You’ll have to pardon me this one. I’ve had a lot going on, and while I have been continuing to read, I haven’t been able to digest it (yet) in a way that would make for a good blog post, and now it’s 4pm on Monday and I want to get something written and scheduled for 8pm (I’m not going to make it, but who’s checking?), which if I’m quick means I can get the vomit draft done and then give it an hour or two before I do an edit pass. From the top of my dome it is, I’m afraid.
Generally I listen to music when I work, which means it’s a sitting at the computer activity. I’m beginning to wonder in general terms about whether it might be better for me to spend less time sitting at the computer (when I’m not writing, anyway), but I also enjoy listening to music, and consider engaging with it to be part of what gives me a sense of wellbeing.
But I don’t own any Bluetooth headphones.
I’ve got plenty of wired pairs, but no phone comes with a 3.5mm port any more, so I can’t really listen to music when I’m out and about. I’ve been thinking about getting a pair of Bluetooth ones, (and I do mean headphones and not earbuds, I have always hated earbuds), as a way of injecting some more music into my life.
Then I came across this article in The Guardian, by Ella Glover, about people who go through life wearing headphones and never listening to the world around them. It’s good. Go read it.
I absolutely sympathise with the idea. Part of the reason I’ve been considering getting a pair of headphones is because my work has moved to an open plan office. They used to be located in a space that was two houses knocked together, which mean different departments had different rooms, and if you needed a quiet, private area, you could probably find one. Then they moved us to a basement room with no windows, and worse, no walls… and I can’t write any more without having this blog post read back to me by HR.
Out on the street it’s another matter. I love hearing snippets of people’s conversations, buskers, traffic. I think fully half the poems I write are me noting down some sentences I heard a stranger say on a bus and then artfully arranging them.
I keep a commonplace book, but I also keep a commonplace file. It’s just a .doc that sits in my Google Drive and is normally titled after the first funny thing I write down in it. I use it to take notes on interesting or funny things I hear, but I also use it to copy paste bits from articles, or weird comments. Sometimes a poem gets composed into the file pretty much fully formed, sometimes just a couplet. When it gets too big to be wieldy, I start a new file.
Genuinely I do not know where I’d be without hearing the city around me. It has ended up governing so much of my compositional process, encapsulates so much of what I’m interested in. Every time I go into the city and really listen, I hear birds. It doesn’t matter where I am. Seriously. There’s a project I’m working on that I haven’t started sharing yet where part of the process is taking field recordings. I remember going to Russell Street, (which is smack bang in the middle of the area that gets referred to as Peterborough’s “no go zone” by people whose only remaining electoral strategy is stoking division), starting the recording, and only at that moment really listening, and hearing the birds.
Maybe I’ll just have to listen to more music by getting more work done (on my own stuff, in my own time, on things I’m passionate about).
Featured image source here.
James Farson 
