Nothing On Earth
Surviving The First Wave
Over the last four years I’ve worked on an audio-visual project about the dangers of social media and screen time, inspired by the work of authors Naomi Klein, Carole Cadwalladr, Sherry Turkle and Douglas Rushkoff.
I have seen few positive sides to screens or any of the technocrat’s temptations and platforms that pour out of them. Until now. Sort of.
When lockdown happened in the UK, like everyone else, I would soon start to realise that screens were the best way to still see friends, family and the people we love. And more than anyone else, it was my mother that I would have to communicate with most of all.
I have never really considered phones and computers as methods of real ‘connection’, but methods we use when we are distanced.
And the distance between me and my mother since I was 14 has been significant. She lives in Spain and I live in the UK. Since 2018 I’ve pretty much been responsible for her wellbeing now that she is quite old and fairly vulnerable (however happy). Before lockdown I visited her regularly in Spain almost every month. She can’t manage as well as she used to and many of her lifelong friends and colleagues are no longer around. But she adores living in her ‘paradise’, as she calls it. I have a friend called Steve who stays and works for her to keep her living the life that makes her happy.
So I always knew my mother was safe and not entirely alone. But apart from Steve, she had no visits for three whole months, and even after Spain eased restrictions, she told me a lot of her friends were still unable to visit because understandably, they were still afraid.
Every parent wants to be close to their children in the winter of their life.
It’s not just a hope or desire, it’s a natural stage in our human story. The news in the media of some individuals losing their parents during this pandemic and saying goodbye via an iPad really affected me. Rory Kinnear’s moving account about the tragic loss of his sister shook me to the core, and from that moment my anxiety about not being able to go to Spain as I have done since I was a kid, to see my mother, began to eat away at me.
What if old age began to take a serious hold on her in my absence?
What if she became ill and I couldn’t get to her to help?
By the time the Spanish borders were reopened in mid-June, I was already filled and fuelled by the same fear many of us have about this pandemic. Now I can go to Spain to see my mother, but what if I am infected by the virus during the journey and end up passing it on to her? I was stuck. I felt paralysed. And the mainstream media has continued to position daily bulletins about travelling by using the term ‘holiday maker’.
Not everybody who wants to travel to another country is a holiday maker. We’re only recently out of the E.U. For over 40 years, countless British citizens have made their home in other countries and have children who remain in the UK, like me. It doesn’t matter what side of the Brexit debate any of us favour — at the core of our spirit, in both natural law and common law, we are human beings with families that want to be together, want to share each other’s lives in real-time, away from screens.
As the months wore on, I did what I have always done when my spirit has been jolted by the outside world. I began to write songs. And I’m willing to admit that I began to write and record with such a ferocious output that I soon realised I was using the creative process to work through the pain I felt in quarantine. In addition to giving classes in song-writing and mentoring on Zoom with a computer, I was communicating with my mother on the computer and also recording all the songs I was writing about the entire experience. A wild guess tells me I’m not the only one who bonded like a Siamese twin to their tech at the start of lockdown.
I’m proud of the album I’ve made. It’s where a lot of my love went during those months and I collaborated with many friends, as well as my partner which was a treasure in itself.
Whilst the experience brought me and the entire music and theatre sector to its knees, the market value of every single corporation operating via our computers and phones soared. Theirs is a world I cannot belong in any more.
My longing now is for more space in my days and weeks, with time to find inner peace in a world that is not just happening to my mind, but happening to my body, my heart, my nearest and dearest, my community.
In burying myself in making the album, I also documented as much as I could on video. Using the tech I have come to dislike so much, I reached out to other musicians, I began a podcast to connect to new and interesting people, and then I reached out to anyone who wanted to be in a video to celebrate the music that was getting me through it all. Over 90 people from all over the UK answered my call and took part in a ‘socially distanced’ music video. It stopped my anxiety from consuming me and I love those souls for doing that.
And I wasn’t alone, as I thought I might be at the start of lockdown. I was safely isolating in my girlfriend’s home with her and her two children. And at age 45, I seemed to have stumbled in to a new family, whom I Iove all the more for opening such precious lives to me.
My nature is to keep meeting new people. I love meeting strangers. I think it’s the nature of a lot of performers. Strangers are embryonic friends. Along with not seeing my mother, this is what I felt had been taken away from me, as I am sure so many others also felt was taken away from them. I’m lucky I could still meet some new people via…screens.
I had to make a choice to stop engaging with fear.
Luckily for me (and anyone near me from now on), I like washing my hands and I began wearing masks when I was 19 (which has at certain times in my career been a trademark). But today, I don’t wear a mask because someone else is telling me to. I wear a mask at the moment because I want to reassure the vulnerable that I have compassion for them as I would hope them to have for me, if I were vulnerable. I welcome fellow feeling and curiosity around this subject, but… obedience is not a virtue.
In a world where we all want to be special, followed, liked and approved of on a minute to minute basis, sometimes it feels like we have finally all become co-dependent children seeking approval from mummy and daddy government.
I wear my mask for my own reasons and I respect others to wear or not wear theirs for their reasons. I do not presume to know what is best for you.
Only myself.
In a crisis, tolerance and understanding must surely come before absolutism?
Calling others ‘dicks’, ‘pricks’ or ‘covidiots’ for not wearing or for wearing a mask is the saddest portrait we have painted of ourselves in recent times and I believe it to be a culmination of the self-righteousness and growing impunity inflamed by corporations and their human unfriendly algorithms.
We are better than that. We need to heal our wounds. Not create fresh ones.
‘These are only beliefs. I’m not sure of anything really. That is what keeps me striving to learn more. Never being sure.’
Finally, last week I decided to book a flight to Spain to see my mother after she began calling me every single day (something she has never done before).
One good thing about mobile phones is that you can use them to capture memories. So I decided to document and film my trip to Spain, and capture the memory of meeting my mother again.
I would like to thank British Airways, Heathrow Airport and Malaga Airport for their support in making the short film. And Steve for capturing the moment mum and I met. I also feel a deep connection to my fellow passengers and all the staff on the plane. For the benefit of anyone trying to decide whether or not to make a trip on a plane to see a relative, all I can say is, in my experience, actual human beings in masks on an aeroplane bear no resemblance to the picture being portrayed in the media.
People are inherently good to each other. That is all I learnt from that trip. For three hours, fear had been replaced by a careful and sensitive community. Even I, with my poor eyesight can read smiles under masks.
There is nothing to be afraid of.
There are some who feel what is happening has all been planned. Perhaps there’s a devilish Bond villain typing in a scary narrative into a computer program made by Microsoft? I don’t believe that.
But I do believe, as MIT graduate and Psychiatrist Kelly Brogan said recently:
“A planet full of traumatized people are ripe for recruitment to a belief system that foregrounds the role of technology in transcending human life.”
It’s good that we can’t hide from our own mirror.
It’s how we can transcend our own lives.
Nothing On Earth is the first song I wrote during lockdown only hours after getting a warm welcome hug into a new life. People are inherently good. The song’s journey ends with another hug from my mother.
Let nothing on earth divide you and the ones you love.
Learn more about Tim’s new lockdown album featuring Nothing On Earth here.
