I have a regular book exchange arrangement with Jennie Macfie, who is Chair of the Promoters Arts Network and promotes events at Glenurquhart Hall.  It’s a great way of coming across books I would never otherwise have thought of reading—like The Real Frank Zappa Book.  It’s a hoot.  I heartily recommend it.  The early chapters about his childhood and teenage years reminded me a lot of Bill Bryson’s wonderful The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.  Bryson, born in 1951, is eleven years’ younger than Zappa, but they both seem to have spent much of their childhood indulging in the kinds of outrageous activities that, if indulged in nowadays in this country, would land them with a hefty succession of ASBOs, if not actually a spell at a youth detention centre. As it was, Zappa, according to his own story, spent several nights in a cell for the simple offence of having long hair!

A few years ago, at one of our regular Visual Arts conferences, the artist and designer Tassy Thompson spoke very inspiringly about the wonderful childhood she had had in the Torridon area, doing things like building fires on the beach which, again, would today be likely to draw down the wrath of the authorities.  Her childhood experiences had shaped her imagination as an artist, and she feared that our more cosseted, restricted youngsters were being deprived of such opportunities.

Now today I read in the latest NESTA e-bulletin that a new report calls on the government to ensure:

‘a fundamental change in the way we educate our young people with a new emphasis on developing entrepreneurial and business skills in the classroom’.

But how can we reconcile the encouragement of the risk-taking that is integral to ‘developing entrepreneurial skills’ with the current climate of massive risk-avoidance in the way we look after and educate the next generation?

One answer, of course, is to involve young people more actively in the arts, and challenge them to the enormous psychological risk-taking that is involved in being a maker, writer or performer, and exposing your activities to the general public.  The Feis movement has very fully documented the immense personal benefits that their training can bring to young people of all sorts of backgrounds, in exactly this way.

But this avoidance of risk is spreading to the arts world as a whole.  There’s much less scope to fail.  Companies which are dependent only on irregular project funding (which is most of those in the Highlands and Islands) feel that they’re only as good as their last production.  Even those in receipt of core funding from the Scottish Arts Council (like HI~Arts, and nine other major arts organisations in the Highlands and Islands), are now faced with standstill funding for the next two years—at a time when the rate of inflation makes such a settlement a major cut in real terms.  Theatres, festival and galleries will respond by taking fewer risks to ensure they retain their audiences.  And those audiences, with less money to be spend, will be less inclined to take a risk on the unfamiliar.  It’s a vicious downward spiral, and we’ll all be the losers.