2 Years in

And then corona…

I find myself almost 2 years to the day from when I started Mummadadda. A lot of amazing and unexpected things have happened. And they still will. But, for now, my focus has been thrown onto my children - the two little girls in the picture, wearing cycle helmets on the beach. I realise this picture may be the very definition of over cautious parent, but they really had just completed a bike ride along Brighton’s wonderful UnderCliff walk and were so keen to get their toes into the water that all thought of removing head protection went on pause.

When the Covid 19 crisis started to become real I felt many of my contracts going into deep freeze. To try and fly in the face of the obvious and keep marketing and creating communications, like nothing was happening, became quite obviously wrong. My family are fortunate, in that my wife’s work seemed to go into over drive, while mine slowly went into cryogenic suspension. And so I have been thrown one of the most challenging, exciting and rewarding creative briefs ever. How to entertain, enlighten and inspire two young minds. MY daughters are 8 and 4, and have quite different personalities and edutainment needs. Like many home schooling parents I am filled with expanded respect for teachers. And laptop has an expanded set of tabs along the top of the browser as I navigate between the SeeSaw home learning app, various links in DropBox and other sources of learning resource. The dining room table is riot if spelling sheets, art projects, play dough, poetry and maths calculations. Some part of the day must be given over to ‘giving them a run off’, and we are lucky to have a garden, the sea and the south downs just a short walk or drive away.

Together we’ve made papier-mâché volcanoes that erupt pyroclastic surges of bicarbonate of soda, food colouring and vinegar. We’ve gotten through The Hobbit and their approximations of Gollum, with no cinematic reference, were uncannily attuned to Peter Jackson’s vision of the slimy protagonist.

I have to be honest and say that I’m in the middle of having the smallest workload of commercial creative work ever. But somehow I’m working on creative projects that are potentially more important than any I’ve ever had - I’m charged wit looking after the development of my children’s minds for late Spring/early Summer of 2020. What we get up to will have an indelible effect. Looking after the next generation of creative thinkers has always been something that I’ve enjoyed as a creative director. So it’s prepped my for 2020. I’ve always believed that there is a lot of truth in that Picasso quote about learning to paint like Raphael.

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” Picasso

In coming up with creative ideas I’ve always seen the value in thinking somewhat like a child. Sir John Hegarty defines the essence of creativity as being somewhere in the area of putting together two elements, that we know, in a way that we’ve never seen them combined. I am reminded of that that playful mashing up when we make a crocodile from an egg box carton, or gather twigs in Stanmer park to make broomsticks. Bring on the PVA glue and sticky back plastic. These are days to sharpen your creative tools, my fellow creatives.