Strangers on a Bench - EPISODE 4: Making Miniatures by the Sea

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

Tom Rosenthal approaches a stranger on a park bench and asks if he can sit down next to them and record their conversation.This is what happened!Produced by Tom RosenthalEdited by Rose De LarrabeitiMixed by Mike WoolleyTheme tune by Tom Rosenthal & Lucy RailtonIncidental music by Maddie AshmanEnd song : By The Ocean Side by November Ultra Please consider following, subscribing, and do leave a review! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, sorry to bother you. Can I ask you a slightly odd question? I'm making a podcast called Strangers on a Bench where essentially I talk to people I don't know on benches for 10 or 15 minutes. Are you up for that? Do you want to give it a go? What's your favourite day of the week? I think Mondays. Because it's a fresh start. It's the beginning of possibility. So I like planning my week and seeing what it might bring. I love that. It's a rare Monday answer, I have to admit.

Have you made any fresh starts recently? Is there anything you've started of late? Well, it depends on what recent is. I am from Canada and I moved across the country two and a half years ago to start life again. I went from the middle of the country to the ocean. So that was a big move. Can I ask what triggered the move? What happened?

Why? Well, I thought about living by an ocean for a long time and I think I wanted a slower pace of life and the place I moved to is really slow so I went from downtown urban life to ocean view rural life. Yeah it's perfect it feeds the soul. If I have to ask you for kind of the one thing you feel has fundamentally changed in you since you've made the move, what would it be? I worry less about what people think about my decisions. A lot of people had a lot of thoughts about me moving across the country by myself.

What was the kind of core thought that people had you're crazy why I think they were projecting a lot of their own fears so I think people are afraid to start things new some people got really upset because I'd been in the same place for so many years and there's a grief though I think when people are upset when you leave a place and they're like hey we we wanted you to stay in our lives physically for a while so I totally see what you mean about kind of the mirror aspect of a decision and it suddenly goes oh hang on should I be making this to move or why haven't I done this thing or yeah you know people ask those yeah it should so can you pinpoint the exact moment when you thought you know I'm gonna do this well

push what pushed you over the edge I don't know if there was an exact moment when you thought you know i'm going to do this what pushed what pushed you over the edge i don't know if there was an exact moment what i've realized recently is that life decisions are small almost minuscule decisions that you make and then something big happens so i was thinking about moving to this place for 10 years and then 2021 i thought i'm just gonna go and see what's possible i worst case, it's a good story at a dinner party. I'll be like, oh, one time I went here and looked at properties. Best case is I find a place that feels like I can root there. And I kind of had this question. I was, you know, get up in age, go, well, if I don't do it now, I'm probably never going to do it.

So it kind of was that piece of like if not now it might not happen. So five years from now might not have the energy or courage to do it. I do think it's funny. I do think it's how you can actually go quite close to a decision before you make it. I think some people feel like they've got to like, oh I gotta dive in and do it or I can't do it. So you can walk up to it and have a look like you did and go oh hang on a sec yeah i can do it yeah i do feel good about it you can get close you can talk to people you could not you know i think not many people actually go

you know they keep themselves this comfortable distance away from the actual decision maybe you're out of fear of making the decision in the first place maybe yeah i think like for me i think about things a lot before i do things and so my close friends were not surprised about this. People that, kind of my outer circle of acquaintances, were kind of like, well, this is out of the blue, right? Because, but it wasn't ever, you know. I think you've got to go to the edge of, like, what's possible, play with it, see what it feels like, and then dive in.

What has come out of your personality since the move that you didn't, you know, was kind of, was buried beforehand? I think I've come back fully to myself more than anything. Like, I feel like I'm more connected to my eight-year-old self than ever. And I'm living a life that my eight-year-old self would have been so pumped to live. So when people are like, what success? I'm like, something that makes my eight-year-old self super happy. What is a typical day in your new paradise? Take me from the morning to the evening. I don't know if there's a typical day. It's pretty slow. I work for myself, so I consult and work for clients, but I try to work about 20 hours a week. So that's why Mondays I kind of go, okay, well, what's this week going to look like? I have a garden.

I love puttering and weeding and watering that. I'm renovating my little house by the sea. So depending on the project, I might be tearing down walls or painting walls. Yeah, or up in my art studio creating miniatures. Miniatures. Yeah. Tell me more.

Well, they're very small things. How small are we talking uh a 1 to 12 scale 1 inch to 12 inch like dollhouse size when i was eight i loved it i could spend hours doing it so i rediscovered it actually during the pandemic and now i have a studio where i just create for the joy of it incredible i love that yeah now so you're one of those Now, someone says miniatures. I've got like 50 questions coming all at once. What are they of? I like doing furniture or scenes, vignettes,

dioramas. I've been doing rooms basically. So I did a library, made little books. Based on existing rooms or just from your own imagination? Mostly from my imagination, but I asked a bunch of people in my life what their top five books were, and then I created the miniature books of those. So my miniature library is full of books that have meaning to people in my life.

So it's not just a thing, but it actually connects to those in my community and who I love. What is, for you, the joy of making miniatures? Can you try and describe that? There's just a wonder to it. It's like you see something human-sized, and then you see something so small, and there's just a wonder to it it's like you see something human size and then you see something so small and you're just like what yeah i know my youngest child in particular is just obsessed with tiny things yeah and there's a there's like a kind of model village um about an hour away it's like a little miniature paradise basically and they have

these lovely old people kind of making these tiny things you can look through the making and then fixing stuff and it's just it's just a such a beautiful thing i know it doesn't matter age gender background people get kind of captivated by it it like allows people to go into a world that is not one they see every day and i think we need more wonder what do you do with them once you've made them? I just put them up on my mini gallery. I sometimes post them on Instagram. Yeah, I'm contemplating doing a store of some sort

but I'm worried that selling them will take the joy out of it. Oh, tricky business, isn't it? Yeah, we'll see. How big is your miniature gallery? Right now I have six dioramas, vignettes. They're just in like boxes and I just create the room in the box. But right now I'm also doing a house. Wow, we're expanding to a house.

Yeah, so IKEA has a dollhouse and I'm just making it my own. But there's a show in Canada called Best in Miniature. It's like Great British Bake Off, but from Indutri Makers. The last season, I'm just trying to follow their challenges. Who knows? One day, maybe I'll be on it. I think you should be on it. You haven't seen my works. Also, TV is just about

presence, isn't it? You've got a good presence to you. I think you talk very well about it. I would put you on the show. Oh, thank you. Let the producers know. If I'm the casting person. I did, I mean, that sounds like a great show.

I'm going to have to look this up. Canada Miniatures. It's called Best in Miniatures. Yeah, I don't know if it's available. Is it only a Canadian thing? I'm sure it's on like YouTube somewhere, Best in Miniature, but your daughter might like that too. Yeah, that's such a good thing. Do you ever feel like you didn't do this, I mean do you go I wish I just was doing miniature my whole life?

No I think I needed to wander the path I took. I've always been creative but I'm just finding my way back to actually doing it with more intention. I think I forgot about it actually for years, because I kind of thought, oh, that's something children do. You know, and you try to be cool in your teens. Failed miserably, but, you know, you still try. Is there any other finding the eight-year-old kind of activity that you're partaking in, bringing the eight-year-old back?

She was pretty confident. It was before the patriarchy and things told her what a girl should act like. And she had a mischievous and, like, courageous spirit. And I lost that for a lot of years, so I feel like I'm finding that now as I hit middle age. Oh, that's beautiful that you can return and have the chance to return. Yeah, it's good. Again, you don't have to answer the question if you if it's too

heavy but like can you chart the kind of points of which you started to lose the eight-year-old oh yes yes for sure schooling and a church I grew up in and a lot of things like that where you know women should be quiet and demure and be very nice and don't cause any trouble and just do whatever everybody needs you to do and I did that for a long time so it's like a kind of gradual diminishing of the spirit rather than there's no kind of moment when suddenly you're like yeah I figured out in like maybe when I was nine or ten I was like oh I see if I just do this nobody will really pay that much attention to me and I can kind of just get through life and so I just kind of reduced who I was to fit. When did you come to understand that that is what had happened? Yeah, it was only really probably started about 10 years ago and more so in the last

five years, doing a lot of healing around. Yeah, finding my voice and who I am again there was a lot of years where I just I kind of played the game climbing the ladder you know following the brochure of life and then you're gonna go oh wait a second I didn't help design this brochure this is not the life I want to live so it's time to shake things up a bit. Do you have any kind of mission to, once you find your own thing, you're like, oh look,

mate, come on, you've got to do this now. Have you found yourself being that person a bit? Or not really? Yes. Kind of evangelical about it. Well, you don't want to be too evangelical.

That's my trouble. Yeah, that's a problem. No, I'm like, everybody can do their own thing, believe their own thing. I think one of the things is our society needs to rest. And so we are just doing what we think we're supposed to be doing. And we're all exhausted. But eight years ago, I took a sabbatical and started asking questions I didn't know I had. What I realized is if you're

exhausted you can't figure out what you actually want. People don't even really have the energy to go there. So I actually did some work, a friend of mine, actually one of the friends I'm meeting today, we did a thing called Conscious Pause which is about guiding people through sabbaticals and so they can ask their own questions. The place I'm creating by the ocean is a place for people to come pay what they can for rest and restoration because I think we need that before people can figure out who they are or what they want to do or you know small thoughts. Just everybody have a nap. Just a small thought.

What are the kind of if you're if someone's listening to they're going, oh, I'm not very good at rest. Most people say that. What do you say is a kind of go-to ways to kind of get better at it? Well, I actually don't say it too much anymore because people don't like the idea of rest. There's a huge narrative around that it's lazy. It's a character flaw, all of these things. So there's great resistance to the idea of rest. There's a huge narrative around that it's lazy, it's a character flaw, all of these things. So there's great resistance to the idea of rest. I usually say, well, tell me how tired you are, how exhausted. And they're like, oh my goodness, so exhausted. I was like,

so we're basically like toddlers walking through this world, just kind of having hissy fits, but all we need to do is have a nap. But people have to come to that themselves. So I just share my life of slowness and ease, and hopefully by example, people will be like, oh, wait, there's another way to live this life. But I see the next generation resting more than we minded. Okay, that's good. I see that as like, wait, we don't have to be a slave to capitalism as much. How do you think that's happened?

I just think the systems that we thought were unbreakable are breaking. And so people are like, wait. Can you, again, another big-ish question. We're only here for a short time. Can you think of a moment when you were playing the ladder game where you kind of felt like wow this is the bottom moment for me uh i was working my what i thought was my dream job eight years ago it was right before i took the sabbatical and i was waking up in the middle of the night with huge heart pains uh

which i didn't realize was anxiety but like they would just knock the breath out of me i thought i was dying sometimes and i was like oh, this job actually is killing me. And so I took some time off. That's the sabbatical. Well, they called it leave, but I just changed the name of it. So I was like, I'm gonna call it sabbatical because leave has negative connotations in corporate world.

And I came back realizing that I needed to change. So we're humans like that. We get to crisis before we change. Sometimes on these things, I've done this all around London, mostly in parks on this. It's quite rare that I go in city-ish bits. Can you describe what we can see in front of us and how that makes you feel? Because it is quite funny where we are.

Yeah, well, we're in St. Paul's church yard. I'm actually going to be going tonight to Evensong with the friends from where I once lived. We're meeting here in London. And because I've never been inside of St. Paul's, I thought I'm going to go in when you can go in for free. So, yeah, we're in front of St St Paul's in the churchyard. Ironically. Are there any questions you'd like to ask yourself and answer it? What's next? That's the big question. It's not like I need to find out but it's like this is a nice slow life.

Is there something next or is this okay? I don't even know if that's the right question, but it's just like, and now? Progress maybe is a different direction now, but I don't know. That's what it is. Look at your tiny heart, how it needs to rest Its broken little parts are holding by a thread

Why don't we live by the ocean side? Take time to breathe, time to slow your mind Terima kasih telah menonton Look how your tiny hands fit so well in mine A home can be a friend, so here's your lullaby