I’ve just got back from a week in Filey, my favourite seaside town in North Yorkshire. I’ve been to Filey many times before, it’s smaller, quieter and less commercial than its more widely known neighbour Scarborough, and also has the most stunning five mile long sandy beach.
Over the last few years I’ve taken the opportunity whilst on family holidays at the coast, like this one, to make field recordings. Some of which I have released on Bandcamp.
This usually involves me getting up early before most people and doing a fair amount of walking. And I fully intended to do the same last week. I took all of my recording gear and I had some interesting ideas for recordings that I wanted to make.
But in the end I made no recordings!
I’ve been recovering from a rather nasty fall in which I hurt my foot and arm. And although I’m almost back to normal it has stopped me from walking very far for a few weeks now. And last week in Filey I still didn’t quite have the energy to get out early in the morning to go field recording.
I needed to continue resting.
Initially, I was quite frustrated every day that I failed to get out early but as the week went by I resigned myself to the fact that I probably wasn’t going to record anything and that was okay.
I have people who support me on Substack, Patreon, and YouTube and I want to make new work for those platforms as often as I can, to provide value for those people, so it’s always a struggle to allow myself downtime. And the platforms want you to keep producing, they rely upon it, but you must ignore their pestering and find your own pace at any particular time.
I know rest is important, not only when you have physically injured yourself like I have but as part of any healthy creative practice. We all need rest to recharge those batteries, take a break from our usual routines and thought patterns and to experience new inputs!
Circumstances will not always be optimal, but you’ve got to pay heed to your own mind and body, roll with the ups and downs, and be kind to yourself. That is the only sustainable way.
And I will be back field recording soon enough.
In the meantime here is the previous work that I made in Filey in 2020. Half of the tracks on my album Recordings of the Sea are from Filey:
I also wrote an album of music called Filey using those recordings:
And here are some photos that I took this week of that stunning beach! 🐚🦀
Take it very easy indeed!!!
Take it easy. I hope you continue to recover from what sounds like a nasty fall. Great photos. I don't know Filey at all but it looks well worth a visit.