Weekly Meander #18: Overload

Sugababes & scatterbrains (or, why this post is so late)

Hi! Thanks for joining me on this weekly meander through my week just gone – with a focus on my evolving working life. If you’re new here, do check out this post for a bit more about me. TLDR: I'm a documentary filmmaker coming to the end of distributing my debut feature doc -about the history of nuclear power - and currently exploring/expanding into new professional avenues whilst also navigating parenting & perimenopause. Some balls may be dropped!

You'll also find recommendations of great reads I've seen on Substack 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.

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Greetings friends – and please be gentle with me this week, it's been a time!

Yes, if you detect a drop off in the usually sparkling quality of my observations on work and life (!) then you are spot on. The truth is, as I'm writing this (even later than usual, sorry), my brain feels well and truly scrambled after what seems like about 3 weeks worth of life crammed into just the past single week.

My tangled brain in AI-generated form

Yet I still wanted to be here and share my customary weekly meander with you. After all, as I keep telling my son, who's experiencing some challenges himself right now, it's just as important to note the tough stuff as the wins. It's all just data after all.

And having committed to getting honest about the ups and downs of my life as a middle-aged, creative, working parent - charting a course along one of many possible paths, up many possible mountains, from my current position in the valley of 'what now' - it feels important to push on through my present mental weariness and record this week, just as I have all the others since I began these updates.

I'm sure it’ll prove instructive for me to look back on from whatever mountain I do eventually find myself on top of in the near future.

And maybe it’ll prove interesting (or at least a source of amused Schadenfreude) for you to read too. I hope so!

I'm well aware of the irony of this super-stacked week coming hard on the heels of last week when I was musing about the importance of respecting our limits. I hadn't intended it this way – but this stuff does have a way of creeping up on you, especially if you're not keeping an eye on the horizon.

Truthfully, it was only when I collapsed on the sofa after a long day of travelling for work on Saturday to watch some Glastonbury highlights on the telly that I had the rather obvious self-realisation... man, I've had a lot going on this week!

And who do I have to thank for said realisation? Why, Mutya, Keisha & Siobhan – the OG line up of noughties pop queens Sugababes of course! And specifically their breakthrough banger Overload, released in November 2000, back when the girls were, incredibly, only 15 & 16 years old.

If you don't know it, here's the original music video on YouTube. It's a real ear-worm.

Of course, I'm being a little facetious here – it's a song about a teen girl's crush on a boy she fancies. Thank god I'm not in that stage of life anymore!

But the chorus lyrics¹ that have been lodged in my head ever since do feel like they speak to me in this stage of life too – though hopefully the first line more so than the second as I'm not over keen on finding myself in a madman's situation...

I'll do my customary run through of work bits and bobs in a moment, but I'll spare you a detailed accounting of all the things that have left me feeling overloaded this week. But just to give you a bit of a flavour they've included:

• school sports day

• a referral meeting with the family champion at school

• setting up for the school summer fair (which I couldn't even attend cos it clashed with another of the 'things')

• collecting cash float from the bank for same (did I mention I'm the PTA treasurer?)

• getting a call to come collect my poorly child from school

• attending a birthday party with my other child (a memorable affair involving a late-running lady with boxes of reptiles, a balloon sword, 'sea foam' and me attempting to explain the rules of Mallett's Mallet to several 5 year olds)

• booking our summer holiday on the Isle of Wight – much later than I should have and hence trickier and more time-consuming than it need have been

• navigating several bus route diversions around Brighton

• running out of charge on my phone on a long train journey the tickets for which were only available as e-tickets on said phone - and then realising I'd left my charger at home and having to find somewhere to buy a new one before the phone went dead (you can imagine the Mission Impossible theme music here to really recreate the high-stakes tension I felt if you like)

• almost losing my bank card (I retraced my steps back down our steep hill and praise be, I found it on the pavement almost at the bottom)

• forgetting to order my repeat prescription for my inhaler (again) and having small asthma flare-ups at night while I wait for the new one to come in at the pharmacy

There were also two semi-finals and a final in the T20 cricket world cup, the start of the Tour de France and the travails of the England football team at the Euros to try to keep up with. And a General Election campaign to largely try to ignore.

So all in all, perhaps not surprising that my brain has been struggling to keep up with it all.

And a pretty clear message I think that I need to SLOW DOWN.

This isn't something I find easy to do – especially as a life-long freelancer (I do wonder if I'd find it easier to give myself permission to completely stop thinking about work if I had paid holiday days, something I've never experienced). But I do plan to give it a try.

In the meantime, here are the work highlights of my week, as trailed above.

WORK WINS THIS WEEK

1. Created a slide presentation on the making of my nuclear documentary for a screening Q&A this week

I mentioned this last week as it wasn’t something I’ve had to do for a screening before. For good or bad, my working life doesn’t involve a lot of Powerpoint so it took me a while as my brain cranked along at both the macro level (remembering the grand arc of my filmmaking journey over more than a decade) and the micro (fiddling around trying to remember how to duplicate slides, add image galleries etc etc). I was pretty pleased with how it turned out in the end. Here’s sneak peak of the first slide:

2. Meet-up with fellow Brighton Substacker

This IRL get-together with

Sandi Fanning

came out of a virtual introduction in the comments of a post by everyone’s favourite Lancastrian bookshop owner

Katie Clapham

a few weeks ago. It almost didn’t happen though after I a) tried to turn up to it a day early and b) arranged it in a bookshop cafe that had actually stopped operations some time ago (the scatterbrain in evidence again…!) And then, just as I was on my way to the hastily rearranged venue, I got a phone call from school that I needed to come in and collect my sick child 😳

Nonetheless we did manage to squeeze in a quick coffee and chew the fat about how we’re finding our respective Substack experiences. It was so good to get out from behind the screens and do this face to face. We’re hoping to do it again so if you’re a Substacker of any capacity and are based in or around Brighton (or know someone else who is) and would like to join us, do please let me know in the comments or by hitting reply in your inbox.

3. Zoom call with Canadian artist / academic whose work examines military culture and the nuclear era

Another stimulating atomic conversation for me this week, this one having come about after the artist and professor in question, Mary Kavanagh, rented my film on Vimeo (you can do this here if you’d like to watch it too).

Her artistic practice focuses on the material legacies of nuclear culture, especially around military landscapes and atomic testing, and we had so much to talk about we’re going to reconvene for a part 2 in a few weeks. There are many examples of her work on her website but I was especially struck² by this powerfully affecting sculpture, made out of green-hued, radioactive uranium glass, from her most recent project Daughters of Uranium.

Mary Kavanagh, "Rosa the Beautiful," 2019. cast uranium glass objects and ultraviolet light (photo by Jaime Vedres)

4. Webinar/online Q&A to accompany film screening for the Society of Radiological Protection

The Q&A for which I made the aforementioned slide presentation. It was a slightly strange experience as I wasn’t able to see anyone on the webinar apart from the SRP organisers who read out questions from the chat box. So I couldn’t really tell if what I was saying was interesting to those in attendance or if I was properly addressing what they wanted me to talk about. But the feedback afterwards was good, so I guess I must have been doing something right, eh!

5. Attended Open Day at Harwell Campus / Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

This enormous site in Oxfordshire started life as the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in 1946 but these days is home to cutting edge theoretical and applied science in everything from particle physics and space exploration, to life science technology and health security. On Saturday they opened their gates to welcome some 20,000 visitors onto the sprawling campus - and I was one of them.

I’d been invited along by the Nuclear Heritage Lead at Sellafield as Harwell are working on an ambitious heritage project to capture and communicate the site’s compelling history over the past almost 80 years - one which could lead the way in other nuclear heritage projects in the UK into the future. It was a jaw-dropping place, both in the scale and scope of the achievements on display especially for my already frazzled (and non-scientific!) brain. But it also felt confident and optimistic in the blazing summer sunshine. I’ll be following developments with interest - and who knows, maybe there’ll be scope for a nuclear-obsessed documentary filmmaker to contribute in some way (let me know if you know one of those 🤣)

WHAT I'M LOVING ON SUBSTACK THIS WEEK

I wasn’t really up to anything requiring deep mental or emotional engagement this week so found myself particularly drawn to writing that just made me chuckle. And these were two of the very funniest.

I strongly urge you to carve out a few minutes to read Tom Cox’s truly inspired and absolutely hilarious short stories inspired by a 1970s furniture catalogue. And if you already know and love Bob Mortimer (by which I surely just mean, if you live in the UK and have got a TV and a pulse), then you’ll need no encouragement from me to dive into this paean from Nick Hornby (yes, that Nick Hornby). And if you don’t, oh my word have you got a treat in store!

The True Stories Behind Some Of The Photos In The 1970s Habitat Catalogues

The genius of Bob Mortimer

And with that, I’m going to go and curl up on the sofa again, this time to watch the Tour de France highlights (my happy place). Hopefully you’re feeling a bit less overloaded than I’ve been this past week - and if not, I hope you too can curl up in your happy place, wherever it is.

Either way as always, I’d love to hear from you - about your favourite Sugababes song, how I can remember to order my repeat prescription on time, or anything else at all.

Sending love and spaciousness your way,

Vicki

Proudly taking part in the Sparkle on Substack 24 essays club with Claire Venus – this is post number 13 😊

Watch my film on Netflix (in Europe) or Vimeo (everywhere else) - or see trailer, reviews & bonus content HERE

Find me on X & LinkedIn

Life stories website – coming soon...

1. Train comes, I don't know its destination /It's a one-way ticket to a madman's situation

2. For reasons that will be obvious to some of you