Nine lessons about life from 3 retirees and an inventor, on a last minute holiday to Milton Keynes
With more bridges than Venice, and the most roundabouts in Britain, Milton Keynes is not your obvious holiday destination for the car sick amongst us.
But we’re in a pandemic. Cornwall’s booked out, and sometimes, you just need a change of scene at the very last minute.
Impulse got me the way it ususally does: I got stressed off my tits at work, saw there was a last-minute slot on a weekend pottery workshop, and was off quicker than you can say ‘Costa Del Keynes’.
Why a weekend pottery workshop, you ask? I got into wheel throwing pottery in September as a bit of organised fun with my younger brother. When I was unceremeniously dumped over text in January, it turned out a really good thing to funnel life’s disapointments through. It was the most therapeutic thing since the advent of paying £70 a week to offload your shit onto a trained stranger who rightly tells you, ‘it all started in your childhood’.
Just to sell it to you a little more, it allows you to do the closest thing to playing with mud and playdough as a child. You’re forced to concentrate on shaping a spinning lump of wet clay, and, more often than not, you get to make a beautiful THING you may one day get to use or just look at.
It’s a form of mindfulness that doesn’t find you staring into an abyss wondering what it’s all about. For a human with ADHD, it’s basically productive meditation.
Most importantly, if you mess up, it doesn’t matter: you can reclaim and recycle your fuck ups. It’s the first time I’ve had a safe space to fail in my life.It chilled me out to no end, and was a little kinder to my liver than my dependency on contraband Valium I’d taken to over lockdown.
So, as I spent yet another week at work feeling underqualified and overwhelmed, a whole weekend of a safe space to fail would be just the tonic.
I had an inkling the demographic who would be there with me would be older women who could coddle me for a bit, tell me it’s all going to be alright, and that it all gets better with age.
They did none of this.
And for the clickbait you call came here for, I OBVIOUSLY LEARNT SO MUCH MORE ABOUT THE HUMAN CONDITION.
And I’m going to give it to you.
1) Some people are exactly how they are on face value.
On this weekend workshop, I met a GP. Lovely and soft spoken, she had a well-practiced nod. Her face was rather readable. Her eyebrows, which had a mind of their own, spent the weekend suspended between pot making concentration and horror of the number of social anxiety driven units of alcohol quaffed round the dinner table.
I was sure that this lady was EXACTLY the same when she sat behind her desk at a GP surgery, as she was at the dinner table. She had no hidden agenda and she didn’t hide her thoughts. Some people are exactly how they are on face value, and you always need someone round the table that you know exactly where you stand with. I just wouldn’t fancy her telling me I was ill, largely cause I’d be able to measure the extent to my doom down to the day.
2) Some people are so much more.
I met a lady called Maria. It turns out she was the inventor of the neck cushion that goes around salon basins. She also funnelled life’s disapointments through her pots. As the weekend unfolded, she recounted tales of her chequered life which meandered through traumas, trials and tribulations that you couldn’t believe one person had gone through.
You’d never know someone so jolly had had quite a journey. She told me it doesn’t get better: you just have to hope it doesn’t all come at once.
3) It may be polarising, but your dark sense of humour is enough to carry you through everything.
Maria told me that, when it does come all at once, your dark sense of humour is all you’ve got left that’ll carry you through. You just have to laugh, and it too, shall pass.
4) An old dog is never too old to learn new tricks.
There was a lady called Pat, aged 80, who sat on a hard potters chair for two days solid and learnt how to throw pots better than I could in my six months. Magic.
5) The silent generation aren’t to blame for Brexit.
Pat took me to one side and told me it’s the fault of those ‘bastardly doomers’ (dastardly boomers). None of her friends would have dreamt of voting to leave the EU.
6) You can’t control the shit life throws at you. You can control how you respond to it though. To do that, you need to be a detective to your past.
So the sooner you play the role as ‘detective’ to your past, the better. Why? What happened to you in your formative years has a bearing on how you react to stuff. This often forms a pattern that isn’t always helpful. It’s only when you understand patterns, that you can break them.
For example: My father is a Palestinian refugee. He brought me up to always have a stash of money and a plan B in case I needed ‘to escape’ from being very young. I realised I carried this impending sense of danger with me at all times. It explained why I moved jobs so often: at any sniff of threat, be it from a terse account man ready to throw you under a bus, or a wave of redundancy, I’m off in search of a safer haven to live my life out. Things improved when I was told to be a little more detective.
Sometimes you can do it alone, with a bit of reflection. Sometimes, you’ve got to pay £70 an hour for help.
7) A view, good chat, and some good piss is all you need.
8) Normal people don’t care about ads.
One of the first things people ask you is ‘what do you do’. When I said I worked in advertising, I was met with ‘I remember when they used to be good’.
Pat said she couldn’t understand why Halifax were burning through a vintage oasis album, and pointed out that the 30 seconds to a minute that punctuate television breaks should never be the thing that threatens your health and well-being. Even if it does put food on the table.
9) Making pots is fucking great.
Give it a go. You might all feel liberated by giving yourself that safe space to experiment and fail. And you might end up with a few toothbrush holders you can truly call your own.
I didn’t leave as rested as I hoped. I did come away with some mad skills, a bunch of imparted wisdom and a wicked new gravy jug. And when I get good enough, I may just share some pots with the world.
