From Symphonies to Sudoku: boredom and creativity

This morning, purely by chance en route to my weekly dance class in the macrobert arts centre I stumbled upon a fascinating free lecture by Richard Holloway entitled "From Symphonies to Sudoku: boredom and the creative imagination.

This is a new Creative Space venture organised by Stirling Management Centre in conjunction with the Art Collection at the University of Stirling, Forth Valley College and the macrobert.

The former Bishop of Edinburgh is a controversial figure in the intellectual life of Scotland and, as chair of Sistema Scotland , he argues for the need to provide a lifeline for the vast army of unemployed in our community .
He claims that introducing people to the creative arts is one way of helping them to pass the time.

Holloway started off by pointing out we all have an innate desire to tell stories from the early days when we sat around camp fires in our caves. Some embellished tools, others drew on the walls.

Why? It had no material benefit he argued yet it was the birth of our creative spirit.
We wanted to fill time. We wanted to mark the day in some way.


He went on to say that boredom is one of the biggest blights in our society. How do we fill the time? Some do it with chasing little white balls around a golf course and others by creating artistic masterpieces.

He argued we all have a basic need to fill our time and in our post industrial society we have the workless poor suffering from boredom. Yet these are the very people whose jobs have disappeared in manufacturing, mining and other industries which created the wealth we enjoy today.

Well I guess he gave us plenty to think about.