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24 April 2020 And so it has come to this: getting up in the night to get some work done. As is the case with many of you, I'm sure, the insomnia has got me bad this time. After weeks of fighting it, I've decided to use it instead to solve the problem of not being able to work much during the day with himself working from home. So up I drag myself to fill a hot water bottle and ready the blankets, for it is still grim up North in late April (well, sunny but Baltic), and fire up my largely neglected workstation in the front room.  Beginning to write this post on Monday 20 April, his children have been with us for the two weeks of Easter break, which during pandemic lockdown simply means a break from homeschooling. I got more done during that time than I anticipated, mostly because they've been very creative with fixing up some unsightly minor issues in the driveway and the back garden. We now have some inventive mosaics using the old bathroom and kitchen tiles, the lefto

17 April 2020 This week during lockdown I've been thinking about trauma and traumatic recall. Being stuck at home with too much time to think and the anxiety of the situation affecting sleep, whether through horrible dreams or insomnia, is a perfect combination to unlock the brain's cage for past difficulties. Ranging from agonising if that text message was annoying to holy-mother-forking-shirtballs realisations about what your past self experienced, everything seems at once amplified and dwarfed by the enormity and seriousness of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. But it's there and isn't going away and it does matter, so what do we do with it? I've been managing anxiety and symptoms of PTSD for what feels like a very long time, certainly in different forms throughout most of my 35 years. This has mostly been rooted in grief from the deaths of close family members and friends on a fairly regular basis for the first 22 of my years. Then came abusive relationships, and ha

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10 April 2020 I thought I'd give Damien a break this week and write something more personal. Having done 22 parts on my Treasures research without missing a week and it's now the holidays in the UK and we're in the full throes of a global pandemic, I've decided that's OK. I wanted to keep up some writing momentum, though, even if it's more of a diary entry. My working day and week have changed substantially since my partner had to move fully to working from home and my voluntary work stopped due to lockdown (although I began self-isolating on 10 March when I recognised the need for distancing). I struggle with misophonia, a condition rooted in distress caused by certain sounds, which makes it extremely difficult for me to share a workspace, which we do at home. I need quiet to think and write, and my time for those is usually fenced off for while himself is at work. I'm aware of how tiny this gripe is and I'm in a very privileged position afforded

3 April 2020 In previous posts I’ve outlined some of the many references to film culture embedded in the works amounting to Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable , but cool, postmodern appropriations of movie characters are not the only ways that the exhibition could be regarded as somewhat cinematic. For starters, the narrative threads throughout the show only came to life – were animated – by visitors moving through the galleries and around the works. We were the cameras in our own first-person point-of-view of the story. We also had stock roles to play: the believer, the unbeliever, the sceptic, the discoverer, the critic, the dissenter, the psuedo-expert, etc. Some of the works themselves can be regarded as cinematic in other ways if we take a more ‘expanded’ or historical approach to the ontological ‘what is cinema?’ question. Some of the earliest ancient and even prehistorical art took the form of conveying narratives: members of a tribe on a hu