HAS anyone ever told you to “chill out”?
If you’re anything like me, this injunction creates the opposite effect – intense irritation, followed perhaps by shame that I haven’t yet mastered the art of inner peace.
But recently I’ve noticed I’m getting more relaxed about tension. While low-level stress rightly gets a bad rap, I’d like to give alertness its due. A few weeks ago at the airport, for example, I was so determined to chill out about a 90-minute flight delay that I almost
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NICK THORPE tries a novel way to let go of perfection and embrace the messy moshing of collaborative art.
Recently I learned to sketch with my feet.
It was one of several unusual skills I acquired at Drawn to Dance - a bizarre and exhilarating two-day experiment in which twenty of us gathered in a converted barn to find out what happens when you mix dancing and drawing.
What was most challenging at the outset was not so much learning to grip a charcoal stick between my toes using a rubber
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I once met a man who had built a cathedral out of leather.
He showed it to me reverently in his back room – a two-foot-tall, perfectly-stitched gothic replica, enshrined on a carpet of rabbit-fur, complete with spires and buttresses and delicate snakeskin windows lit from within by coloured lights.
“I started it eight years ago to show that with leather you can do anything," explained Peter, a former hippy who earned his living selling belts and other more recognisable handicrafts in the
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