West Park Park bench Podcsat 12 - Everything's Change

10:09AM Sep 6, 2022

Speakers:

Caron Lyon

Keywords:

swim

talk

today

podcasts

podcast

spectrums

people

caron

change

listened

session

digital

audio

park bench

moment

put

share

blog

melodrama

pool

Welcome to Episode 12 of the West Park Park Bench Podcast. Today is a moment where I'm contemplating change as I walk from the pool to this park bench, so much was going around in my head about what what do I want to talk about today. One of the functions of these podcasts is to be my audio blog. So as a dyslexic, I find it very hard to turn the words in my head or the thoughts in my head into words that go onto paper. And the more frustrated or the more impassioned that I get about what I want to say the harder it is for me to actually put it down on a piece of paper in a timely fashion. So the starting of this blog, I just, I just wanted, if you've listened to other episodes, I just wanted to get that rhythm of making media and creating something that has a workflow that I can share with other people and that if people want to make podcasts I'm in a flow so that I can bring people into my flow and help them voice their concerns or promote their work or share their thoughts. And then there comes the point where things are happening in my world, that I really want to shout about. But I don't want to be a ranter. And I don't want to put myself in a position where I will get trolled. But there are there are things that put me into despair.

Now. I'm going to talk about today's topic, today's trial. That's what it will be today's trial. So I go swimming on a Tuesday. And for the last while since I've been doing this podcast, so this is episode 12. So for at least 12 weeks and there was a couple of weeks that I've not been swimming and there's a couple of weeks where I haven't done a podcast episode. But 12 weeks and a half past 10 I was able to find this session that happened to be half past 10 That was width swimming at the local pool. It is the only session of its kind. And I think because of COVID the Leisure Centre has introduced a limit to how many people can swim and that can be frustrating if you miss and you're on the waiting list, but ultimately it's been a really nice space paced swim, that that lets you settle with your thoughts and you don't have to get out of people's way. Well, I think because the schools are gone back.

Everything's change. Railway set sessions change timetables change at this time of year. The bus times change the clocks go back. We've got a new prime minister we were in when a moment when nothing, nothing is stable. And those routines that people have in their life are part of the routine that keeps them stable. And today my dismay and my disappointment and my fears for the world. I feel like I'm living in a melodrama script. I sit and write emails to people at the moment for something that's going on in my world which I may share in next week's podcast.

This week's podcast I go into keep that out of this particular thing. But when I go to this when I go to swim and I keep myself to myself, I've not been going many weeks I recognise some faces, but it's just a little bit awkward. Talking to people who are there for the same reason that I am, which is to get a bit of a swim in you don't want to stop and talk you also don't want to waste the money that you're spending on the hour that you're swimming. So you know kind of look around and you hear in the dressing room. You do hear people's What do you hear you hear you overhear people's conversations, and I think those overheard conversations are the most revealing and they can be banal, quite a lot of them are people chastising their children or talking about missing something at work or watching a programme or it's all very peripheral stuff. Today was the first time that I heard people talking about how they'd notice down their streets, lots of televisions flickering in the windows because people aren't putting their lights on and oh, I think everybody's doing the same as me. One lady, saying that. A friend of hers had bought her head torch so that she could read at night because she can't put the lights on and that she had actually done that a few weeks ago. And the woman that she was talking to is going that's a really good idea. That is just awful. And then when we got into the pool, I mean this was already a 930 session instead of a 1030 session, which in itself has caused a shift and I could feel I could feel the disarray I could feel discombobulation of an hour's shift. But the makeup of who was in the pool was radically different. There was much more. There were more people allowed in and it just wasn't enjoyable. I had to force myself to enjoy the swim. And it just sat as a metaphor for me for just just those small changes for people who have had a relative stability the cost of living and the fuel crisis are really worrying. It's really hard to it's hard to do a podcast without

being on show or performing and or using hyperbole and and slanting into melodrama. And when I do these i It's kind of a bit of a note to myself a chance for me to listen to what I'm saying and compose those sentences. I spent a lot of time reading back transcripts and I was surprised especially at the beginning how we rarely talk in complete sentences and how we are prone to changing the tense of our sentence halfway through a statement. Having to take a statement that is in one tense at the beginning and concludes in a different one means that you have to interpret for the person who was speaking. And it's almost as if they've swapped their presence in the moment of their statement from being then to now being the past or the present. And I think to bring a sense of philosophy to this session, which I was really torn between what I was going to talk to I think I have had a little bit of a swimming pool rant. And I did come out and speak to the duty manager. And everything that I have said here, I said to him in a much more controlled fashion with politeness and a smile on my face and without wanting to be that woman that always complained and asks to see the manager. But one of the things that I said to him was, I suspect I'm the first person who's been to speak to you about this, am I right? And he acknowledged that I was right or he was being incredibly diplomatic, and maybe people had been and said, it but he held their confidence but anyway,

but the problem that I think I have with today is digital. And people who know me will say that's a little bit strange coming from you Caron. The problem is digital. When we had televisions that we had to tune in either with a dial in the early 70s, or when you had to tune it in to a frequency, you had to go through the process of observing the spectrum of reception before you got the optimal signal. And sometimes there was a compromise between good picture and good audio. And sometimes you would pick the good audio and have a slightly grainy picture but it tended to be if you've your audio is key, and that's been the same with theatre. So that digital when it came to digital, the problem with digital is that it is on or off. It's zeros and ones and I fear that the world has become polarised polarised in the digital and although we have we talk about spectrums, in terms of sexuality, and gender, and we talk about spectrums, in terms of neurodiversity, and those of us that exist within those spectrums. Appreciate the nuance between different points on the spectrum. But when you're operating in a left, right, up, down, backwards, forwards on off world, you have to pick a side. And I fear that this digital this this digital consciousness that we've all embraced and entered into, has been without considering the consequences. And this polarisation that we often see, I think, is a product of digitalization. We want everything to work perfectly. When it doesn't there's a problem that that grey scale of, of arriving somewhere a destination, the sense of travel, that sense of accomplishment. The sense of Revelation is all it's all for nothing. When everything is just about on or off. Right or wrong.

And I don't know what to do about that.

These podcasts are vital to my mental health. I've realised today in this point of change where the swimming time changed the gym sessions that I've been attending have changed their time. I have really tried to come out of my developing creative practice grant with a sense of structure to take me through the next six months because I know this is going to be the hardest six months of my life in terms of my career. I want to achieve so much. But I also know that I'm capable of doing nothing and enjoying nothing, but I want to achieve things but the amount of hoops and administrative barriers and boundaries that you have to navigate

it's an odd cliche to say I'm just too old and I don't mean that I'm too old enough I've given up. But I mean I'm too old because I see too much. And when you see too much and you feel as much as I do, and relish that closeness and that emotion and that empathetic connection that you can have to a subject it makes it difficult to have some perspective sometimes. And that's another thing about these podcasts. I could have made it a rant about the thing that was happening immediately. That's come to light that is going to fundamentally change the way my last two years have been perceived within the industry that I work in. It needs thought and I need to find people to talk to that's just not this echo chamber of my podcast. I would like this podcast not to be an echo chamber and I would like to think that there's people listening who can pick up a banner and amplify things that need to be shared. But that's not what this is for.

I'm gonna head home I'm gonna have kind of a breakfast at brunch type thing because it was too soon for me to have breakfast, and it's not going to quite be lunch. So I will continue my day.

Thank you so much for staying to the end. Do comment if this is on a Facebook post. Do put something in the comments if you see this on Anchor. I'm going to start putting these on to my type pad text blog to try and keep that up to date because it looks like I haven't been blogging on my text blog because I've been audio blogging, but that's fine. Also, as it's an audio blog, it won't be going on my youtube which I've been trying to do some webcasts to have conversations and I'm going to try and have some of these conversations with people and put them into an arena where people might be able to hear them and take those comments back to their circles of industry collaborators. So it is coming to an end. I suspect I'm coming 15 to 20 minutes. I might have gone over the top of that. Thank you so much for listening.

If this is your first podcast that you've listened to, I'm Caron, I'm a creative producer living in the East Midlands and trying to navigate the world of the entertainment industry from the perspective of an independent.

@PCMcreative on Twitter and podcasting from West Park on Tuesdays