, it enabled me to be myself, speak my truth and do the same.

EPILOGUE

Several years ago, before UNBOXED was even a thing, I was working on a project that involved helping people to identify if they were creative.  “I have a fundamental objection to this,” I said. “I believe that everyone’s creative.”  I was a lone voice and so I quietly withdrew and accepted that the image of creativity as a river that flows through the cosmos, the earth and every human being was just my personal little quirk. Having worked at UNBOXED, I returned to the project and had a similar conversation with colleagues addressing the same issue. This time I didn’t back down.

I love you UNBOXED.  X

Andrew Christophers has written Starting Up & Scaling Up A Human-First Business, as he steps back from Brand Genetics, the marketing consultancy he co-founded 25 years ago.  He is essentially sharing his tips for success, rooted in the direct experience of growing a business from his kitchen table to one with a £6.1m turnover (December 2021).

Having read his book, I don’t think there’s any doubt that Brand Genetics will flourish without him in a hands-on role – and that’s the greatest compliment.

Andrew claims that Brand Genetics has achieved success through being a “human-first” organisation. His book unpacks what this means, using photographs, real-life stories and a nice big font with summaries of key take-outs at the end of each chapter.  (It is a marketing consultancy after all.)

It’s distinctly lacking in pomposity and, with the slight exception of the section on Mutant Marketing, jargon-free. The book follows an A-to-Z structure, with insights appearing in alphabetical, rather logical, order. It essentially makes the book a selection of anecdotes, like pearls on a necklace. To me, this is a human-first, approach – presenting the nuggets as insights from a well-lived life rather than a thesis. Andrew says that Michael, one of his members of staff, used to joke about some of Brand Genetics work, saying: “that’s all very well in practice, but what’s the theory?” Scrap the theory – that’s what I say.

This is a book about scaling up a start-up, but it resonated with my experience of working in charities, medium-sized businesses, and global corporations too. What he says about delegation and trusting younger people to do the work will be appreciated by micro-managed employees in organisations of every size.

I took strength from his JFDI section which was about the importance of making decisions.  “I once read that the best managers don’t make better decisions, they just make more decisions,” he says.  Yes! Absolutely!  I hereby take “Just F***ing Do It” as my modus operandi.

The most surprising tip came from his Never Stop section. I thought it a universal rule of business that you never have someone in the job at the time you need them.  By the time you have identified the need, made the business case, signed off the job description, advertised the post, interviewed and waited for the new employee to hand in their notice, you are so busy doing the work yourself that you don’t have time to induct the new employee into the role. Was it not ever thus? (Or is that just the way it works in the circles where I hang out?)

Brand Genetics has an interesting take on this. They try to hire good people BEFORE they need them, knowing they will need them one day. There’s something I never thought of before… “Never Stop selling, and never stop recruiting either,” says Andrew.

The most touching anecdote came in Y is for You, which was about being your true self at work. From the style of his book, it’s easy to imagine that Andrew is a bit of an operator in business. He admits that he was good at putting on a suit and playing the game. Who’s to say that his business wasn’t just like all the others – where the guys at the top deliver a nice patter about employee-care but are no different from anyone else in reality?

I found myself believing that Brand Genetics really was a human-first business when Andrew admits that putting on a suit and playing the game came at a cost of being true to himself. He says he didn’t want that. And he wanted everyone at Brand Genetics to be their true selves, warts and all. So one of his employees would come to work in shorts and bring his dog with him too – and they loved him for it.

For me, that heart-warming anecdote brought a distinct layer of authenticity to this beautifully presented and easily digestible book. I believe Brand Genetics really is a human-first business – and as such businesses of all sizes need to sit up and listen.

(I don’t suppose you’ve got a job going, have you?)

(Starting Up & Scaling Up A Human-First Business by Andrew Christophers is published by Troubador and costs £12.99)

I am delighted to be the producer of Our Garden – Sacred Spaces of Balsall Heath, a project in which we are making a beautiful map showing Balsall Heath as a place of trees, bees, and blue and green spaces rather than roads. We have three brilliant artists –Shaheen Ahmed, Rachel Pilkington and Dave Gray – a great project manager in Abbas Shah and a steering group made up of representatives from two mosques and a church.

It was my idea.

For almost ten years I have been fantasising about creating an artists’ map showing the waterways and wildlife of Birmingham, so that, even in the UK’s second city, we can imagine ourselves as people of nature.

Through gathering together project partners in the form of the United Church of St Paul’s, the Hazrat Sultan Bahu Trust and the Al-Abbas Islamic Centre, all in Balsall Heath, we became a Creative City Project generously funded by Birmingham City Council programmed by the Birmingham 2022 Festival.

Now we are forming relationships, praying together under stars, planting fruit trees and planning to make beautiful art.

I didn’t start my professional creative life as a producer. I started out writing books. I was aged 21, straight from university when I wrote Fat is a Spiritual Issue, followed a decade later by Memories of Bliss.

With both books, I remember the point at which I sent them off to their publishers, a point at which nobody else had read them in their entirety apart from me. Writing books was a solitary activity. I discussed the content with others, but nobody read what I had written, commented on it or steered me along the way.

In writing, there was an intimacy between me and the page. It was a place through which I grafted and despaired and became. When I finally got to the point where I could say: “So THAT’s what I needed to write,” it was as much of a surprise to me as it was to anyone else. The great river of creativity had carried me to a place that had been hidden even from me.

Having done that twice, the day came when a publisher said: “What do you want to write next? I don’t mind what it is. Tell us what you want to write and we’ll publish it.” It was an enviable offer by any standards and yet, for reasons that alluded me at the time, I found myself thinking: “Nah…”

Looking back, I can say I stopped writing books.

That brings me to today and Our Garden – Sacred Spaces of Balsall Heath. Unlike my books, which were written entirely by me, this is a project I couldn’t possibly do by myself. And that is the very thing that touches me. I go out of the room to make tea and when I come back the artists are talking about the nature map and making it their own. The project manager is forming relationships in ways that I couldn’t. The Chamberlain Highbury Trust gives us fruit trees. The mosques are inviting us to Iftars I hadn’t imagined. It’s humbling. It fills me with gratitude. It’s where I want to be.

At the same time, I am working on UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK, a celebration of creativity taking place in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales during the summer of 2022.  In the interests of simplicity, it calls itself a celebration of creativity, but it’s actually a particular kind of creativity that it’s celebrating – not personal self-expression but creative collaboration.  It’s about what happens when you bring together people form science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics; what happens when you bring established organisations together with emerging artists. It’s about our creativity and its power to change the world.

I am excited by this because this is the kind of creativity I want to experience in my life right now.

Am I saying that I will never write a book again? Of course not. Anything might happen.  I can only go with the flow of the river of creativity and be surprised at where it takes me. I’m not into goals, aims and predictions.

But I AM saying that, when I was in young, I was very concerned with the question of what I was doing with my life. It was a question that had an urgency that drove me. Today it’s not even a question that interests me. “What are we doing together?” That’s the question that drives me now.

It’s a very simple idea – taking photographs from the same spot through the seasons (and not an original one either). But I have found it more profound than I had anticipated.

It reminds me that life is always changing. To live well is therefore to allow life to flow through you like a river, rather than try to hold onto the good times as though they can last. It teaches me that death and loss are as much a part of life as buds and blossom. It shows me that winter is as beautiful as summer and autumn as lovely as spring. So when I go through my times of grief – as I most surely have and most surely will again – I can welcome them.

Sometimes, I think this is all we need to know, just this – just what the trees through the seasons can tell us. If we understood this deeply, we would be most fully alive.

The conference centre, familiar to me through schmoozy celebrations with Birmingham’s film and TV industry, was now being run with military precision.

There were St John Ambulance volunteers in green tee-shirts wiping down chairs and showing the way. I was shown to three desks, two waiting areas and one clinical space. At each point, people smiled. There was welcome, clarity and a quiet seriousness about it all.

I felt humbled and grateful. I was humbled by the scale of the horror that had brought us all to this place; by the skill of the scientists; by the dedication of healthcare staff; by the urgency of the roll-out programme. I was in my home city, but I felt connected to the globe.

This little jab was one small step towards saving lives, giving children their education and healing the world. Some people had their jabs in cathedrals. Millennium Point was cathedral for me.

But do women who have become pregnant through fertility treatment have a slightly different relationship with their children from those who have conceived naturally? Do the years of struggling to have a child make the love more intense if the baby eventually arrives?

And what about pregnancy? Is that fraught with particular anxieties for women who have miscarried many times? Is it ever possible to find a way to enjoy it?

We will be asking some of these questions at Fertility Fest 2019, when I’m chairing a session, Parenting after IVF at the Barbican, London.

The evening will start with a performance of To the Moon and Back, a dialogue between a mother and daughter on the experience of IVF from their respective perspectives – a fertility patient and a person born as a result of reproductive science. It uncovers th intensity and complexity of being born “special”.

The artists, Anna Furse and Nina Klaff will join me in conversation with Ann Daniels, record-breaking polar explorer and mum of IVF triplets, and Victoria Macdonald, Channel 4’s health and social care correspondent.

Do IVF parents love their children differently? I’ve no idea. But I am hoping to learn something. Do join us on Friday 26 April to find out. Or I will post an update and let you afterwards.

This is not so much as a review, as 21 reasons why Jessica Hepburn should step onto the stage and take a bow.

Bow 1: Skilful narration

21 Miles is about Jessica’s endeavour to swim the Channel after 11 unsuccessful rounds of IVF, which she has written about in her previous book, The Pursuit of Motherhood. She gets a skilful narration point for telling the IVF backstory in a way that makes sense to those who don’t already know it but which isn’t repetitive to those who do.

Bow 2: Swimming

It’s an awesome thing that’s hard to describe. Jessica captures it both physically and metaphorically. “I can feel tears in my goggles but here in the pool, no one knows, not even the water, because water only knows tears as itself.”

Bow 3: Nature

It’s not just any old swimming but open water swimming that Jessica’s doing here. So the book is also about our relationship with nature. “Even though I feel small and vulnerable, as I start to swim I also feel something else. The words of a poem my dad used to recite to me when I was a child come unbidden into my mind: ‘And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more’.”

Bow 4: Humour

What can I say? This girl’s hilarious.

Bow 5: Food

As if it wasn’t enough to connect motherhood and swimming, Jessica makes this into a food story too. In so doing she integrates another of those themes that’s BIG for most women. Big love to Jessica for her fully-fledged fest of all things edible.

Bow 6: Skilful narration

She gets another skilful narration point for integrating such diverse themes into a coherent story.

Bow 7: Other women

Jessica invites women, ranging from scientist Baroness Greenfield (childless) to businesswoman Nicola Horlick (mother of six), to have lunch with her and answer the question of whether motherhood makes you happy. This is interesting, as it’s a question we don’t tend to ask. It’s also beautifully expansive as she finds a point of connection in each of the women’s baby stories and thereby binds them (us) together.

Bow 8: Reflections on motherhood

She might have missed the experience of motherhood but she had the meaning (to paraphrase TS Eliot). Through her quest she unveils insights that are fuller and deeper than those of many a literal mother.

Bow 9: Skilful narration

Jessica asks each of the women to give her one word to take with her on her swim and in so doing creates a poem. She deserves a skilful narration point for the very idea. When she has to dig deep in her swim, she recalls those words with each stroke. In so doing takes all the women she has interviewed with her and, by extension, all of womankind too. God bless you, Jessica.

Bow 10: Vulnerability

This vulnerability is all the more powerful because it’s shared before the wound has healed. “Sometimes I think the hardest thing about what I’ve been through – what we’ve been through – is that it makes it difficult to love because you’re so frightened of happiness being taken away.”

Bow 11: Living for the unborn children

A fellow swimmer, Nick, says swimming the Channel is all about the strength of the things deep inside you that are driving you forward. Jessica discovers her motivation. “Mille Gade swam the Channel for her children. I’m swimming it for me and Gertrude Ederle and the children we never had.” I find this both poignant and deeply inspiring.

Bow 12: Uterus-power

Jessica has her doubters, the greatest of which is Chris, who doesn’t think she stands a hope in Hell’s chance because she’s always complaining about the cold. But Jessica unveiled what the competitive sportsman couldn’t see – the gravitational pull of the womb.

Bow 13: Healing of family

It’s not part of the core narrative, but along the way Jessica grows in appreciation for her mum and dad and their own journeys into parenthood. It’s a beautiful reaching back as the stretches forward. After her swim, she goes for a picnic with her mum. “Because although neither of us quite had the family of our dreams, we do have the family of our reality and that will always be something to treasure.”

Bow 14: Control

There are plenty in our culture who make out we can control our destiny through a mix of positive thinking and grim determination. Swimming the Channel and making a baby give the lie to that. This book tells a more truthful story – about the dance between what we can control and what we can’t and is all the more inspiring for it.

Bow 15: Conclusion 1 – sadness

And so Jessica starts to reach her conclusions on her search for the meaning of motherhood. “Every single person in the world seems to have something that makes them terribly sad. And life is about making the best of your sad thing.”

Bow 16: Conclusion 2 – connection

“Connection is vital to human happiness and if you can’t get it ready-made by having your own children you need to create it in different ways.”

Bow 17: Conclusion 3 – something else

Jessica recognises that however much women want to have children, they need to have something else as well. I am sure this is true. There is, at the heart of motherhood, and ambivalence. We want our children, but we also want to get back to our “something else” – our work, our silence, our creativity, whatever it is. If we don’t have a something else, it will be very difficult to let our children go as they grow up. So the something else is at the heart of motherhood as well as the heart of life.

Bow 18: Skilful narration

Jessica manages to keep the story twisting to the end. In almost the last chapter, she reveals she had asked each woman what they would eat for their last supper. When she has finished her swim, she eats that food as a celebration. It’s a surprising detail, all the better for being held back and which celebrates the symbolic power of food as well as nicely concluding the theme.

Bow 19: Climax 3 – relationship

There are three endings to this story, each of which had me in tears. The final (surprising) climax is the last word – love – which Jessica’s partner, Peter, giver her retrospectively as her Channel word. This is a story about what 11 failed attempts at IVF can do to a relationship. (It’s also NOT a story about what 11 failed attempts at IVF can do to a relationship and Jessica gets a bonus skilful narration point for the way she manages to tell the story while empathically not telling that story in deference to Peter’s desire for privacy.)

Bow 20: Climax 2 – She did it!

She bloody well did it! Listen to that sound. It’s the sound of all my eggs rushing down my fallopian tubes to stand on the edge of my uterus cheering. Well done Jessica! Bloody, menstrual bloody, well done!

Bow 21: Climax 3 – mother

For me, the most profound part of the book was when Jessica’s mother gave her childless daughter the word “mother” to swim the Channel with. I could have cried her a Channel. I almost did.

I hope you’ve not got backache from all the bowing, Jessica. But you’ve swum the Channel, so you should be OK. What more can I say? Thank you.

It’s arguably the most important job you’re ever going to do and – apart from the twenty-seventh rendition of Thomas the Tank Engine – is utterly fascinating.  And yet the demands of feeding, entertaining, wiping, holding, soothing and life-saving are so relentless it’s impossible to reflect upon what you’re doing as you are actually doing it. (I wrote about this at the time: Can you be a feminist if you can’t think?)

What I didn’t know during my child’s early years is that as your child grows so does the space to pause and consider. When he’s old enough to walk home from school alone, you gain an extra hour each day.  When she can stay in the house on her own, you gain another hour, maybe two.

Now my child is aged 11, I’ve found it’s possible to mine that rich repository of milky, burpy, tired-as-zombie experience in a way that would have been an impossible luxury only a few years ago.

I will be doing that next month at Fertility Fest 2018, at the Bush Theatre, London between Tuesday 8 and Sunday 13 May.

Fertility Fest is the world’s first arts festival dedicated to fertility, infertility,modern families and the science of making babies. I was part of the first Fertility Fest in Birmingham last year so I know it will be a thoughtful, emotional, caring and beautiful occasion. (I can’t tell you how much it made me cry.)

Lots of questions will be being asked:

• How does not being able to make a baby make you feel about your body?
• Are there different pressures and prejudices about infertility depending on the community you come from?
• What makes you angry in the field of fertility, infertility, modern families and the science of making babies?
• Why do we not talk about miscarriage?

The question I’m most looking forward to is one posed by the incredibly engaging and generally awesome Jessica Hepburn: Does motherhood make you happy? Jessica, who co-founded Fertility Fest, asks 21 women that question in her new book: 21 Miles.

I can’t wait to read it, not least because not all of the women said: “Yes”.  I know that motherhood has made me happy; very happy indeed, even when it’s meant I haven’t had time to think.  But I will relish the opportunity to reflect upon why – and do that with other mothers and those who longed to be mothers.  We are woven together with the same golden thread, my sisters.

For around the past thirty years, I’ve been aware that I live in a city, the second largest metropolis in the UK to be precise.

I thought I was surrounded by buildings (mainly ugly ones), a spaghetti of junctions and a blast of cars. I just saw miles and miles of hideous sprawl wherever I happened to be.

But in recent years, my perception has changed. I haven’t moved city. I  haven’t even moved house. But now I feel that I live amongst fields, trees, wildlife and glorious sky.

Last week the BBC published an article: How much of your area is built on?

It was reporting on the Co-ordination of Information on the Environment (Corine) project initiated by the European Commission in 1985 which found only six per cent of the UK is actually built on.

A whopping 21 per cent of Birmingham is classed as ‘green urban’ – namely parks, gardens and sports fields. The map shows that where I live is indeed very green.

The point made by journalist Mark Easton in his blog Five mind-blowing facts about what the UK looks like, is that our perception of our nations is at odds with the reality – a mere 0.1 per cent of the UK is classed as ‘continuous urban fabric’.

My sense of where I live has evolved gradually over the years through small changes in my practice. I walk through parks to get to church rather than catch the bus. And I’ve discovered the secret fields of Birmingham through taking my son to football matches.

I’ve also cultivated the habit of looking at the sky.  When I walk down the street, I choose to look up, notice the sun or the moon and remember I’m standing on a beautiful sphere that’s circling other spheres. It’s an awareness that’s always available but helped just by glancing skyward.

Now when I’m out and about in my city, instead of being conscious of buildings (mainly ugly), cars and roads, I see myself in a field with trees,  birds, flowers, gardens and an ever-changing sky.  It just so happens that my little bit is paved. That’s all.