I’m sitting in the sunshine in the garden, listening to The Salt Path on Audible, washing down the remains of a piece of cake left over from yesterday’s creative retreat with tea in a mug that was a gift, last year, from one of the writers in my regular writing group. A writer I first met at Ulverscroft Activity Centre, actually, pre-lockdown, when the charity that owns it paid me to do monthly writing sessions there.

So, sitting, drinking tea and mulling over the Connect with Nature writing and painting event we ran at Ulverscroft yesterday, from which my brain’s still buzzing. It was a great day – ‘gentle’, ‘tranquil’, ‘encouraging’, ‘just what I needed’, some of the participants said, as well as ‘challenging – but I’m so glad I did it!’

Staging the retreat – the first ever ‘under our own banner’ commercial event Liz and I have organised together – was challenging, too, for me at least, with many of the challenges inside my own head. But I’m glad that we did it, too.

I’ve taken so many learning points from the day, which’ve made it into my journal but are too boring to list here. The two that stand out most strongly, though, are what a powerful influence being creative can have on a positive sense of well-being, and how low many people’s belief in their own creativity actually is.

Again, this isn’t the right place for discussing why I think that might be, but much of my time yesterday was certainly spent reassuring people that however they chose to follow my prompts was fine and that what they produced because of it was okay, too. There were stunning elements from everyone’s contributions and mundane elements from everyone, also, and that, too, was okay. Nobody writes a masterpiece in a 10-minute drop-of-the-hat writing activity, not even Simon Armitage (to continue The Salt Path theme), but there’s usually a nugget of gold in even the most speedily scrawled idea, worth picking over and working up into something others would enjoy reading.

There was no drop-of-the-hat-edness about planning the creative retreat, obviously, but as with any creative endeavour, there were elements we could only sketch out roughly to then be filled in by the act of trying it out, and there was some discomfort in that. Would our vision fulfil the participants’ expectations, for instance, and until quite late in the run up to the retreat, would the event fulfil our own commercial brief?

I’m happy to answer ‘yes’ to both those questions. People’s comments were fantastically positive and the day wiped its face financially, with enough left over for us that, if we were The Salt Path couple, we’d have been able to have fish and chips on the seafront without having to share. So, something to build on from an income point of view, then, and a day spent being personally creative ourselves, to boot. What’s not to be happy about in that?

AM, 9th June 2025