‘Dear Andrew

Thank you so much for SUCH a fantastic pirate party on Saturday! Hugo and all of his friends just had the best time and the look of pure joy on their faces was so wonderful to see! The pirate adventure was amazing and so well planned out Andrew and I’ve had messages all weekend from parents saying how much fun their child had at the party!

So, thank you so so much it was truly a party to remember and we couldn’t be more thankful!’

Last weekend I went back to pre-school.

I have missed it like crazy. It’s the ultimate pick me up if you’ve been feeling down and need to surround yourself with little people who will jump head-first into any idea you throw at them with all the enthusiasm in the world.

The only black hats at this party were pirate ones.

We are halfway through our time at SCA and I have noticed that the room is making less and less time for their playful child. So concerned are we with the pressure of work that we’re eschewing the inner child in favour of the very tightly wound and serious adult. And that’s understandable. It feels counter intuitive, when a deadline is looming, to put the Sharpies down and run around, tell jokes or play games.

But it’s not counterintuitive at all. It’s a shortcut.

When ideas aren’t coming you won’t force them to materialise by focussing even harder on your laptop screen. You’ll probably just get a headache. The best thing you can do for yourself is stand up, step away from the electronics and find a way to be silly. Five minutes of being five years old is all it takes. If you spend five minutes recruiting some space cadets and launching a cardboard box mission to Mars, or turning the studio floor into lava and trying to get from one end of the room to the other without touching it, you will come back to your work with a different perspective. We need to give ourselves permission.

I find this at the parties I take. This weekend I asked the parents to be the enemy pirates. It took a brave dad to go first but once one went the rest soon followed. Once they gave themselves permission to come out of

grown-up world they were in a happier state. It was written on their faces. Within about a minute the room was full of forty-year-olds popping up from behind slides and towers, throwing beach ball ‘cannonballs’ at their kids and shouting “yaaaaaaarrrrr!’

I’m going to start paying my old pre-school a visit a couple of times a month. If anyone wants to come with me you’d be very welcome. I reckon we could probably just give our work to the kids and they’d take it places our uptight adult heads would never go.

Only one way to find out!