Mounting Insect Specimens
I prepare and display insect specimens — green click beetles, dung beetles and citrus swallowtail butterflies — mounted, labelled and arranged so that other people can see what they normally walk past.
The work is slow and entirely physical: the setting, the pin, the setting block, the label written in a small hand. Each specimen keeps a date and a place, and together they make a record rather than a decoration.
The point is biodiversity awareness — showing that the insects around a school ground are worth knowing by name, and that a display case can be a small piece of public education.
Three Quiet Things
Tennis
Tennis is the one place where nothing is finished early. A rally has to be held point by point, and the only way to hold it is to keep showing up to the same small spot on the court and hitting the ball back.
It is the same discipline as everything else in this portfolio, with the tempo turned up: stay in the exchange, adjust late, and let the other person's mistake decide the score.
Piano
On the piano the hands have to arrive before the head does. Reading ahead is easy; making the fingers land together at the speed you meant is the whole difficulty, and it is the same kind of difficulty as debugging a script that almost behaves.
The score open on the desk is the first movement of Moonlight Sonata — Adagio sostenuto. It stays a practice, not a performance: the point is the hour at the end of the day when the room gets quiet enough to hear whether the left hand is still late.
Diabolo
A diabolo has one string and two sticks, and it only exists while it is moving. Stop, and the shape is gone; the trick is not a trick but a rhythm that keeps the wheel alive.
It is the least serious thing on this page and the one that teaches the most about timing — commit slightly early, correct slightly late, and keep the object in the air.
More Things On the Shelf
Musical Theatre
The poster above the bed is for The Greatest Show — the show I was in. The two masks on the shelf are the comedy and the tragedy, and the little book beside them is a script.
Musical theatre is the hobby where a room full of people decides, together, to pretend — and where the smallest thing going wrong is the most interesting thing that can happen.
Snowboarding
The photograph propped on the desk is a red jacket on a white slope. Snowboarding is the hobby that taught me how to fall: get low, put the board across the fall line, and let the edge do the rest.
It is the same lesson as everything else here — commit, then correct.
Tea
The pot is Yixing purple clay, and it is used every day. Purple clay keeps the character of the tea — the first infusion is never quite the same as the last.
It is a slow, quiet hour: boil the water, warm the pot, and let the leaves open.
Hamilton
The star on the wall is Hamilton — a musical about the people who built a country and were not thanked for it in time. Ambition, debt, and a room that will not sit still.
It is the one I return to when I want to see a story told with this much nerve.