At the end of June I was visiting my grown-up son in Yorkshire. It was a glorious day and we had stopped to drink our iced tea on a bench beside the river Nidd in Knaresborough, a place I know well having been born in Yorkshire and brought up only a couple of miles from there.
We sat quietly for a while under the trees, watching the children playing in the water below and then he asked me, ‘Are you happy with your life so far?’ Perhaps it is a measure of my age and recent challenges that he felt he could ask me this, but I was surprised and moved.
It's a big question and he’s my son but it only took me a moment to race backwards in time and, as I thought about my answer, I could immediately see a golden thread of creativity which has accompanied me throughout my life, from childhood to today. Life is tough and full of challenges, no one gets off scott free but my creativity has never failed me and I am of an age now where I can see it for what it is. I am happy and proud to say that I am a writer and a potter. I have always written stories, poems and plays, and I wrote my first diary (which I still have) when I was 6. My huge pile of excruciating teenage journals with extra pages, added to the back when I was in the middle of many an existential crisis, saved me. Art at school, art at home, creative jobs, creative homes, two children, (my most creative act ever) followed by children’s picture book writing and publishing and now my ceramics, perhaps the single most creative aspect of my life and one which, with a fair wind, and no more broken bones, I can still be doing in my nineties.
He was pleased at my answer and so was I and as we got up to leave, we agreed I still have a lot of life to live, and many more things to do with my creative mind and creative hands, perhaps in helping others find their creativity through words and clay. It was a beautiful question, beautifully timed and it made me realise how much I have been blessed. He’s 6 foot tall and a junior doctor now, but not too old for me to reach for his hand and hold it in mine.