In December 2024, I wrote a post entitled The Next Phase. It’s been just over a year since I stepped into The Next Phase, setting off to explore wellbeing, sustainability, the arts and technology, as well as slow travel, together with Kaberi. Much to her dismay, we have somehow become even busier than before!

The intention of launching a YouTube channel evolved into The Waterfall podcast and community. In case you are not already a subscriber, you can find The Waterfall on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other platforms. Our latest episode introduces the As You Like It Creative Wellbeing Retreats, which the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has just launched.

These retreats are based on this concept paper I had mentioned in The Next Phase:

Thanks to Rachael North, CEO of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, artist and tutor Lizzie Bentley, as well as Sophie Clausen of the Brook Arts Hub, what began as a vision outlined in our concept paper has now evolved into two series of retreats – the As You Like It Creative Wellbeing Retreats and The Tempest Crisis Leadership Retreats. We also need to thank circus and theatre director Paul Liengaard for having originally invited us to perform in Dartington during its centenary year and for setting us the challenge which led us to write the concept paper.

Here is the brochure for the inaugural As You Like It Creative Wellbeing Retreat, which is taking place on 2-3 May 2026. In case you are interested in the retreat, please register on the website of the Brook Arts Hub here. There are only 12 places available, on a first-come-first-served basis.

So far, we have published three episodes of The Waterfall – see below. Please do subscribe or follow The Waterfall to be notified about future episodes. We have already recorded conversations for several more episodes and are preparing to publish our first ‘slow travel’ episode, about our visit to Bhutan.

I should provide an update about the other intentions I had outlined in The Next Phase. As you will have seen from my blog post Return to Dartington, in May last year, Kaberi and I, together with other members of our Bengali cultural group Prantik, gave a special performance in the medieval Great Hall at Dartington called The Rabindranath Tagore Connection.

Our film about Growth vs Wellbeing will now be the second adventure for the puppet couple created for us by the late Enrique Nicanor for our earlier investigative documentary You must be nuts! – The Business of Dementia. The conversations we are publishing the The Waterfall are preparing the ground for that. The title of the new film is Enough! – A Hitchhikers’ Guide to Humanity:

In Enough!, curious Alph and his sceptical, no‑nonsense wife Chah‑Lee hitchhike through real‑world conversations with experts to test a radical idea: in a world of multiple crises – climate, cost‑of‑living, energy, food security, and more – as well as polarisation and wars over scarce resources, could putting wellbeing first help ordinary people live a life that feels like ‘enough’ … and give them the courage to tell politicians ‘Enough!’?

Unfortunately, The Story of Gitanjali is still in post-production, as are a number of other audiovisual projects! However, we have made our house in London more climate resilient by installing solar panels and a battery so that the house can operate off-grid if needed.

I hope you can understand from this overview of the first year why we still have plenty of things to keep us busy for the rest of The Next Phase … !