Saturday afternoon, passing the polo grounds
Out on today’s walk, I came across a field full of ravens (or rooks, I can never quite tell without a close-up). Hundreds of them, clustered around my favorite tree. These birds have always felt significant to me, in fact, at one point, they were my spirit animal. I love encountering them out in the wild at some random moment that insignificantly significant.
I was out unpacking my reflections from my morning quiet time. A simple question: what to do with a Saturday?
Odd that such a simple question spiraled into a philosophical reflection on the passage of time and more importantly, how I spend my time.
The Archaeology of Saturdays
Single. Days belonged to randomness then. Friends and impulse and whatever came next.
**
Marriage without children: a curatorial phase. Museums as weekend ritual. Art galleries. New cities mapped by their cultural coordinates. Restaurants collected like stamps.
**
Then: children.
The weekend stopped being mine. Became theirs. Prams pushed through parks. Playgrounds. Play groups. Days structured around their wonder, their growth, their needs. I was infrastructure now. The one who built the world they explored.
**
Later, when they needed me less: I remembered myself.
The sports hippie returning. Mountain bike tires on dirt trails. Rock face under fingertips. Paddle cutting water. Adventure races that pushed the body past what it thought possible.
North Face. Salomon. Leather bracelets. Granola eating… Every stereotype, fully inhabited. Not ironically. Earnestly.
**
Then Radio Warwickshire shifted everything again.
Weekends became sonic. Live music in small venues. Community events across Warwickshire. Interviewing unsigned bands. Photographing the indie scene. Connected to artists, to sound, to the underground pulse of things.
**
Each phase: a different Saturday.
Each Saturday: a different self.
The Slump
And then… a dead period.
I remember asking on a podcast: “What do you do when you’ve done everything?”
Not literally everything, of course. But when you’ve climbed mountains before, when you’ve been to museums, when you’ve experienced the activities that once excited you, and the novelty fades. Yes, it’s a different mountain, a different painting, but the act is the same.
I hit that wall. The sameness of it all.
(Pausing here at a seasonal creek turned river by recent rain and snow. Someone’s built a dodgy crossing. Kid-me would have leaped across without thinking. Approaching-60-me is putting the phone in a dry bag first.)
Act Three Eyes
Maybe the answer isn’t finding completely new things. Maybe it’s revisiting old passions with new eyes.
A scaled-down sports hippie revival. More mountain biking. Wisdom walks in different locations (even if it means driving to the trailhead rather than rolling out my front door).
But now I’m experiencing these things through Act Three eyes. As a 57-year-old grandfather in the final act.
You know what Act Three is in movies, right? The climax has happened. You’re sliding toward the conclusion. UK male life expectancy: 82-84. I’m 57. Do the math.
So what do I focus on in Act Three?
I wrote about this recently on the blog. I need to revisit it myself as I orient toward 2026.
But first, I’m going to attempt this makeshift creek crossing.
Wish me luck.
P.S.
Easy peasy, lemon squeasey, made it across, no problem
For me, Saturdays have always and will always the best day of the week.But I don’t think you’ve done ‘everything’ there’s a new thing waiting to be ‘discovered’ to fill the void. The new thing could actually be an old thing that the 16 year old Clay yearned to do but never did.