JENNY Lindsay runs Flint & Pitch Productions, a spoken-word, theatre and music organisation focused on emerging talent in Scotland. She is also a writer and performer of poetry and is currently working on a new collection of work titled This Script and Other Drafts. A stage show of the same name will tour later this year.
MY day starts and ends with my cat Hera jumping on my bed to either wake me up or to coorie in to sleep. She is an excellent alarm clock, recognising my actual alarm as an indication that she is due to get some of that delicious mashed-up donkey head sachet stuff she likes so much. If I’m in at night, she will often pester me endlessly if I’m working too late, until I go to my bed and she can get her habitual cuddles.
On a gig day I’ll usually try to get a good kip the night before, and always have beans on toast a few hours before the gig or before I have to go to set up the venue. Dinner of champions, I swear. I get really nervous/jangly/excited before events so can’t eat for a few hours beforehand usually. Chris Scott, the photographer for Flint & Pitch, knowing me well, usually brings me along a “tactical sandwich” for the inevitable adrenalin crash from pulling off an event that has usually been months in the planning.
On non-event days, there’s a lot of emailing, admin, banking, pitching to folks for potential collaboration events, neglecting the “creative” column in my four-headed To Do List Book, invoicing, re-invoicing, following up invoices with as much patience as can be mustered, booking acts, collating tech info, visiting venues, meeting folks who are interested in Flint & Pitch and want to collaborate, writing references for former F&P acts who’re applying for things, ranting and railing against underpayment in live performance in Scotland, negotiating higher fees for acts from clients, phoning folk, planning workshops, researching themes for the next personal show I have planned (it’s a bit epic and possibly mad), and a helluva lot of unpaid work-for-labour that is typical of a freelancer in the arts really.
On these days, I’ll get to 7pm and realise I’ve only done about 400 bloody steps, so have to take myself on a wheezing wee jog (OK, sometimes just a walk) around the Meadows, attempting to avoid the temptation of a pint. I’ve been a full-time freelancer since May 2014 and it hath not been good for the waistline, I will say!
But I generally love what I do for a living and get a helluva lot of joy out of my work. Rent being what it is (I live alone in central Edinburgh, eesh) things can get pretty hairy from time to time, but I am also lucky that occasionally I get offered a day of supply teaching work which keeps me grounded and has occasionally saved my hide when those unpaid invoices pile up. I reckon it’s pretty important to stay humble and grounded if yer mainly immersed in the arts bubble, and teenagers will give ye that!
Most of my days, really, are hard-working, quiet, solitary and covered in cat hair. “I wish a room of my own and 25k a year” to update/paraphrase Virginia Woolf. I’ve at least got the former, and a great deal of autonomy and self-determination about what I do. It’s an unbelievable privilege to have that, pretty much, from dawn to dusk ... albeit with a daily routine that is often dictated by a misanthropic feline.
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