Another eventful day supporting the Whitworth PLAY days for under fives. Today was ACTIVE!! From carrying children through their adventures in wheelbarrows, rolling around tires and playing make-shift bowling stations and exploring obstacle paths scattered with forts and colourful items... It was such a great time! And the group clean-up was extra-efficient with the help of our little helpers 😉

I had the opportunity to take part in both the documentation activity with the See My World team and the full training workshop with Laila Benhaida at the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Education Trust, held at Manchester Central Library. In the morning, I joined the field documentation activity at a counter-protest connected to Black Lives Matter UK, where I learnt how to initiate short interviews. Being present in a live civic moment and thinking about it as future archive material was complex and required a lot of care.

In the afternoon workshop, we brought this material back into the room and collectively unpacked it: discussing ethics, community accountability, and the responsibility that comes with holding people’s stories. We explored digital preservation strategies, metadata logging, and cataloguing practices, learning how to take intellectual control of collections and safeguard them for the long term. Using tools like Audacity and the HN4 Zoom recorder, we also practised oral history indexing and transcription workflows. It strengthened my commitment to community-led archiving and affirmed my belief in the importance of preserving lived experience!

I supported Art Baby @ the Whitworth again and had such a fun, inspiring day. I got to observe babies exploring — one was completely obsessed with cables and coloured torches, while others crawled under bright orange tents. There’s also a brand-new set of sensory toys developed by Sarah Marsh, which the little ones loved... and a lively “flying the babies” exercise session!

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Thank you to Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star and Anne Carson’s A Brief History of Skywriting for helping me navigate a prolonged period of unemployment and stagnancy after graduating. During this time, stillness became unavoidable, and with it came an intensified mode of observation—at once awe-inducing and unsettling. Reading and writing offered a way to remain present without needing to act, sharpening my attention to clouds, fields, insects, sound, texture, and the sense that space is never truly empty.

I reflected a lot in the past few months, coming from a period shaped by burnout, isolation, and existential unease, informed by a broader reading around alienation and heightened perception (including Sartre's Nausea and Sean Bonney's Letters Against the Firmament). This all later echoed in my interest in spatial thinking such that in Philip Beesley’s work. What began as stagnation became a practice of attention, and ultimately, a source of gratitude—towards literature, art, and the clarity that comes from being forced to slow down.