Weekly Meander #7: A Cacophany of Cousins

Or, what's all this working for anyway?

Each week I'm documenting what I've been up to in my working life. This is mainly for my own benefit – I seem to get to the end of most weeks feeling I've barely achieved anything so it'll be nice to start to build up a record of what I havedone in any given 7 days. But hopefully some of it’ll be fun & interesting for everyone else too. I'll also be highlighting some great Substack posts I’ve seen in the past week. Thoughts, comments etc always happily received – you can hit reply if you're getting this in your inbox or leave a comment at the end if you're reading online or in the Substack app (recommended).

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 currently exploring/expanding into new professional avenues whilst also navigating parenting & perimenopause. Some balls may be dropped!

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I finished last week's weekly meander wondering aloud how much work I might realistically get done this week, given the double whammy of the school Easter holidays and my niece and nephew - aged 6 & 12 - coming to stay with us for the duration. Well, the answer is... some!

To be honest though, once they were here it just felt way, way more important to spend time with and create memories for them, for my own kids and for me and my partner. Work isn't going anywhere after all.

I do have a definite tendency to be quite future-focused, both in a broader sense of thinking about and visualising the direction I want my life to go in and more granularly, in terms of the various goals I like to set for myself in different areas, both professional and personal.

So it's good to remind myself often that, of course, life is really just one big 'now' – and that if we're looking too much into the horizon we can easily miss the details and texture of that 'now'.

Drawing by my 6 year old nephew - the four cousins, two cuddly toys and a castle

In a blink of an eye, these little kids will be big kids who won't be up for hanging out with us oldies (I'm an older parent so most of my friends' children are already well into their teens and even young adulthood, so that particular future perhaps feels even more vivid to me than it otherwise might).

Plus, my niece and nephew are almost certainly going to return to live in Japan in a couple of years time - so it feels even more important to make the most of this window with them while it's here.

Both my partner and I were officially working this week – and my youngest was still in nursery as usual – so it wasn't full on holiday mode by any means, but our memory-making included:

• visits to the beach and the marina (with obligatory stone skimming, obviously)

• glow-in-the-dark indoor crazy golf (yes, that's a thing)

• Superhero/Ghostbusters movie marathon on the sofa, with blankets & popcorn

• a trip on the Volks Electric Railway along the seafront

• a bath in some bright pink goo (courtesy of this)

• and a day out in Lewes featuring some 13^th Century battle reenactors at Lewes Castle and some Tudor dress up at Anne of Cleves House

The eldest two cousins also played the silentest round of the board game Ticket to Ride that has surely ever occurred anywhere (a rare moment when the cacophany wasn't present – mostly these kids are LOUD!) All in all, it's been a lovely week. And I am knackered!

And on top of all this, amazingly I did manage to squeeze in a little bit of work around the edges (to slightly misquote the title of the great

Writing Around The Edges

from

Luisa Skinner

). It’s necessarily a slightly truncated list. But that's just as it should be.

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WORK WINS THIS WEEK

1. Zoom call with a Japanese academic about potential screenings of ‘The Atom: A Love Affair’ in the US & Japan

I kicked the week off with a wonderful conversation with a nuclear ethics professor in Chicago whose mother actually survived the atomic bombing at Hiroshima – a personal link I found really powerful.

We talked widely - about our respective journeys into the topic of nuclear; about my experiences screening my film to a variety of different audiences and their responses to it; about the current mood of optimism around civil nuclear power and the darkening situation around nuclear weapons¹; about a potential new nuclear-related documentary short I'm developing. And about Oppenheimer (the movie, not the man). We both had our reservations...

Despite a few technical snafus, it was a brilliant meeting and she went away promising to speak to colleagues both in the US and in Japan about opportunities to screen my film – I will keep my fingers crossed.

2. Finished the final cost report for my fiscal sponsor

Having started this last week, I found it was the perfect work task for fitting into the nooks and crannies of quieter moments around hanging out with the kids. And the final numbers were definitely eye-opening - even to me and I was there! I will write in more detail about this in a future post for sure.

3. Hit 50 subscribers on Substack!

Photo by Peri Stojnic on Unsplash

I know this is a very modest milestone, but nonetheless I was really pleased, having started with just myself, my brother and a close friend as the initial subscribers when I published my first post back in mid-December. I really only got going properly with my writing in February and the rest of those subscribers have come almost entirely from within the Substack ecosystem since then.

So thanks to EVERY one of you who’s opened this email and is reading this missive now – it means a lot. I've got all kinds of ideas for this space – it's really got my creative juices flowing and I'm excited about trying stuff out and playing. I think it's gonna be a fun ride and it’s great to have you here. And if you’re enjoying it - maybe tell someone else to check it out too 🤩

4. Committed to writing 24 essays on Substack by January 31st 2025

This great essay club idea is the latest initiative from the ever-wonderful

Claire Venus

over at

Sparkle on Substack

who was also one of the brilliant minds behind the International Womens Day writing prompt last month (here's the post I wrote for that if you didn't see it the first time around: My Women: A Salute Across the Decades).

I'm very proud of having stuck to my aim of publishing something at least once a week (this is now my 7^th weekly post – not an enormous amount I know but still, little acorns and all that). So I'm really up for taking part in this and having another way to hold myself accountable.

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WHAT I'M LOVING ON SUBSTACK THIS WEEK

Receipt from the Bookshop #40

A long overdue recommendation for one of the first Substacks I signed up to when I started hanging out here - and still one of my favourites. In case you've somehow missed this treat,

Katie Clapham

and her mum (aka BusinessMum) run an independent bookshop in the seaside town of St. Annes-on-Sea in Lancashire in the northwest of England. And each week she writes a report in real time of her day working in the shop, the customers who've come in, the conversations she's had, the books she's sold/not sold/ordered in, the hot drinks or sweet treats she may have consumed and assorted other happenings. It's absolutely great.

This week is the 40^th edition (with a real life Canadian author visiting, a motorbike, a trumpet and a spot of shoplifting) so it seems an excellent time to salute it.

Eleanor's Letter: Malfi to Maitlis in Scoop - how far we've come and how far there is to go

I very much enjoyed reading this week's Queenager newsletter from

Eleanor Mills

reflecting on two different cultural highlights in her week – a 500 year old Jacobean tragedy at Shakespeare's Globe and the latest zeitgeisty biopic drama on Netflix:

“ a tale of two cultural moments. How much life has changed for women in the last five centuries, but also of how far there is still to go….”

I was in two minds about watching the Netflix take on the infamous Prince Andrew Newsnight interview as I often find it hard to suspend disbelief with adaptations where famous people are playing other contemporary famous people. But this may have just persuaded me to give it a go.

Organised crime against the cinema

If you've got any interest in either the Golden Age of Hollywood, or the mafia, then you'll definitely get something out of this fascinating essay – it's dispiriting, if not surprising, to read that the fraught relationship between the big studios and trade unions has a long & murky history...

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

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Life stories website – coming soon...

1.

She works with the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, whose Doomsday Clock (marking how close we are to nuclear catastrophe) is currently set at the nearest to midnight it has ever been, since its inception almost 80 years ago.