When I decided I needed to get a bit more Right Brain balance into my Left Brain life, I consulted Floodlight (google it). In the old days, it was a paper volume, but now its online and countrywide and you can browse college courses in anything - in dance or singing or massage or life drawing or Swedish or jewellery making .. This is how I found ceramics at Morley College. Yes its a bit of an effort to drag yourself out of work and then spend three hours in deep concentration learning something new and its not free and your husband has to cook you supper, but its a terrific antidote to the rat race. One of my tutors once told us about a lady eye surgeon who used to make the most spectacularly large and lumpen vases. He once tactfully asked whether she had considered "refining" the look a bit. She responded that she spends hours each day operating on eyes in the most miniscule detail. For that reason, throwing around great lumps of clay once a week was, for her, joyfully therapeutic. In the same way, you also get to meet a lot of really nice people who don't care what you do for a job (the same people who will unfailingly admire your work even if its really bad). As an added bonus Christmas shopping becomes a doddle as you offset the cost of the course by gifting your relatives your wonky vases...

If I was king for a day, college courses would be compulsory - everyone over the age of 30 would go to college for three hours a week to do something opposite to what they normally do. It keeps you curious and young and grounded and its all the best bits of school without the bad bits; You only do your favourite class for a start, there are no reports and in a lot of subjects there are no exams. The work and finding your voice is the focus and, at the end of the day, none of my work would exist without Morley College.