Weekly Meander #13: Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey
Cannibals* to content and everything in between (*not actually cannibals)
Hello! Thanks for joining me on a weekly meander through my week just gone – with a focus on my working life (a way for me to document a time of professional transition as well as a little shot of motivation and accountability to keep me pushing on!) And in case you're new here and wondering who on earth I am, do check out this post. TLDR: I'm a documentary filmmaker coming to the end of distributing my debut feature doc and currently exploring/expanding into new professional avenues whilst also navigating parenting & perimenopause. Some balls may be dropped!
I'm still quite new to Substack and really enjoying finding my way around so you'll also find my recommendations of great reads I've seen in the past week. If you enjoy it, do feel free to leave a comment. And of course I'd love it if you would consider subscribing to get all my posts delivered straight to your inbox.
I'm feeling a little bit luxurious - and a big bit grateful - as I settle down to write this week's review of my week with an iced latte and big slab of lemon drizzle in the cool, calm, creative oasis of the upstairs cafe at my local bookshop (which a cutting in the window proudly tells me is one of The Times newspaper's top 12 independent bookshops in the country – and deservedly so in my admittedly biased opinion!)
The sun is shining, my anxious boy has managed a playdate at a friend's house and my partner is at home having some daddy-daughter time with the 4 year old. So I get to swank about drinking coffee, eating cake and writing my Substack. Truly, these are the moments a life is made of.
It's a cliché of course – but it's true that all our lives are ultimately just a series of moments, neatly lined up one after the other. But time doesn't always feel so neat, so linear, so manageable.
And this week it definitely felt like the universe was prodding me to grapple with some of time's many confounding characteristics. Much like Carey Mulligan's Sally Sparrow in what is surely one of the greatest Doctor Who episodes ever1 (and from which I have shamelessly stolen the title for this post!)
It started with Neolithic Cannibals. Not in fact a death metal band but a provocative sound art/psychogeography exhibition and accompanying guided archaeological walk on the programme at this year's Brighton Festival - inspired by an extraordinary but little known Neolithic encampment on the top of the very hill I live on.
Approximately 5,700 years old, Whitehawk Camp is a Neolithic Causewayed Enclosure, a rare type of ritual monument that predates Stonehenge by at least 500 years. It was first excavated around a century ago when Brighton Racecourse, which is situated on the same hill, wanted to extend their course. The lead archaeologist at the time jumped to some unflattering - and now debunked - conclusions about the cannibalistic habits of those who lived here, hence the exhibition’s title.
Today the valley beneath the hill is home to the Whitehawk Estate, one of the most socially deprived areas in the whole of England and subject to a depressing amount of prejudice, not least from neighbouring residents in other parts of the city. The exhibition was created by Class Divide, a fantastic local campaign working to end educational inequality in Brighton & Hove, something that's especially acute in and around Whitehawk.
The lead artist, working with young people from the estate, drew out some subtle, but highly-charged parallels about how negative preconceptions about a place and its people can set in when their voice isn't heard.
There was so much to think about in their co-created work, but one of the biggest and most surprising takeaways for me was learning that the Neolithic camp only lasted for around 150 years, a mere blink of an eye in the context of the deep time frame that links their time and ours.
The concept of deep time – geologic time, measured in thousands or even millions of years – is one I've been thinking about a lot recently in relation to nuclear waste, a topic I may well end up doing some more documentary film work around. How hard it is to conceptualise time at this epochal scale – hard enough going backwards in time when there is at least some record of the past, however faint, to guide us, but surely edging close to impossible going forwards into the future, as we must do when thinking about storing radioactive waste for thousands of years.
And how insignificant it can make us feel – tiny specks in that vast expanse of endless time. Yet I think there's also a liberation in that – like the inhabitants of Whitehawk Camp whose community burned brightly on the top of the hill for a century and a half before fading away into the oblivion of history, in the end we'll probably all end up as fodder for future archaeologists to puzzle over (and given current worries about digital archiving, maybe not even that). Whatever we're getting stressed over now, in five thousand years time, well, who cares!
Yet however much we might try to hold on to this sense of grand perspective, day to day time still generally feels more prosaic, something to be moulded or manipulated in the service of our needs. I've written before of my love of planners and goals and I lap up books and blogs on productivity (speaking of which, I was excited that one of my very favourite writers in this area, Laura Vanderkam, is now on Substack – check out
for lots of useful nuggets if this is your bag too).But I often struggle to complete my tasks according to any strict time schedule – and this week I read an intriguing article that shed new light on this 'failure' (a loaded term, that).
It explored the difference between 'clock time' and 'event time' – and how people have a tendency to favour one or the other. I am definitely an event time person – I much prefer just to keep on working on something until it's done rather than setting an arbitrary time limit to work on something before stopping and moving on to something else, whether or not I'm finished.
Whereas clock time folk can feel agitated when they can't move onto the next block of time as scheduled. This felt like a real revelation to me to be honest – and very helpful in understanding how other people may think about and move through time differently from the way I do.
So I'd love to know – are you a clock time or an event time person?
Time of course is also finite – and I hugely appreciate you giving me some of yours so I'll refrain from rabbiting on too much longer (though I'm sure I will return to the topic again as it's too darn fascinating).
But just quickly, one final time-related thing to pop into the pot from this week is a gem of a movie I watched last night. 'Petite Maman', from French writer & director Céline Sciammaand and released in 2021, is a magical fairytale, fable and possibly ghost story, about time, memory and love featuring two captivating performances from 8 year old twin sisters. At just 73 minutes long, it's an excellent use of anyone's time – I haven't been able to stop thinking about it all day.
WORK WINS THIS WEEK
So onto the business bit – and a few more tangible things to go down in the record than last week!
1. DocMums meeting & Documentary Film Council vote
As mentioned a few posts back, I facilitate a peer support group for a small group of mums working in documentary and this week we had our latest meeting. One of our number has been working on a particularly harrowing project and we talked about how this has been impacting her and, happily, how the production company she's working for have paid for her to have some therapeutic support. This is something that's been sorely lacking in the industry so it was great to hear she's been able to access it – I do hope at some point it will be the norm and entirely unremarkable.
But we are very much not there yet. There was a dire article in the Guardian this week about the plight of women working in British TV ('At the start you get molested and by 45 you’re too old to work’) and independent documentary (where I live now, having not had a proper job in telly since 2019) is arguably even worse. Thankfully though, a new co-operative body has been set up to try to improve the overall state of this fragile and massively under-funded sector and this week they held their first election for board members, which I was very pleased to vote in.
It's not always easy but we have to stay positive and optimistic. Documentaries make a vital contribution to our culture – and dare I say it, even to our democracy – and if we cede the ground entirely to the streamers with their proliferation of true crime and celebrities, we will all lose out.
2. Substack behind the scenes stuff
I'm pretty pleased with how I've been managing to keep up with these weekly posts but I've got so many more thoughts and ideas for other things I want to write and do in the space. But to get there I've really got to knuckle down and work on my to do list of tasks (maybe a case for employing a bit more 'clock time' to tick some of it off!)
But I'm happy to say I did make some progress this week, joining in with the Sparkle on Substack group call on Monday and transcribing and prepping an interview for a post which I think is going to form part of a series of interviews I'll curate and publish later this year. Thanks so much to my new subscribers – I'm so thrilled to have you here and I'm sorry I haven't written a proper welcome email yet! I will get there...
3. Double webinar Friday
Though I don't officially work on Fridays I managed to get a bit of free 'childcare' from the tellybox and sneaked off to the kitchen table for not one but two webinars.
The first was optimistically entitled, 'The new freelance world - from TV to content creation and beyond'. I found it both incredibly depressing - hearing from highly successful TV professionals with 20+ years in the industry who'd been unable to find a job for months at a time – and at the same time reassuring in showing me I'm on the right lines with the documentary-adjacent endeavours I'm currently pursuing, making the most of some of those much-vaunted transferrable skills.
The second was a nuclear heritage webinar featuring a presentation on the now long-shuttered visitor centre at the Dounreay fast reactor site in the far north of Scotland, at which I was one of the final few visitors way back in 2007. I may have more to say on this soon - but for now, here I am posing next to a reactor core2.
WHAT I'M LOVING ON SUBSTACK THIS WEEK
In keeping with my preoccupation with time this week, these two posts both caught my attention. The first one, from
introduced me to the delightful Japanese concept of yutori - having enough time and peace of mind to enjoy life without being constantly under pressure (yes please to that!) While (via Joanna Wolfarth) shared another concept I’d never heard of, that of maiological time - a time in early mothering “of mutuality, inter-relatedness, interaction and reciprocity. It is a slower time, closely connected to bodily rhythms”. Both are well worth reading and thinking about.
Last - but certainly not least - is this absolute peach from
. I adored her invitation to make an A-Z list of my favourite things so much I’m going to write a bonus post on exactly this to send out tomorrow. So look out for that!
Proudly taking part in theSparkle on Substack 24 essays club with Claire Venus – this is post number 7 😊
Watch my film on Netflix (in Europe) or Vimeo (everywhere else) - or see trailer, reviews & bonus content HERE
Find me on X /Twitter & at LinkedIn
Life stories website – coming soon...
It’s called Blink. You must watch it. Here’s a bit more about Sally Sparrow if you still need convincing https://www.doctorwho.tv/characters/sally-sparrow
Disclaimer: not a real one
Thanks for sharing my post Vicki 😊 And thanks for sharing that article - I was really interested to read about 'clock time' and 'event time' - I didn't know about this, and it turns out I'm definitely an event time person! Thinking about it now, I was miserable when I had a full time 9-5 job, working mainly from home and I felt obliged to sit at my desk during those hours. Now that I'm mainly freelance I feel much happier setting my own agenda - though I'm still working on boundaries and being a little firmer with myself about structure, as I would definitely benefit from that. I feel a little more aware of myself now though, having read about the different approaches!
I loved reading your exploration of time, it’s a subject I am also so fascinated by. Have you ever come across the thoughts/words of John O’Donohue on time, about a deeper experience underneath linear time and ‘slow time’ in his blessing ‘For one who is exhausted’ https://onbeing.org/blog/john-odonohue-for-one-who-is-exhausted-a-blessing/. Thank you so much for including my recent post, I was so interested to learn about maiological time, it allowed a few things to make sense in my mind! xx