Weekly Meander #25: Buffering
Letting my mind catch up. Plus, would you like a free film on me?
Hi! Thanks for joining me on this weekly meander through my week just gone as I navigate a time of personal and professional reimagining. 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 moving onto new working adventures, alongside 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.
Hi friends,
How's your internet connection? Mine's rubbish.
Despite living in a city that prides itself on its thriving and innovative digital/tech economy (which you can hear much more about in the fab podcast series from
if that's your cup of tea), the wonders of high speed internet have yet to reach to the top of my windy hill.My broadband speed is so woeful that when I had to send the high res master copy of my film to my sales agent I actually had to go and stay in a hotel with high speed internet to guarantee I could get it uploaded to her servers on time.1
Our hopes were raised a year or so ago when a company called City Fibre started digging up the roads all over the city to install a brand new full fibre network. My neighbours and I watched with a hushed awe in anticipation of finally joining the 21st century broadband party. But since then... nothing.
And so I am, unfortunately, all too familiar with the dreaded spinning circle of a buffering connection – especially when I'm trying to watch some prestige TV series or critically acclaimed international documentary whilst my son is catching up with the all important news of lower league Scottish football results on the iPlayer or watching an Associated Cricket2 match between, say, Oman & Nepal on YouTube.
The stream of information just runs too fast for our leisurely connection to stand a chance of keeping up.
This past week I've felt a bit like a human version of that spinning circle.
A whole ton of new information and experiences has been loaded into my brain of late – and over the preceding week especially, with the news of my son's autism diagnosis, which I wrote about last week if you missed it:
And honestly, I feel like I'm in a constant game of mental catch up, both in letting this new information land and percolate and with all of the other life stuff I've more or less unconsciously set to one side to focus on supporting the kids, one in starting at school for the first time, the other in dealing with the prospect of the next big transition, to secondary school. Whilst also fully stepping across the threshold into the brave new world of special educational needs.
It's probably not ideal that all these things have come along at once – much easier to deal with one thing at a time, even for a neurotypical brain. But we are where we are and really, it's all good. And I must send sincere thanks to everyone who got in touch after that post, both in the comments and over email – I felt completely validated in my out-of-my-comfort-zone decision to talk about this stuff so publicly and feel very lucky to have such lovely humans reading my words each week 😊
And of course, one corner of life so often has lessons to teach you in another corner. Whilst I was trying to ignore that nagging little voice that wants me to feel guilty about not making fast enough progress in my work ventures (whatever that really means – who gets to decide what is 'enough' anyway?!), I ordered up a bunch of books on autism.
The titles were recommended in the brochure for parents of newly-diagnosed autistic children that we were given by the child development clinic. They included some for parents and some for my son to read himself (including a couple of kids' sci-fi adventure books whose protagonists are on the spectrum, which sounds pretty cool).
In one of them, I came across such a wonderful quote, that really resonated with me in relation to my own life as much as to my son's, that I wanted to share it here. The author, whose son was diagnosed with autism at the age of 3 in the 1990s, recalls her son's psychologist telling her:
Remember: all children, all people, unfold in their own time... His time will come.
What a good reminder to try to just let things happen as they will and not to keep piling on the pressure to reach targets that just aren’t realistic for you right now for whatever reason. If you're feeling like you're struggling to keep up or to hit imaginary benchmarks, just remember, your time will come too.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO WATCH A GREAT DOCUMENTARY FOR FREE?
This is a bit of an experiment but I have a subscription to MUBI, which if you don't know it is a fantastic streaming platform for global cinema, showing arthouse and indie films, documentaries and cult classics. One of its features is that subscribers can gift friends a film to stream on the platform for free.
This week I watched an incredibly interesting essay film from two Irish artist-filmmakers, who also happen to be husband and wife, which tackles the big question of whether the time has come for them to move back to Ireland from London, where they've lived since the late '80s. Here's the trailer:
'The Future Tense' is a meditation on migration, national identity and belonging, which meanders its way around a host of disparate topics from mental health and ageing, to the decline of the Irish language and a glamorous English debutante who became a volunteer for the IRA.
It also plays with the documentary form in a fun, reflexive way, throwing lots of different techniques at the wall and seeing which ones stick (this was partly due to the pandemic apparently, but my sense is it’s also a deliberately chosen stylistic approach).
I found it an enjoyable and engrossing film and when the follow up email arrived in my inbox asking if I'd like to share it with a friend, I thought to myself, yeah, I would! So if you like the sound of it and would like a free pass to watch it, just reply to this email (or send me a DM on Substack) with your first & last name and email address and I'll sort you out.3
WORK WINS THIS WEEK
This was a shortened working week for me as I gave myself a day off on Monday to go and meet an old friend from university who now lives in Australia but was briefly back in the UK – we spent a delightful few hours pootling along the South Bank in London, dodging the rain, eating street food and generally having a good old catch up. But I did get a few bits and bobs done the rest of the week.
1. Took the second class in my Boost Your Documentary Productions with AI course
This was not in fact as I told
last week on audio AI tools but on video (audio is coming up next). Truth be told, I found this class rather less inspiring than the first one, when we looked at how we could use text tools like ChatGPT and Claude in our overall work flow.Although undoubtedly remarkable, the AI video we looked at still had that slightly creepy, uncanny valley feel to me. Certainly at this point I can’t imagine wanting to try and actually produce anything substantive with any of the tools we saw. Though the technology is developing at incredible speed so I guess never say never.
2. Substack Collaboration Planning
After a hiatus for the school holidays I finally got around to laying the ground work for some possible collaborations with other Substackers, plus another with an academic who came to an event I organised last year with nuclear novelist and psychogeographer Philippa Holloway about her novel The Half Life of Snails. I hope to have more news on these soon...
3. Wrote the next post in my A-Z of Favourite Documentary Films series
I had a lot of fun re-visiting this particular movie (hint: it starts with Q) and am looking forward to publishing my piece on it. This will actually be next week in lieu of my regular weekly meander as I'm going away for a long weekend with two of my very dearest friends and want to be fully present with them for that. I hope you guys like it!
WHAT I'M LOVING ON SUBSTACK THIS WEEK
I very much enjoyed this one from
. Come for the mission statement, stay for the fabulous photographs. Plus find out what leaf-levelling is.Some wise words here on 'regathering for now' after a complicated month – needless to say I very much related to this one!
Somehow I'd missed the news about comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS but I’m delighted that this oversight has now been rectified via this heavenly piece. Comets are a big thing in my family. My partner's Dad was a space scientist whose team sent a scientific instrument up on the Giotto satellite that made close-up observations of Halley's comet back in 1986. And in the days after my daughter was born in March 2020, we were bewitched by following Comet Neowise’s journey across the night sky. Here's hoping for a spectacular view on 12th October eh.
Lastly, this piece by the mother of an autistic son simply took my breath away.
And there, as September bids us all farewell, so I do you. I’ll see you back here in a couple of weeks for my next meandering update.
Comments open as always. I’d love to hear your broadband beefs (or brags). Or if you can relate to your intentions moving way faster than your actions. Or owt else!
And don’t forget, let me know if you’d like a free watch of ‘The Future Tense’.
Sending love and spaciousness your way,
Vicki x
Proudly taking part in the Sparkle on Substack 24 essays club with
– this is post number 22.
Watch my film on Netflix (in Europe) or Vimeo (everywhere else) - or see trailer, reviews & bonus content HERE
Life stories website – coming soon...
My editor and I had been working up to the wire to get it finished by the Monday morning deadline which meant uploading it overnight on the Sunday night when no business centres or the like were open, or at least not here in Brighton…
Cricket played between nations who don't yet have full membership of the International Cricket Council
I don't know if there's a limit on how many times I can share it – I guess we'll find out!
Dear Vicki,
Thanks for mentioning me! Every week at Becoming, I try for some splendid photos, a poem or two and some quirky observations. I'm enjoying your meandering as well.
Hello from another windy Brighton hill. I had to go over to fibre way earlier than most people precisely because of this reason. The excellent tech guy I spoke to at my internet provider had taken it on as a project, determined to find out why I had such crap internet. Turns out on my side of town, there is only 1 phone/internet box thingy connection point and I was, in internet terms, a very long way away from it. We were also the first area to get dug up by city fibre and some neighbours have connected to it but I don't think they get much faster connections than me. Sending you grounding thoughts with everything you're juggling at the moment.