It’s hard to know when to do this.

If you’re finding it difficult to make decisions, it’s probably the right time. If you can’t see woods for trees and your thought patterns shift towards negativity in the creative process, sometimes the most advisable thing you can do is take a step back to allow yourself to breathe, and come back to it with a fresher perspective.

We can be desperate and full of desire to see things through, but sometimes this requires us letting those things breathe before we go through the final steps to ensure our work is done.

But that’s how the government treats it.

The posters of Fatima still remain a coarse image of the undervalued perception that the Tories have of Ballet dancers, and musicians and all creators.

Art is essential. If you’re looking to contradict that, then ask yourself if you’ve managed a day without visualising something that is artistic let alone spending your time engaging with it. It’s what we do to understand things better, ourselves and the world around us.

And when art is marginalised in education, the wider society suffers for it.

All children and young people should be able to engage and pursue their art further and be given the opportunity to do so with support and a sense of serious ambition.

Unfortunately, I fear that many people continue to be squeezed out because of their lack of money or privilege.

Music, I always hold dear to my heart, and for all the ambitions I hold personally, I know how powerful music can be socially and within community.

Art is much more than a luxury, it’s at the essence of life itself.

And those in power should give opportunities for art, not take them away.

Recently, I’ve doing some teaching to age groups I had never dealt with before. Both younger years and older years.

At times, it has been an initial sense of dread at the prospect of dealing with a situation I’m not used to. What tone do I use? How do I approach the lesson to get the best approach.

What has occurred is the realisation that I’m adapting and learning in these new environments myself and it’s a privilege to see a wider scope, and that is how learning takes place across a wider range and context and in doing so, helps me appreciate and connect everything with that bit more clarity.

Sometimes, the deep end is really uncomfortable, but the reward of learning new things means it’s worth that temporary discomfort.

Tonight, we experienced an outage of Facebook and in turn, Instagram and WhatsApp.

It was a peaceful evening. I did however take to Twitter and was amused by the Bottas meme that Mercedes posted.

What was missing was the ease of connectivity that can exist from group chats and whatsapp.

And that what social media is about, the ability to connect. That’s also how Facebook sells itself.

But Facebook as turned a blind eye for so long to that which divides us and profiteering from misinformation and fuelling hatred.

The disdain expressed for Facebook was apparent this evening but we are not moving away from this world, because we are social beings that seek to find easy ways to connect.

But the people running these need to carefully reflect on what their products are for and how they can make things better not worse.

Imagine being part of a project for the best part of 5 years, pouring your heart and soul into it, and then having it come to an end.

One of my favourite parts of the appendix is watching the actors during their final takes, just because you get to see the emotional release involved with people so personally invested in something for such a long time.

A lot of us spend time working wanting to do the minimum amount in a fixed period of time and that’s part of life. But when we do art, we never want to do less, we always want and strive to do more.

I wish everyone the privilege of finding things you want to give your all too, and would struggle to let go of. That creativity is an essential part of us elevating ourselves

I genuinely find the experience of buying tickets infuriating at times.

And it’s remarkable how squeezed out of tickets you are if you are not with the 02 network. They have a dominance over the U.K. live music scene.

So Tool are coming to the U.K. and I knew this was going to be a hot ticket so I had my laptop ready at 9am to order.

So, the ‘buy tickets’ opened at 9:03am and I was put into a queue of about 2500 people, it took about ten minutes to get through. When I finally got through, I had to deal with a poor website page that told me seats were available when they weren’t.

It took me 20 attempts and that point, I thought I had missed out. So I changed venues and that did the trick. I finally secured tickets.

The whole process though was unnecessarily stressful due to the website being completely lacking in user friendliness and reliability.

Others weren’t so lucky and the page crashed on them.

And then before long, you see Viagogo promoting tickets for a extortionate multiple of the original ticket price! It’s completely unethical and shouldn’t be allowed to happen.

So there are a myriad of obstacles to deal with when buying tickets and it’s situations like this where the customer is on the back foot.

So Live Nation and Ticketmaster need to figure out how to make their pages work when dealing with high volumes. If they are the two main players, there shouldn’t be excuses.

And Viagogo and secondary ticket touts need to be cracked down on. How many times does the news have to discuss it and acts have to tweet not to use this service before it dies a death?

I rewatched the extended edition of Lord of the Rings recently.

I make the tradition of watching it every year because I utterly adore these films, and they are my favourite franchise from me being a child. They also make up some of my most visceral memories of being absolutely struck with awe when I went to the cinema.

And to this day, they still hold firm in their look, aesthetic and artistic execution. In fact, they set a benchmark that overrides so many films released today. Purely because Peter Jackson and his team were willing to put hours of work in where others would just stick it into CGI, especially these days.

So usually when I watch the films, I get the middle earth bug and do a bit more digging, I read the books, I look up YouTube videos exploring the films and this time round, I watched the appendices through from start to finish.

It is honestly astonishing to see these documentary films unravel the process of making the films in such a generously informative way. The time, years and personnel that was involved is remarkable and so many people around Peter Jackson put their heart and soul into this project.

I’ve learnt about costume and sculpture design, script writing, camera work, sound design and effects. I also was fascinated by Howard Shore’s approach to writing the music and having a live feed between Abbey Road and New Zealand shows that these guys knew how to work remotely decades before COVID ran amok!

Having watched the series, I’ve been inspired to attempt to give to my creative projects, the same energy, desire and passion that these people did. I also learnt that so much of what makes the films so good is the willingness for happy accidents to occur, or the desire to push each other to go that one bit further.

Watch it and you’ll learn so much about different worlds of work within the filming industry. You’ll also crave for more films that have departments dedicated to bigatures as well!