horizons

These past couple of weeks I’ve been away with work, stage-managing my final tour of the year, and I’m loving it. You’re in a little bubble when you’re on the road – as anyone who’s ever been involved will know – and that can offer a welcome and much-needed respite from the unremitting awfulness of what nowadays passes for news. Yes, the hours are long and the days are sometimes hard, but being so immersed in this new/old/familiar routine has also given me time to regain a sense of perspective, and reminded me that the world isn’t entirely grim.

The world’s been helping with that, too, bless it. On Thursday afternoon, I made time to walk out of the venue with a cup of coffee – when you’re on tour it’s all too easy to spend all day, day after day, not seeing any natural light – and spend half an hour standing beside the river Mersey, listening to the gulls, watching ships glide upstream on an incoming tide, relaxing as the light shifted and changed, and dreaming a little as the sun slid down out of the cathedral of an eggshell-blue sky into low charcoal clouds that hugged the horizon.

It looked a lot like this.

I’m just a bloke who puts stages together, organises musicians, and scrabbles a living in the underbelly of the world of entertainment. There are worse ways to make living, and – believe me – I count my blessings on a regular basis. And on those days when [waves at news headlines] it feels next to impossible to retain hope for a better future, when social media is awash with hateful performative ignorance, and when so many of our great and good choose to dance to that discordant tune, there’s a huge amount to be said for taking five minutes out to stand quietly with a cuppa and marvel at the beauty of our planet.

I recommend looking up, looking out, and regaining sense of perspective before heading back to the grindstone once again.

Believe me, it’s worth it.