“We expect extinction to unfold offstage, in the mists of prehistory, not right in front of our faces, on a specific calendar day. And yet here it was: March 19, 2018.”

How are you facing the era of crisis?

Let me ask it better: 

How the hell are you supposed to face the era of crisis?

A story resurfacing in algorithmic eddies I found sobering this beautiful morning: “The last two northern white rhinos on earth”

Extinction. It’s a word we live with too much to feel, I think. But it’s interesting how people reacted to Sudan, this last male white rhino waiting for his end. How they reacted to him when meeting him or just reading of him. It’s clear this stuff DOES get to us;, we DO feel connection – when naturally meeting nature.

And it can be a way in. As personal experiences always are.

Of course, in case you want to sober up from some more personal-feeling grief about the White Rhino, the UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’” is now two years old – so times Sudan by potentially… er,

..one million species.

>checks notes<

A million.

“UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’”

“Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history – and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world now likely” says this report, pulling together study data from global govs, NGOs and indigenous groups.

“We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”

What are you supposed to do with this world breaking thought? You. What are you supposed to do with this? Me.

With my Battery Tour head on I’d say: What is your own passion telling you?

On the #GGMusicRoadshow we talking about “plugging in your passion, because passion is where change starts.”

It’s the emotional truth of you; the way you really want to first connect with the world around you.

I think it’s the only place to start doing the impossible seeming.

 

Plugging in passion.

This morning made five swims in my local stretch of sea in fewer days. It was like a lake; glassy, calm, etherial. Lastnight a shoal of minnows flashed around me in the shallows. A few UK summer days and climate and Covid alike seem way off. But.

I bumped into a gym buddy on the prom lastnight, in the beautiful evening young people’s paradise of #Southbourne beach on a hot evening. We’re both missing our regular circuits class after 18months away from normal sports centre life. He introduced me to his wife I’d never met.

Sam and John’s daughter is passionate about environmental stuff. Even works for a start-up energy co of some kind. Sam said: “I don’t know anything of course. You don’t think about this stuff normally, do you?”

“You don’t” I agreed.

Then she said: “This will sound silly… but I love cosmetics. Have a real interest in how they are made and what ingredients we’re putting onto ourselves, and in to ourselves with nutrition. Have you heard of #thebodyburden?”

And then she spoke so passionately we all just listened.

Ethical cosmetics, as sustainably packaged and sold as possible, all linked to a rethinking culture about beauty and health and its place in nature.

But she didn’t know anything.

Don’t you believe you can’t do anything. Your life belongs to this world and its dying or blooming.

Have rhinos ended up in cosmetics? Was the last male White Rhino on Earth a dinosaur joining history, or are we about to be, you might ask.

Does this question make you feel passionate?

Where there is passion, there is energy. Where there is energy there is change.

“One million is not just a number — it contains countless living creatures: individual frogs, bats, turtles, tigers, bees, eels, puffins, owls. Each one as real as you or me, each with its own life story and family ties and collection of habits.”

“Together, these animals make up a vast, incredible archive: a collection of evolutionary stories so rich and complex that our highly evolved brains can hardly begin to hold them.”

Cannot recommend this article by @shamblanderson enough.

—

Celebrating a significant birthday at the start of October, in all the complexity of getting here and of the times I find myself in here, for a moment I am boringly mostly just grateful.

It’s not been boring for me, but might be for a post about it left at a thank you list. But little seems great at the moment generally, to put it midly, and for me personally there was a time I could see nothing great at all.

Which, via the long way round, was a period that lead to the inception of my work as Momo and to the coming out of its musical sound – a musical sound first released with a home-made debut LP, The Golden Age of Exploration. And it’s a record that still means a lot to me.

 

 
In a little behind the scenes below, I share just a bit about where I’d come from in arriving at this album. It was a very long way round – over twenty years to drag myself just over the line of something that actually worked and seemed to embody a genuine artistic world. Talk about arriving late, despite trying quite hard the whole way; some people are born cool, some people have cool thrust upon them and some of them will never attain cool but by virtue of sheer blind beligerance make something that sounds at least a bit intentional. This record was a massive sketchbook work-out essentially, unsure what I was intending until I’d feverishly worked it through, but it unlocked me into a new world of music making with confidence and identity. It will always be a big symbol for me.

As I share in this vlog, of the many Momo secret hits from The Golden Age that I’ll never tire of playing out live, perhaps one symbolises the journey in my memory the best – Asylum Seeker.

These are some thoughts more about the personal walk through the development of this piece and the record around it, rather than an exploration of refugeeism. That’s a separate story to consider with art in which my place is to listen, not sing. But for a single example of the place of art in making connection to borderless citizenry, as geographic as emotional, you should follow The Walk of Little Amal from the Turkish-Syrian border to Manchester in a wave of creativity and testimony through seventy towns and cities. It is ambitious, to say the least, giving voice and visualisation to the human statistics of empty politics. That brokenness and lostness can help the most entitled of us, maybe well used to being heard and seen, glimpse empathy for those forced to make their whole lives testimony to dislocation is the whole point of my own little electro-pop song about looking for home.

 

 

A MIXTAPE FOR TIMO.

My gratitude at reaching the half century in the town I grew up in is actually in how I’ve arrived back here. Not just in one piece physically and emotionally, despite the darkest of sunny summers in generations this year, but having had the lifeblood transfusion of getting to finish a few things all at about the same time. I’ve been working some long hours and slightly obsessive To Do sheets over the last couple of months especially, but projects like Talking Distance and my Science Caketalk, as well as a couple of really interesting projects I’ve been working through consulting with Zo, have given me a nice sense of closure right before a big round number nameday. As I’ve said like a stuck record over the years, finishing things feels essential for learning and moving on. Especially because earning a little celebration at the close of them helps give you a little payback of joy and rest. Damn lucky when that works out.

An extra part of this I should say is a gift from some of my creative family. A reflection back to me of their creativity and how we can encourage each other in our play, our making, trying and exploring – a mixtape, that can really only be described as a variety show of gentle madness and brilliance on a lovingly presented C90 cassette. Arrived in the post on the afternoon of my fiftieth, from Andy Robinson, Simon Brett and a whole gang of people for some reason wanting to sing silly songs at me, or share poetry, or performance, or mixes or just well wishes and tune choices. These couple of sentences do not do this justice, and frankly I never will be able to. It’s floored me in its generosity and encouragement. But if the decade that The Golden Age unlocked could lead me to such family and produce such creativity between us then I should celebrate it. If your work leads you to find people who can hold each other up in the lostness and madness, you’ve been following something good, I suspect.

If you’d like to hear it for yourself, message me and I’ll send you the private link. It’s very entertaining.

Meanwhile, as a final part of my own little bit of celebration and closure before looking forward, I’ve created a loving kit bash of Asylum Seeker – the Decade Defiance Mix, which you can download for free right here, below.

So I am indeed grateful. But there’s nothing boring about it. All these decades in, whether I even get to glimpse the promised land or not, loved ones have encouraged me to feel like I’m only just warming up for the road still ahead.

x.

 

Were you at or cheering on the Unite For Freedom rally yesterday in London? Ten thousand turned up, it is reported. Pointedly not wearing masks, as symbols of oppression.

Living in a machine that naturally recycles fear at the best of times, it is an impossible mental feat to balance clear-headed concerns in times of crisis. Times of crisis – if they are that – demand reactions out of a normal sense of balance.

I want to share a little basic research that Mrs Peach sourced this morning that I too have been wanting to firm up in my mind a little more – one of the most central claims of the protests against COVID19 social restrictions: It’s less deadly than ‘the flu’.

Being a deep cynic about our current government and conservative trends in politics generally, never mind the more extremes of it driving global conversations at the moment, I felt for months that official Covid figures in the UK couldn’t be trusted. Liked GPs mentally adding a third to patients’ weekly alcohol unit claims. Perhaps you have been mentally doing the reverse, like those of uswho’ve said, with a tempting swoop of a cloak: “But do you actually KNOW anyone who’s had it though?”

All our understandable gossips aside, on the far side of the first summer with this disease I’m here comparing some key reported figures we’ve found. Different sources, admittedly, but fair ones in context, I think. Also, for both Covid19 and ‘normal’ influenza, England is by far the lion’s share of the cases across the UK nations, so I’m going to quote those figures, to keep it a degree simpler for essential illustration of the main point.

Links to the official spreadsheet and report are in the comments below for your reference. The Office of National Statistics reports deaths registered officially between Gov.uk and NHS England as 49,460. Of over 300,000 reported cases. across the whole UK.

Gov.uk’s official flu report for 2018/19 (which we’ve picked to steer clear of any Covid reports muddling more recent data) says, at the bottom of p51, the worst year for cases of flu recently was 2014/15 at 28,330. Less than a thousand of those deaths were of people under the age of 65. The report year itself recorded a bizarrely low figure of less than two thousand but an average number of deaths from flu in England in the last five years must be a little less than 20,000PA.

Remember too, the Covid19 figures of people who have died from the disease are for a lot less than a year of recording yet – essentially half that time. And these figures I believe don’t include indirect deaths. Note also, this has happened in distinctly not flu season. When our immune systems are stronger.

I would honestly add to this comparison also that the demographic for Covid deaths is widely reported as significantly different to that of normal flu – while kids seem very unlikely to get it, fatalities are markedly more spread across the ages than flu. And, anecdotally, while some who’ve had the disease have reported little trouble from it, many have conversely reported not just how unpleasant it is but how weirdly long lasting, still feeling knocked for six by it months later. Medical folk, please wade in with testimony and evidence here. But I’m concerned we are in danger of concocting simplistic narratives to suit our fears about SARS CoV2 and the disease the virus triggers.

It’s not the flu, as we’re used to dealing with it. It seems a lot more serious. I’d say, as ever, spend time talking to NHS workers who’ve been dealing with the disease whether they think the phenomenon is a hoax.

I’ll confess I’ve not gotten around to watching the London Real exposé on all this, with David Icke’s perspective fairly central to the thesis. I would say his words at the rally on Saturday: “Anyone with half a braincell on active duty can see it (the virus) is a nonsense, because they (the government) are making it up” seem to not fit the human loss represented in the recording of it above, or indeed around the world. Yes, I have homework still set me by friends to hear what the thesis is about where the disease did or didn’t come from, whether it is or isn’t real or natural. I do know that Brian from London Real Academy has sent me half a dozen promotional emails a day since I had to
subscribe to his channel in order to watch the exposé YouTube and Facebook took down.

My instinct here, as it has been all through our Brexit debates, is to ask: What is the fruit of the idea? Whose company does an idea keep or encourage; who seems emboldened by it and who is diminished. As with any political momentum, I think we should be asking: Who has the power here?

Who will benefit, what will we the people gain, and what might we lose?

I won’t call this a march of loonies and cranks and I’ll just about manage to stifle, by stuffing a kitchen cloth into my mouth, saying the march looked like a collection of right wing groups gathering. That’s the reactionary liberal in me. It was, I think, only one bloke who unfurled the Union of British Fascists flag and it could be mistaken for a 30s superhero logo and maybe that’s why it
seemed to go unchallenged by the crowd.

I do think this is more evidence of things we are all wrestling with as a society in this era. Massive corporate influence over world markets, assets and governments? Duh – obviously. Threats to civil liberties in a digital era? You tell me, Alexa. Shite-ton-a questions over vaccines produced in an unsafe timeframe by big pharma? What are we even fighting about? People waving placards saying: “Love and freedom to all”? I’ve always said you libertarians just want an unconditional hug. I’m in. And a corrupt decadent elite, cultivating the abuse cultures while the world burns? It’s not exactly a big imaginative ask, is it? And the strain to local businesses and everyone’s mental health
from suspending business as usual? Huge, but complex.

We’re in a global economic system I would describe as sickening and seizing-up . I’ve come to see it fundamentally. We are out of balance with the natural systems that made everything we have, and it’s a problem so fundamental and so big that few of us can take it in, let alone feel the impact of it emotionally. It’s different details of injustice that tend to hit home, I think.

If there is any fundamental waking up to do, I wonder if we’re more of us beginning to but to different aspects of the world machine’s problems, at different times. Different imperatives get us questioning our priorities.

And I take some comfort in how compassionate values are mixed up with more extreme rhetoric unconsciously. Vegan libertarians speak up. But also, keep following and joining the dots. Who is really around you, and who is missing?

My worry about narratives like those of Saturday’s rally in London is the over-simplification of medical and scientific issues, in a conflation of widely-shared fears and very specific more conspiratorial details. What rights our governments may attempt to lever into place during the
pandemic should concern us – as surely as the unelected technocrats trying to run them, like Dominic Cummings. We should be as angry at the undemocracy of that as of the cavalier treatment of British citizens. The narrative arc of Mr Icke’s story reads like a Dan Brown novel, like a season structure from a drama writers’ room looking for the right balance of centres of gravity and character to make it work.

Its effect too is an eroding of trust in the methodology of science, because for all the intellect wrestling with these issues in QAnon-type spaces, our own placards reduce the story to “antivaxing” “anti masks” “anti-5G” “anti-Bill Gates” “anti-global health organisations” “antigovernement”. Really, the networked “demon-haunted world” as Carl Sagan described it, is too easily dangerously
anti-complexity. Pro-gaslighting. Whether it’s populist politicians or consumer product placement. A demanding of you that something is what it isn’t.

In my bones, it didn’t feel like my home I saw articulated and represented yesterday, and it didn’t feel like freedom for me they were championing. But that’s how we all feel about someone’s protests, in their right to do so. Why should I feel so differently about this march compared with others I have attended myself – most noteably just a couple of blog posts back? From the story I currently think I’m in, I’d say the Unite For Freedom rally was a lot more pro-status quo than many folk on the march would like to hear themselves saying. I also believe it is part of sharing the working out of massive, new foundational times for all of us, and I mainly know that I don’t know very much, really. And also truths will out in time.

I think we’ve all grown up in an unreality in the West. But I think we’re being offered alternative unrealities as lifeboats. When we’re many more of us marching not because “MASKS ARE MUZZLES” but for values that would help someone else with their oxygen supply before attending to our own, then I’ll feel we’re going to get revolution from this current insane world.

David Icke called the “real” virus among us fascism. I’m at a personal stage that whenever I see it, I will call it out and stand with those who energise me about a truly healthy, hopeful, accountable human tomorrow.

 

Photo by Adam Nieścioruk on Unsplash.

—

 

So, yeah. I’m a TEDx speaker, apparently.

Sort of.

It’s been a bit of a journey, man.

After a wrestling with a pitch, around the very helpfully well structured framework laid out by TEDx Southampton 2020, back in the late spring I hit send on a rather thorough package of creative intent to join their event. To ask for a corner of their hallowed stage. The stage that was to have that famous giant Helvetica Heavy logo standing on it, just down the road from where I live.

I upped my game for this one. This felt good. I’d felt oddly moved by a sudden new take on my essentially Unsee The Future core thinking that seemed to fall out of my conversations with Caroline about what irresistable idea worth sharing I should try riding into the Mayflower Theatre upon. A new way into the big picture of our human planet in 2020. Dignified and rehearsed. Informed and sedately intelligent. Just a hint of boyish Momo cheek.

Or possibly me riding the TED logo like a bronco in a tequila bar. You get the picture.

 

Deep dive.

After thirty rich episodes of my research cast to date, I feel like the water is getting deeper and hotter. Not in the sea off Bournemouth, you understand. My exceptionally late dive into summer sea swimming this week may be based upon eight days of very benign weather, but the English channel is still a bracingly healthy temperature. Y’know. Healthy to the corpuscles and the zealous wellness guru in you, if not to male body confidence. Though call out my daily commitment to the plunge as soon as there’s as much as a force three off the Purbecks, won’t you.

No, I obviously mean the general temperature and complexity of current life on the human planet. My grip on encouraging the more hopeful human tomorrow is slightly more tremulous. Experience wizard mate Karla Morales-Lee very generously but forlornly tweeted me some months ago saying: “I feel like there should be a Timo podcast telling us everything is going to be alright.”

So do I.

Some things will be alright. Some things will be better. Much could be much worse in our life times. But the hope may lie in re-adjusting our scale of context.

And this gave me quite a personal way into a potential TEDx talk.

When I got back a standard email two weeks later that I hadn’t been selected for audition, I felt slugged in the solar plexus.

I was genuinely surprised. And not because of the middle aged white bloke over-confidence you assume I carry everywhere, on account of how much I appear to assume people want to hear what I reckon. Depsite the analytics. No, I tend to assume first that my default productions will struggle like hell to seem ‘credible’. And no wonder, I know, you’re right. But this talk felt like it should have landed.

So I did something uncharacteristic. I pushed back.

I politely emailed Annelies James from the team, working with Lee Peck Media and the Mayflower crew and other partners all bringing this show to life and slaving over emails with people like me. And essentially I thanked her for taking the time to go through mine and everyone’s talks, and acknowledged it can’t be easy telling people No. But also why did she tell me No?

Annelies was, as she has been throughout my contact with TEDx Southampton mostly through her, lovely. Encouraging but professionally consistent. And I got the crumbs I’d needed – I’d apparently been very close to selection. But I think I’d been late in the day and others had fitted into the event’s more intimate theme they were curating, human to human contact, just that bit better.

So, I rolled with the punch and breathed in. As Savannah Peterson said on Twitter today, admitting to failing at a big tilt at something: “It feels so 2020.” God, but this did. A year of needing personal resilience in grinding and sudden fighty ways. But something told me to take the lesson on fighting. Namely: Make sure you do, don’t take no for the whole answer, but do it with empathy.

Two weeks later I emailed Annelies again. Wondering if anything had, ah, changed.

To her charming credit she called me. I don’t think she’d mind me sharing that she said: “You’ve been so nice about it, I’m thinking: f**ck it, let’s hear you.”

I had an audition.

 

Short talk.

Writing and praciticing the whole first half of my talk I marched onto the Mayflower’s wide boards into the lights in a top hat a month later, and suddenly realised I was doing my first ever audition. For a bloke with theatre supposedly in his blood, I’d never actually put it out there quite like this. Like every actor has to constantly to find every single bit of work.

“Bugger me, I’m on a talent show” I realised as I stood looking at the judges. They all smiled at me warmly, with the magnificent sweep of the Mayflower’s oppulent auditorium atmospherically behind them.

Sauntering out after warm applause, I figured: “You got a shot and gave it your best. Now don’t think about it.”

So I tried not to think about it. Think about how perfect me in a top hat on a grand Victorian stage opening a talk with the words “The VicTORIANS!”in a music hall swoop would be for this show. Or about how much I could do with an honest-to-God break. A little bit of good luck to boost the energies at last and have an actual THING on my CV at last. Tried not to think about how utterly timely and Right Ruddy Now relevant my talk is.

Tried not to. Failed, obviously.

Then I heard. The judges were finding it hard to select twelve. I was down to the last 16.

I cheered. Then thought… why not just put us all on?

I of course cheekily, and ever so nicely, asked Annelies why they couldn’t just put us all on. She ever so professionally left giving me an answer until she had a firm one.

A week later I finally heard. And you won’t be surprised to hear, of course, that I… didn’t get selected.

I felt hit in the solar plexus.

Except… I had been selected. I was… an alternate speaker.

Number 13 of 12, essentially. Yeah. THAT close. Along with a spare female speaker, Johanna.

The bucking TED logo threw me off. Face first onto my stupid stupid top hat.

 

Long game.

Now, you might imagine how this feels. Or you might not. To think that in the middle of a summer of economic ruin, global pandemic fear, loss and conspiracy, I felt all but knocked out by not winning a TED talk tells you all you need to know about my first world problems and sense of perspective. Obviously. Except, y’know. You have to put your all into an audition, or not even bother turning up. Right? And if my one use in life in these horror-ful, utterly destabilising times is to bring strangely confident words of encouragement to people occasionally, then of course I was feeling hit in the boney plate covering my heart at coming so close to feeling useful. To doing something that might have reached more people with something creatively actually POSTIVE in 2020.

I’m just a twerp. But such is the detail a storyteller of any kind has to inhabit. All theatre is silly. And from the depths. And just hard work. And what one must absolutely do or die trying.

I had another call with Annelies. In which she was as kind and thoughtful as she could be within sure professional commitmenst to the team – 100% correctly – and in which I tried and failed to keep all my adult dignity and a suave indifference to the spotlight. The challenge was set: I was being asked to be a sub, if anyone dropped out. But the point slowly dawning on me through the punchdrunkness was… I was being recognised and promoted as a TEDx speaker. PEACH. WAKE UP.

Having given it my all, prepared to say: “I don’t want to put myself through that” and walk away with head up and no hard feelings at all, I saw myself under the TED logo on the new website and my knees buckled. I sat myself down and realised I had been selected as a credible potential voice of the event. And this was still a chance to represent and cheer on South Central. An opportunity to be in amongst the conversation for a while, and make the points I think are important. And to be part of a really well put together TEDx event on my doorstep and learn from it and get to put this mugshot in my blog posts: “I’m a TEDx speaker”.

There’s also another bit of the story. M’dear mate Matt. Because, while I knew almost no one, surprisingly, who made it through to the finals, one of the most distinctive voices for the Bournemouth and South Central creative scene, Matt Desmier and I got to ride into it a bit like another job, swapping notes about which of us had done less homework closer to the hour. It was encouraging, and a laugh. And we came THAT close to both riding into it together. And hey, right the way up to the final day, we actually are.

But there’s only so much of a good thing a single event can take, which I think they recognise… so I’m happy to say he’s now representing our corner of the coast in there for us both over the last mile. His talk, The future’s not so different, is a ride through science fiction culture deconstructing our so called predictions a bit – so it’s obviously the talk I secretly most want to watch. Plus, he’ll likely now give me a slot when he brings back Silicon Beach, so, y’know. Mates. I appreciate them. And am proud of them.

So I AM a TEDx speaker. And I will be sharing at least a version of my talk once the event has happened in November. Between now and then, I get to speak about the issue and the theme explored by our other twelve, no thirteen, speakers – we’re both taking this one for the team, Johanna. Picturing how your work honestly fits into a team? This is definitely part of what it means to make human to human contact.

Especially given how much I wang on about how the story of human planet futures “is not about me.” Called out there when it most counts, huh, Peach.

Also, Annelies said I should start a government petition to get me included, so there’s that.

—

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Read or listen to an Unsee The Future: Think Blink introducing Momo’s TEDx Southampton theme >