TL;DR
I realise that, after 13 issues, I have got into a bit of a routine writing this Substack and experiment with breaking it.
RAMBLINGS: Is synaptic pruning a good metaphor for thinking about how we need to regularly maintain our creative gardens?
ARTICLE: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
WALK: I’m leading an Art walk along the Thames as part of the Kingston walking festival on Sunday 12th July. Come make stuff and look at stuff.
WORKSHOP: A 2 day “Dancing with the Inner Critic” workshop on November 26th and 27th with myself and Simon Cavicchia.
BUY: My new WE ARE CRABS t-shirt.
A photo of a juvenile wood duck that jumped into my kayak as I was writing this issue, to encourage you to scroll to the end of the Substack and read about how you can financially support my work by Buying stuff in my shop, becoming a patron of my studio, become a paid subscriber or buying me a coffee (tip jar).
1. Hello
When I started writing this Substack exactly a year ago, I became so immersed in the process that I had often completed the next issue within a few days of the previous one going out. I was so excited about sharing what I had written that it took a lot of discipline not to send it out straight away and instead wait until four weeks had passed to keep the regular rhythm going.
But my experience over the last few issues has felt noticeably different. I still have as many ideas for things I want to write about, and I still absolutely adore the writing process, but something subtle seemed to be shifting in my relationship with it all. I found myself putting off starting an issue until less than a week before it was due to go out and, on some occasions, finishing it the day before publication. This became even more time-pressured as I then had the podcast version to record, edit, master and upload.
I decided to spend some time this month reflecting on all of this and came to the conclusion that I had somehow accidentally turned the once-exciting process of writing into too much of a routine for it to remain as exciting as it originally was. The tiniest morsel of it beginning to feel like “work” had started to creep in, so I concluded that now was the time to experiment with disrupting it.
This whole thing started somewhat by accident. I had written a Mailchimp newsletter for around fifteen years, a sporadic thing that listed the workshops and events I had coming up, along with other bits of news I thought people might be interested in. But as the years went by, Mailchimp became more and more expensive and seemed to add endless features that I never used, so I decided to switch to Substack. I noticed that many people were using it less as a newsletter platform and more as a home for long-form writing, so it felt like a good opportunity to start writing longer pieces based on whatever had captured my interest over the previous month. I then accidentally launched a podcast in the process of trying to make an accessible audio version of it all.
Back then, there was no routine as I was making it up as I went along. But over time a routine for creating the Substack and podcast has emerged: 1) I collect thoughts and ideas for the next issue in my phone’s notes app, 2) I pick three of these and write the pieces that end up in the Substack, 3) I use the content of the Substack as a framework for recording the podcast and 4) I release it all into the wild every four weeks. And this routine has worked well for me. I’ve loved writing the 13 issues so far, the audience continues to grow and I’ve had some lovely feedback. So at some level, it feels ridiculous that I want to change something. But my intuition, and previous experience of similar things, tells me that I need to disrupt my own process in order to re-access the excitement and naivety I felt at the start, otherwise I suspect I’ll have run out of momentum and interest by issue 20.
Gordon MacKenzie tells a wonderful story in “Orbiting the giant hairball” about developing a creative workshop for managers at Hallmark Cards. Recalling the pitch he gave to management before running the first session, he writes: “[The workshop]… is called ‘Grope’. The object would be to expose the participants to a three-hour bombardment of non-rational experiences that would leave them wondering, ‘What the hell was all that about?’” Gordon ran the workshop and it was a huge success. Despite its bizarreness, it received great feedback. He was asked to run it a second time, and then a third, but each time he noticed that something important was missing.
Reflecting on this, he wrote: “In our first Grope session, because we had been willing to flow without structure, we opened ourselves to the creative energy that is extruded from chaos. I took that formula to a second workshop where, consequently, the experience became structured, linear… formulary rather than seminal. I was no longer facilitating a Grope session; I was conducting a Rote session.”
I realised that perhaps my changing relationship with this Substack was because I too had moved from grope to rote. So for this issue I experimented with moving back towards my own version of grope. As a reader, you may notice nothing different. But for me it has made creating this issue the most exciting and immersive one yet. Instead of sitting down to write, I went out on my kayak to a stretch of the River Thames I had never paddled before and recorded a flow of consciousness onto my Tascam audio recorder. (Which I accidentally dropped in the river, causing the screen to stop working so I had no idea whether it was recording or not.) I then turned this audio into a very raw and unpolished podcast episode and listened back to it in order to tease out the themes for writing this Substack. And here we are.
One of the magical things I discovered about starting in this way was that “writing” whilst doing a repetitive motion, in this case paddling the kayak, seemed to give me access to a much richer flow of spontaneous thought. It reminded me of a great exercise that theatre director Keith Johnstone once taught us. Keith would invite us up on stage to perform a repetitive task, such as miming washing up, whilst having a spontaneous conversation with another improviser. He was keen to point out that, in real life, people washing up would not talk about washing up itself (e.g. “Now I am washing up a plate”) but would either talk about something entirely unrelated or be in silence. It was a wonderful way of bringing the body into the experience of the improviser, one that seemed to disturb the internal censor just enough to allow a more natural and free-flowing chain of thought to emerge.
I had this experience in mind when James Traeger told me he wanted to give a talk on tennis at my experimental Inexpert conference, where people were invited to speak on subjects they had little or no expertise in. I suggested that, whilst James gave his talk, I would bounce tennis balls at him for him to serve back, and he sportingly agreed. It ended up being one of the highlights of the conference because not only was he talking about something he didn’t know much about, but his chain of thought was continually interrupted by the repeated physical action of having to hit the tennis balls. The result was a deeply human and beautifully imperfect talk.
But even though I have thoroughly enjoyed the strange and experimental process of writing this issue, I feel somewhat ashamed to admit that it does feel risky. And if I am completely honest, the entirety of that risk is to do with whether you, the reader, will reject it in some way. I have spent a lot of time writing these and slowly building a lovely audience for both the Substack and the podcast. That audience continues to grow each month, so part of me is screaming that this is not the time to start messing with a successful formula. I genuinely write this Substack for me because it helps me make sense of my experience and bring meaning into my life, but as all the risks I am feeling right now seem to be about losing audience, I realise that perhaps this has become more about numbers, stats and followers than I would like to admit. And this is something I want to gently let go of so that I can fully reconnect with the original spirit of it all.
A degree of unfamiliarity is important in my own creative practice and, I think, the process of writing this and recording the podcast has inevitably become more and more familiar over time. Philosopher and writer Rachel Jones, drawing on the work of Luce Irigaray, writes: “When we seek to make the strange familiar, we avoid the problem of meeting with the stranger… we avoid letting ourselves be moved, questioned, modified and enriched by the other. Part of the artistic work of becoming lies in remaining open to the strange in its strangeness; being prepared to lose ourselves in the encounter; risking not knowing as the condition of possible transformation.”
So, with the greatest respect for you as a reader, I realise that what you think of all of this and how you respond to it is of far less importance than the wonderful experience I had of making it and reconnecting with the original fizz and excitement of not really knowing what I am doing.
Synaptic pruning
A well-known neuroscience aphorism says that “neurons that fire together, wire together”. In other words, when two neurons in the brain repeatedly fire at the same time, the connection between them strengthens. This is part of how we learn. The more often we do something, from playing a musical instrument to opening a door, the more the brain lays down and reinforces that particular pathway until it becomes automatic. Synaptic pruning is the brain’s way of doing the opposite, a kind of quiet neural gardening in which it gets rid of connections it no longer needs, trimming away the weak and unused so that the pathways it relies on can work more efficiently.
I first came across the term synaptic pruning in an article I stumbled across in 2025 that explained how and why the brain does this important bit of routine maintenance. In early childhood, the brain creates a huge surplus of neural connections, partly to maximise its ability to learn and adapt as we try to make sense of the world. But as we get older, a number of these connections are either never used or become less and less useful. These weak or unused connections are chemically tagged and specialised immune cells in the brain, known as microglia, break them down and clear them away, making the whole system more coherent and efficient.
Pruning begins around the age of two but increases steeply during the teenage years and into our late twenties, helping us develop more “adult” capacities such as decision-making, emotional regulation and abstract thought. The thing I remember most vividly about this article, though, was the suggestion that synaptic pruning may be part of the reason teenagers can become more withdrawn and monosyllabic, simply because of the intense amount of change and remodelling their brains are going through.
This Substack became a teenager last month and it was that which reminded me of the synaptic pruning article. It made me wonder whether there was a kind of pruning that needed to occur in order for my relationship with it to mature and for me to continue accessing an exciting, spontaneous flow in writing it. What are the redundant processes and rituals that have now become superfluous and need to break down in order to make space for new ones?
It strikes me that this kind of neurological gardening is important to all creative practice: paying attention to the balance between novelty and familiarity, and noticing when we are becoming so hard-wired into comfort and routine that we drift away from the very practice we set out to explore. And I should say that I have nothing against comfort zones. I like having a comfort zone and regularly roll my eyes at overly macho articles that suggest we should always be striving for discomfort. But what feels important to me here is finding a kind of sweet spot of discomfort where we feel safe enough to move towards the unknown without becoming overwhelmed by it, and in doing so reclaim some of the magic of not quite knowing what we are doing, but doing it anyway.
2. The hobgoblin of little minds
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am by nature inconsistent. I am a living and breathing contradiction. I change my mind. My mood alters, ebbing and flowing like a somewhat unpredictable tide. What I believe today may not be what I believe tomorrow. I will often begin a sentence and, by the time I reach the end of it, have changed my mind and need to start again. I have chains of thought that flash across my brain like bolts of lightning and, before long, I find myself somewhere far away from where I thought I was. It has taken me many years to accept this and embrace it as a natural part of being human. But appropriately, my level of acceptance is wildly inconstant.
I’m not entirely sure what Ralph Waldo Emerson meant by this quote but it has stuck with me as a kind of honouring of the natural inconsistency of human experience and the perils of striving for the opposite. A certain type of structure is important to me in my work. A structure that provides just enough of a frame or a constraint to enable a kind of focussed, spontaneous freedom. I find a totally blank page an unhelpful starting point in the same way that I find an overly prescriptive structure very disabling. My imagination needs something in the middle - an enabling constraint.
Hobgoblins lurk in the shadows waiting for these loose structures to emerge before pouncing on them and feasting until all of their rough edges have been rounded off. They feed on spontaneity and contradiction, slowly turning what was once supple and alive into something rigid, rote and deadened. There is no bargaining or reasoning with a hobgoblin. This is what they do and what they love. The only way to scare one away is to expose it to nonsense: something so bafflingly illogical that it cannot tolerate it. Only then will it let out a little shriek of discomfort and retreat back into the shadows, where it patiently resumes its watch.
“One is fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions. If a man never contradicts himself, the reason must be that he virtually never says anything at all.” Friedrich Nietzsche
3. Workshops and events
Some workshops and events that you might be interested in coming along to.
Playing at the Edge: Dancing with the inner critic
26th & 27th November 2026
Bloomsbury, London
£495 + VAT. Limited to 12 attendees.
I’m very excited to say that Simon Cavicchia and I have a date for our Playing at the Edge workshop. This two day workshop uses a variety of creative experiments to help us get to know and better understand our inhibiting idealised self images, our inner critic and the effect this has on realising our full creative potential.
Participants will be invited to participate in a variety of Gestalt Psychology techniques, creative practices, masks, improvisational experiments, mindfulness practices and a variety of other methods to help them become more aware of their attachments to fixed self images and other ways in which they inhibit their spontaneity.
If you’d like to know a little bit more about this work then you can watch my 2017 talk about dancing with my inner critic or read about “poster’s on the super ego’s bedroom wall” in Issue #7 of this Substack.
..:: MORE INFO AND TICKETS ::.
Art Walk with Steve XOH: Kinsgton Walking Festival
12th July 2026
£5
From Kingston Station to Hampton Court Station along Thames towpath
I’m doing an art walk as part of the Kingston Walking Festival this Sunday.
🐦⬛ Paint sticks
🐦⬛ Make zines
🐦⬛ Decorate tiles
🐦⬛ Look at creatures and wildlife
🐦⬛ Take part in a river survey/litter pick (optional)
🐦⬛ Or just do what you want.
..:: MORE INFO AND TICKETS ::.
4. “Hello, we are CRABS” t-shirt
This drawing started off as a page in the little zine I made to encourage people crab fishing to be kinder to crabs. (See issue #4 for the full story.) I liked it so much that I had it printed onto a t-shirt with the intention of never making it available for sale.
But many people have since commented on it and requested one so I have got a load screen-printed on lovely 100% cotton heavy Gildan t-shirts.
Get one to impress and educate and support our 200 million year-old crustacean friends.
..:: BUY CRAB T-SHIRTS HERE ::.
5. Support my work
One of my favourite moments of recording the podcast on a kayak was when this juvenile wood duck jumped out of the water and sat on my feet as I passed through a lock. It was one of an infinite number of moments that would never have happened had I followed my usual process and recorded in my studio. What I particularly loved about it was this was a moment that occurred whilst I wasn’t recording. I’m sure there is some rich metaphor about wonder and attachment in that!
I want this Substack to be free and accessible for everyone irrelevant of financial means (the podcast version too) and this is an important principle in much of my work. When I do charge for things, like art or workshops or events, I strive to do so in a way that doesn’t exclude those who do not have the financial means to participate. So, when people do support my work financially it means so much and helps me continue to work in this way.
If you can afford to do so you can support my work in a number of ways, be that buying me a coffee from £1, buying some art from my shop, becoming a patron of my studio or becoming a paid subscriber to this Substack. (And if you can’t afford it then I absolutely love you getting this for free.)
Buy some art from my shop. I have a big selection of prints, original art, books, badges, t-shirts, posters and more.
.:: VISIT MY SHOP HERE ::.Become a patron of my studio. For a one-off donation of your choice you become an official patron with a badge, a certificate, a behind the scenes blog and your name added to the scroll of honour in the window of the studio.
.:: BECOME A PATRON HERE ::.Buy me a coffee from £1. Like a tip jar.
.:: BUY ME A COFFEE HERE::.Become a paid subscriber of this Substack. I didn’t even know this was an option until a few people spontaneously did it! You don’t get any extra content or anything but you do get my eternal gratitude!