Experiencing The Familiar - Making Time For Play

Mum has graciously offered me the chance to jump aboard this blog and introduce myself. My name is Morgan, and I'm working in and researching children's play. What this means practically speaking is that I spend much of my time with kids aged 6-12, covered in glitter and wood chips, pretending to be a tiger and covertly taking notes.

I live and work in London, which might seem an odd choice for someone raised in a family that loves the countryside so deeply. I came here for graduate school nearly two years ago, but the more complicated lesson that I've been learning is that questions of community, of sustainability, of what it means to be "local", are just as vibrant and problematic in the city and countryside. The ways in which we live, work, shop and play all matter.

It's this combination of local and global that I think is at the heart of mum's company, Countryside Connection: http://www.countrysideconnection.com - a business predicated on the idea that new technologies can help very traditional businesses, and that "local" people can work together and create new communities - even if they're thousands of miles apart. This idea was brought home to me the other day, when I faced the most terrifying sight of my young life: thirty 14 year old girls, expecting a lecture on urban theory.

Many months ago I agreed to participate in University College London's Widening Participation Program, which brings in groups of local schoolchildren to offer them a tour of the University and a sample lecture by a current or (in my case recent) graduate student. I wanted to talk to them about what it means to know a place, how we live in cities, how they shape us and how we, if we only try, can shape them in return. I wanted them to think about who controlled public space, who the "public" really are, and how social groups monitor public behaviour. I don't know if any of this actually happened.

But part of this process was getting them each to make a map of their local environments. The Situationists (a group of French theorists in the late 1950s/early 1960s) believed that most people operate within a triangle of work, home and recreation that they rarely break out of. To re-experience the familiar city they did some fairly odd, early 1960s things, such as walking around Paris following a map of London, just to see where they'd end up. They took careful notes on how streets smelt, how their character changed along their length, took photographs of signs and shop fronts.

The girls thought this was a bit stupid, but they made their maps anyway and when they'd finished they waved their maps at me, asking me to look. What I saw was startling. Their maps were tangled lines cross-crossing at points labelled "where we hang out", friends' houses and chip shops. Their worlds already encompassed far more communities than mine, with school and home being complimented by the homes of friends and relatives, and the locations of enough places for recreation to make me quite jealous. They not only inhabited a London that I knew nothing about, they had made it their own in a way that I'm still figuring out.

This might seem off-topic, but play for me is mainly about finding different ways of experiencing the familiar. For children and adults, much of what we do can be done 'playfully' - even if it's technically work! Taking tiny bits of time to remember why we do the things we do, whether sending emails, painting fences, stuffing envelopes and running out for milk, can give us back some of the joy we had when we started out on these projects. It's so easy to get stuck into something and lose enthusiasm for it (my dissertation springs horribly to mind) and that's where I think play can help. I've been reading The Playful Self by Rebecca Abrams lately, and she speaks eloquently on the need for adults to find ways of enjoying themselves purely, and of the positive knock-on effects of this in all areas of their lives. Creative play is a kind of networking, too, and out of half-joking conversations can come the most remarkable (even profitable) ideas. In paying attention to the possibilities of places, relationships and objects we can open up those relationships, turn a cup into a boat, a pavement into a dance floor, an acquaintance into a co-conspirator.

So what ways have you found of making time for play, or of reconfiguring your relationships to your area, work or colleagues? Any suggestions for the rest of us?