11 Jun 2026 5 min read TV

Silly Hour!

A few things keeping my mind playful

The games I ran for my "Silly Hour" workshop at Bath Spa University last week

Hello loves!

Last week I ran a workshop with some of the alumni from the Bath Spa University MA in Writing for Young People called SILLY HOUR. Here's what I promised:

Tap into your most creative and playful self with a series of writing games designed to liberate your inner chaos orangutang. Inspired by practices from Oulipo, improv and oblique strategies, we’ll be getting zany and finding ways to upend our habitual ways of thinking. If the writer’s having fun, the reader will have fun.

It was great. My favourite game was "Bad First Lines", where I challenged everyone to write the worst possible opening line for a story they could think of. We threw them into a hat anonymously and read them out loud. The results were hilarious (I bloody wish I'd thought to record some of them). I then asked the students to pick a random terrible line and, making the smallest possible adjustment, turn it into a great line.

Obviously I wanted to get my students laughing, but my hidden agenda for this game was to get them to stop worrying about writing something "bad". You can't play if you're afraid of failing. To play is to risk. Sometimes it's best to just get the failure out of the way from the beginning. Fail as huge and boldly as you can! Then all the fun can begin.

I've been trying to channel SILLINESS into all of my work this week as I've worked on replotting my next novel Mama (follow along with my live writing journal if you're interested in the micro day-to-day decisions of writing a novel).

What are you working on right now that could do with a good injection of play?

Bloomsbury Big Night In

Watcha doing tonight? Why not come hang out with me and five other Bloomsbury authors on the internet (where occasionally, nice things still happen)! I'll be joined by:

Melissa Albert, author of The Children
Bal Khabra, author of Embrace
Louise Kennedy, author of Stations
Beth Brower, author of Emma M. Lion
Venetia Constantine, author of The Last Starborn Seer

We'll be chatting about our books, playing games and doing giveaways. It's basically free, just get your tickets here.

Pimsleur

I'm planning to spend a good chunk of the summer in France again (it's very convenient when it's the neighbouring country) so I'm working on improving my French beyond, "Un autray pain du chocolate, silvy-play minsuurr."

Luckily, language learning has improved dramatically from the semester of French I took at uni which involved an hour a week sitting in a dusty subterranean "language lab" with a walkman and airplane headphones. The best modern tool I've found is the app Pimsleur. It's very focussed on getting you conversational as quickly as possible, with far more focus on speaking/hearing than reading, which is just much more useful, PLUS there's no nightmare green cartoon owl that you fear might murder you in your sleep. I just wish they offered more African languages.

Naomi Alderman had some more great suggestions for practicing new languages on her excellent newsletter.

That's Showbiz Baby!

My friend Meg got me hooked on this album by JADE: That's Showbiz Baby! She's a bit Grimes meets Charlie XCX, I think I'd call the genre Dark Nightclub Pop? Anyway it slaps, give it a listen.

Widow's Bay

Do you love both Stephen King and Parks & Rec? Drop everything and watch this incredible horror-comedy show on AppleTV about the mayor of a tiny New England island town who's trying to promote the island as a tourist destination ... except, whoops, it's also VERY haunted.

My friend Dashe got me into it and it's one of my favourite shows of the year so far. A group of wacky lovable small-town public servants trying to battle a series of terrifying monsters AND also drag the town into the 21st century is just a very charming setup.

Global Justice Report

How can you work towards a better world if you have no vision for what that world might look like?

I've written before about how susceptible my brain is to doomerism, how I instinctively interpret most news events as being the opening scenes of some Hunger Games-Octavia Butler-World War Z-Margaret Atwood-Mad Max-Last of Us nightmare hell mashup scenario. I try to balance this tendency out by exposing it to more positive and hopeful visions of the future from time to time.

This week, I spent a lot of time thinking through one vision for the future I find quite compelling: the Global Justice Report, published by a group of researchers including Thomas Piketty and co-ordinated by the World Inequality Lab. Jonathan Watts describes it as Eco-Socialism (his analysis in The Guardian's a great place to start if you don't feel like reading 100 pages of macroeconomic models, or here's the authors' own summary). Essentially, they argue, 90% of the world's population could double their income but work half the hours we work today, while we also avoid the worst impacts of the climate emergency. They go into a lot of detail about how they believe this could be achieved through changes to global taxation frameworks, political coalitions and the creation of a Global Justice Fund.

Your knee-jerk reaction to reading this vision might be, as I'll confess mine was, "eh sounds lovely but it will never never happen". But it's helpful to interrogate that reaction. I'm reminded of Frederic Jameson's quote, "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism". The authors anticipate many of the most likely critiques (for instance, they include a model that argues most of their vision could be achieved even without the co-operation of the US and/or China). Even if it's not a perfect roadmap, it's a rallying point.

And even if your idea of a utopia looks very different to this one, this is a well-articulated, evidenced and thoughtful proposition that's worth engaging with. I don't agree with 100% of it, as I didn't agree with 100% of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book Abundance or – heck – 10% of Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist's Manifesto, but this is exactly the kind of thing we need more of: hopeful and clearly articulated visions of futures we can build towards.