Beehiiv is where I’ll be sharing a selection of posts from “But anyway, I digress…” which is my regular blog over on my personal website — to see all my posts in full, and for more information about my writing, head over to philipholyman.com
20th May 2025
There are currently 1,713 notes synchronised across the Notes app of my phone and laptop, and recently I went trawling through some of the older ones in a half-hearted attempt to Marie Kondo a few of them into the bin, in order to save a token amount of storage space. I didn’t do very well when it came to thanking the old notes and letting loads of them go. I kept finding notes that interested me or intrigued me, and I ended up not only keeping them, but pinning them, too — the equivalent of moving belongings from one room of the house to another. Marie Kondo would NOT be very proud of me.
This is the note from 11th May 2020:
How do we make our work space more of a play space? What toys does it need to be filled with??
That’s all it says. I don’t know if this was an original thought I had, or whether it was inspired or directly lifted from something I heard or read. It most definitely has the scent of Austin Kleon permeating through it — so if he is the source, I’m very grateful to him.
Five years and a few days after I made the note, it’s still a fascinating question, and one I’ve not given much proper thought to until now.
Austin Kleon, as I’ve mentioned before, maintains an analog[ue] desk and a digital one, and pursues different kinds of creative pursuits at each of these stations. But that’s not quite what the question is driving at, I don’t think — they’re just two different modes of getting stuck into a process. They don’t grapple with the emotional or psychological challenge that the question seems to be posing.
There’s another quote I remembered recently that feels relevant here. It’s attributed to different people in different places online — of course it is; heavens forfend the internet would get something entirely right — but my most educated guess is that it comes from “Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul” by Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play:
“The opposite of play is not work — the opposite of play is depression.”
So perhaps the question I’m really trying to address is:
How do we make our work space more of a play space and less of a depression space? What toys does it need to be filled with to achieve that??
I’ve experienced depression, and I’m hardly on my own in that respect. I avoided using that word for the longest time, because I never felt that what I was experiencing could compare to what some other people experience, who have a much harder time of it than I felt I ever did. But that’s one of depression’s greatest game moves — by making you minimise the impact of what you’re experiencing, you’re much less likely to do anything about it, and so the depression gets to flourish, twisting the knife just a little by giving you one extra thing to feel bad about. But anyway, I digress.
The play toys that each of us need will be individually linked to whatever our work might be, to whatever our creative practice might be — some people might quibble over whether “work” and “creative practice” are synonyms or whether they should be kept scrupulously separate, but that’s of no great importance here. My point is, the person who gets to decide what the best toys to load your playroom with is you.
My stack of A4 school exercise books count as a toy, and so therefore do my uncomfortable-to-hold hexagonal fineliner pens, and by extension, the rolls of fabric plaster that protect my fingers when I’m in serious handwriting mode. You might be about to argue that writing is just work. It’s not; not for me. Writing is the safest, freest space I can currently access to be my most unfettered self, to think what I like, to like what I choose, to choose what I think. Anything is possible when I’m writing — and that feels like the very definition of play — the very antithesis of depression.
I’m surrounded by books in the flat, and I don’t play with those nearly enough — I don’t dip into them as much as I should, for pleasure or for input (and you know how big a champion of good inputs I am.) Books on stage design are one of my nerdy passions — stick a book in my hands with production images and design sketches and models by a visionary European stage designer and I’d be content for hours. (Here’s a link to one of my absolute favourites – apologies for having to link to THAT site – featuring the work of the German designer Katrin Brack — if you spot it cheap somewhere else, or not even that cheap, treat yourself.)
What other toys do I want? It’s high time I gave that serious consideration, and that I started a little wishlist, and that I started making serious investments in such things. Some things, though, I’ve already got — I just don’t play with them enough. My record player ought to be out all the time so that I can play some of my childhood vinyl any time I feel like it, but it currently just sits up on a shelf. I already have a sewing machine, and it’d be great to have the space to keep it out all the time, so that I actually use it and get better at using it, but the flat being the size it is, that’s not really a practical option right now.
Likewise with the garden — it’s a shared garden and if you scrape just an inch or two under the soil or grass, you find the rubble left behind during the block’s construction, so there’s not much scope to flex my green fingers here. (Fortunately, we’ve got friends with allotments who regularly extend invitations to join them for a bit of toil in the soil.) Our small freezer and limited cupboard space also hamper me from doing as much adventurous cooking as I’d like, as there’s little space to store ingredients or to pre-prepare lots of goodies for future meals — but we get by.
It would be great to have archive boxes of all of my previous writing stacked up in front of me at all times, and, more importantly, boxes full of the stumps of half-baked ideas or fragmentary notes for things I’ve never developed, which I could rummage around in from time to time when I’m working on something new or just feel like doing some writing for the sake of doing some writing.
It’d be wonderful to have a drafting table. I’m mildly obsessed with map cabinets. A telescope would be a lovely thing to own. As would a fondue set, a heated hostess trolley, a greenhouse, a writing shed… And if I’m going really bluesky with my thinking, I mean, I’d really like one of THESE if I had a spare £1,500 that didn’t need to be going towards the home deposit fund.
The more I ponder this, the more fun it becomes imagining a world of play possibilities, and the serious benefits to my mental health, my dignity and my fortunes (in every sense) that they could open up.
So — go on — it’s your turn now.
What toys does your work space need to be filled with to make it into as powerful a play space as it can be?