Potency: When We Realise How Little It Takes To Change Everything

Or why I can laugh at a Festival of Retch and still weep when people remember how to belong.

​8 June 2026

• ​2255 words • ​13 min read

I cry at odd things.

Tragic things, obviously. I have the usual human weaknesses. Give me a lost dog or cat, a hospital corridor, a parent saying the thing they should have said thirty years earlier, or a long-lost family member walking through a studio door on Surprise Surprise, and I’m anybody’s.

But there is another kind of crying that is harder to explain.

It doesn’t feel like sadness exactly. It feels older than that. Stranger. Almost primal.

And it doesn’t arrive as one elegant tear. Not the cinematic kind. I mean the kind that feels as though it might take over completely and require someone to gently escort me outside for air.

The Spell

It happened again the other afternoon while I was ironing what felt like a hundred and seventy-seven pillowcases for my Airbnb and watching Australian Story.

At first, I was simply interested. The episode was about Astrid Jorgensen, the woman behind Pub Choir, and the road that led her there. Her story was compelling enough on its own: a bright, funny, driven woman finding her way back to music and then building something no one quite seemed to have seen coming.

But then the footage moved into what Pub Choir actually does.

That was when I had to stop ironing.

I couldn’t look down.

Pub Choir, if you haven’t come across it, is one of those ideas so simple it almost hurts. A room full of people turns up. Astrid teaches them a song in parts. And by the end, they are singing together — not as professionals, not as performers trying to impress anyone, but as ordinary people concentrating their energy for a few minutes on making something beautiful.

That is the part that gets me.

It seems so small. A song. A room. A woman conducting. A crowd willing to try.

But when human beings gather their attention and goodwill and breath in the same direction, the result is almost shocking. It is so different from the usual static of modern life — the nightly news, the fear, the suspicion, the endless pulling apart — that the beauty of it feels like evidence from another world.

Astrid said she had a deep desire to “exist in the minds of others.” She also said, very simply, “It’s not nice feeling lonely.”

That sentence stopped me.

Because beneath all the joy, the harmonies, the hands in the air, the sold-out rooms, there is the oldest human ache: remember me. Hear me. Let me be part of something.

And somehow, Astrid has found a way to answer that ache with a song.

Astrid is the catalyst. The conduit. Without her, the room stays a room. With her, thousands of faces come alive.

One of the people who saw it early described it as magic — as though she were casting a spell on the audience with her hands. That feels exactly right to me. Watching her conduct a crowd, you can see the energy move. She doesn’t just teach people notes. She gives them permission.

Permission to try.
Permission to be loud.
Permission to be part of something before they’ve earned the right to call themselves good at it.

There is something about the songs, too.

They aren’t obscure little exercises chosen to show off a conductor’s cleverness. They’re songs people already carry somewhere in the body. Bohemian Rhapsody. Running Up That Hill. We Belong. Africa. (They Long To Be) Close To You. The kind of songs that seem to live in the collective bloodstream, waiting for someone to give them permission to come out.

One glimpse at the Pub Choir clips and I’m gone.

It’s the faces. And the sound of them together.

People are focused. Present. Singing hard. Grinning like idiots. Laughing. Looking sideways at the people they came with as if to say, Can you believe we’re doing this? There is delight, but also devotion — a genuine concentration on doing the best job they can possibly do.

And it isn’t private joy. That’s the thing. It moves between them. The joy passes from face to face, from row to row, until the room seems to become one breathing thing.

No wonder people can’t get enough of it.

The Jungle Village

The same thing happens to me in a far less elegant setting: I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here.

I know.

This is where I lose any remaining claim to cultural sophistication.

The first season I watched properly was the one Miguel Maestre won, and I had never seen anything quite like it. I remember telling my sister, on the phone, with genuine excitement, “You’re not going to believe this, but I watched I’m a Celebrity last night. It was so good.”

Her reply was immediate.

“Who are you?”

Fair question.

Because on the surface, it is a difficult show to defend with a straight face. There are eating challenges involving century eggs, fermented horrors, bin juice, insects, and pieces of animal anatomy one hopes never to meet socially. It is, at times, a festival of retch.

And yes, I laugh until I hurt.

But the real hook, for me, was never only the grotesque theatre of it. It was the camaraderie. The community. The care. The unlikely tenderness of a motley crew of people — actors, chefs, comedians, footballers, reality TV personalities, influencers, soap stars, and the occasional international wild card — beginning to matter to one another in a place where nobody has the usual props.

Miguel shedding a tear over how much Erin Barnett had suffered with endometriosis struck me as profoundly beautiful. He was funny, of course. Gorgeous, yes, let’s not pretend otherwise. But what moved me was the size of his heart.

Charlotte Crosby was in there too, and she was a revelation to me — wildly funny, completely herself. And Rhonda Burchmore was sensational. “Rhonda Burpmore,” as she was christened after one particularly heroic encounter with the less glamorous end of the food chain, gave herself over to the whole ridiculous business with magnificent commitment.

That was the thing I hadn’t expected. Not the trials. Not even the laughs. But the way these wildly different people formed a tiny village, then began protecting the village.

Gary Sweet, in the most recent season, seemed to understand this too.

He laughed as much as he cried. I nearly wet my pants watching him demonstrate his special bar-room pick-up line, and half the joy was watching the others lose it around him. There is a particular kind of laughter that leaves you feeling better when it finally subsides, as though something has been rinsed out of the system.

But Gary also found the eliminations almost unbearable. The contestants would see one another again in a matter of days, possibly hours, and yet choosing someone to leave felt enormous. It wasn’t just about who went. It was about the end of that exact little community — the one that had formed under those conditions and would never exist in quite the same way again.

And presiding over it all, of course, was Julia Morris, eternally fabulous.

I still miss Break It Down with Dr Brown, which may be more revealing than I intended. But Robert Irwin has become his own strange pleasure. When he first stepped into those enormous shoes, he was sweet and capable, but so young that it felt as though Julia could no longer quite let fly. Two years later, something had shifted. He was still impossibly wholesome, but suddenly grown enough to catch the adult joke, cover his face, and laugh properly.

Julia, thank God, could once again be Julia.

And now, apparently, the show itself has been axed, rested, paused, or otherwise marched out of camp with its torch extinguished. I find that sadder than I expected. Not because the world is short of reality television, heaven knows, but because this one created a strange little pocket where people from completely different worlds were asked to endure discomfort, depend on one another, laugh, crack, soften, and care.

Ridiculous? Frequently.

But also, somehow, a little bit precious.

And perhaps that is where I’m a Celebrity meets Pub Choir for me, though they seem to have almost nothing in common. One is a televised jungle full of celebrities, hunger, panic and revolting food. The other is a room full of ordinary people learning a song. But both show me the same thing: people becoming more than separate. People forming a temporary little world. People remembering, however briefly, how to belong.

The Body Knows First

By the time I am watching those Pub Choir faces — focused, delighted, singing hard — the feeling has already moved past ordinary emotion.

It feels bodily.

As though some part of me recognises this — not the specific song, not the specific room, but the act of humans gathering their breath and attention and goodwill to make something beautiful together.

It makes me feel a little like E.T. trying to phone home from the modern world.

Not because I think we should all be standing around in caves humming at the moon, although frankly there are worse ideas. But because that kind of belonging feels so rare now. Everyone bringing their best self for a few minutes. Everyone concentrating on the same beautiful thing. Everyone briefly released from the exhausting modern business of being separate.

And that is where the embarrassment comes in.

If I went to a Pub Choir event, I don’t think I’d be worried about singing badly. I’d be worried about crying too much to sing at all.

Not one elegant tear. Not a discreet shimmer in the eye. I mean proper ugly crying — the kind where strangers start using the careful voice.

I know that feeling. Once, years ago, after my parents split up, my father returned to England. I went to the airport to say goodbye. I thought I was all right with it. I even thought it was the right thing for him to do.

Then I started crying and couldn’t stop.

People arrived to farewell him, and there I was — his blubbering eldest daughter, wracking sobs, completely unable to pull myself back together. My body seemed to have discovered something my mind had not had the courtesy to brief me on.

So yes, I know what can happen when feeling gets through the side door.

The Wrong Witness

Perhaps that is why the person beside you matters.

About a thousand years ago, a boyfriend told me about seeing Sade in an intimate venue in Brighton, England, circa 1985. She came out for an encore and sang Jezebel, in all its quiet beauty. He said you could hear a pin drop — except for his then-girlfriend, who sat beside him jingling her car keys.

In my view, this should have carried jail time. Not actual jail time, obviously, though I remain emotionally open to the argument. It was the mass destruction of an intimate moment. Everyone around her would have been distracted, yet nobody could say anything because the moment they did, they too would be dragged out of the song and into the irritation.

Those keys rang the death knell for the relationship.

She was already leaving.
He was still listening.

Years later, I had my own version.

I had managed to get two tickets to see Duffy at the Sydney Opera House. I say “managed” because I think I bought them on eBay, back when that still felt like a slightly lawless act of devotion. I went with Louise, a dear friend who worked with me at the gym I ran at the time. She was a singer herself, and a proper fan, so she understood the scale of the thing.

It was the only time I have ever seen a performance at the Opera House.

Before or since.

And then Duffy began singing Warwick Avenue.

That song was special to me. Still is. So when it started, I phoned my then-husband.

Not to show off where I was. Not to make some dramatic point. I think I simply wanted him inside the song with me  If he couldn’t be there, this felt like the next best thing. A small offering down the phone line: here, listen to this; this is touching me; be with me in it.

When the song finished, I put the phone back to my ear.

He had hung up.

I remember feeling stung. Then, almost immediately, came the colder little realisation: my marriage was often exactly that cold. I had just forgotten for the length of a song.

I had invited him into the music.

He left before it ended.

I wonder sometimes whether that was the death knell for my marriage. But that is a story for another time.

When the Room Holds

Maybe that is why I am so undone when people get it right.

When the room holds. When the song is shared. When the person beside you doesn’t cheapen the moment. When strangers, campmates, or a crowd of ordinary people bring their attention to the same beautiful thing and, for a few minutes, become more than separate.

A man leaves Pub Choir saying he’d had a terrible day, and now it is a great one. Not slightly improved. Not tidied up around the edges. Turned around.

A full emotional 180, apparently achieved by standing in a room with strangers and singing.

That should not feel miraculous.

But it does.

It takes so little.

A room. A song. Someone brave enough to begin.

The heartbreaking thing is not that the magic is gone.

It’s that it still works, and we use it so rarely.