The funniest things that have happened while filming in my flat

Not everything needs to be a lesson. Some things are just funny, and I think the fact that I spent a while not acknowledging the funny side of this is itself a bit funny. Making gentle, considered content in a small flat that has its own ideas about what the day will hold has produced some genuinely good material that never made it into the actual content — and I feel like it should be documented somewhere, both as a corrective to the polished-aesthetic impression and as honest reporting from the inside of this whole endeavour.

Consider this the blooper reel, because every archive needs one.

The buzzer and the fourth take

There was a morning in January — grey, still, properly quiet outside — when I had set up a voiceover for something I was actually pleased with. It had taken me about forty minutes to get the room right: lamp angled, phone positioned, second cup of tea positioned in frame because the first cup was at the wrong temperature for filming, a throw arranged artfully on the chair in the background in a way that had required several attempts. The kind of setup that, when you finally stand back and look at it, makes you feel momentarily like you have your life together.

I was on take four. Take one had a siren in it. Take two I lost my train of thought in the second sentence. Take three was the best one yet — I could hear it in the playback, the timing was right, the voice was relaxed, the sentence I'd been practising landed exactly the way I wanted it to land. Take four was going to be the keeper. I could feel it.

Delivery buzzer. Full volume. The specific pitch of my flat's entry buzzer, which I have complained about to no one because I live alone and the complaint would simply hang in the room unanswered. It went off at the end of the sentence I was proudest of — right at the punctuation, as if it had been cued. I stood there for a moment. I looked at the phone. I went to the intercom. It was something I hadn't ordered and didn't need to sign for. I came back. I did take five, which was fine, and that was the one that went up.

The great fourth take lives only in the room's memory now.

The lighting setup that was exactly my lamp

I went through a phase — I think this happens to most small creators at some point — where I got very interested in lighting. I watched videos about it. I read articles. I bought a ring light, then returned it because it looked too obviously ring-lit. I borrowed a small softbox from somewhere and positioned it at the angle recommended by a person online who clearly knew what they were talking about. I adjusted. I moved. I took test shots. I compared them side by side.

The result was indistinguishable from my normal bedside lamp.

Not similar. Identical. The same warm pool of light, the same slight unevenness, the same quality that I had been trying to replicate and had apparently already achieved through the accidental placement of a lamp I'd had for three years and paid about twelve pounds for. I laughed at myself for a solid two minutes. Then I put the softbox away and went back to the lamp. It's been the lamp ever since. The lamp is fine. The lamp was always fine.

The pigeon

There is a pigeon who has taken a specific interest in the external window ledge directly outside the room I film in most. I don't know why it chose this ledge. There are many ledges. It has chosen mine. It arrives, seemingly at random, and begins its vocalisations with the confidence of a creature that has never encountered the concept of a voice-over recording in progress.

The first time it happened I thought it was a one-off. By the third time I understood it was structural. The pigeon is a feature of the filming environment. I have learned to pause when I hear its approach, wait for the natural cessation, and resume. I have also learned that waiting for the natural cessation can take longer than one might expect. The pigeon has opinions about duration.

I did once try to film through it, thinking the gentle ambient sound of a pigeon might even be charming. I was wrong. It was not charming. It was distracting and vaguely aggressive-sounding, which was the opposite of the video's energy. I have accepted the pigeon as a co-creator now, technically, given the number of breaks it has enforced. I've thought about featuring it. I haven't yet. But it's not off the table.

The blooper reel is the most honest part of the archive. Everything perfect in the actual posts was built on a foundation of fourth takes and rogue pigeons and lighting setups that turned out to be redundant.

The café and the croissant tray

A few months ago I was at a café — the one with the big window table I like, where the light comes in sideways in the morning and the noise level is just enough to be anonymous in — and I was attempting something I'd seen done well by a number of people, which is the casual-context video. The kind where you appear to be simply living your life while incidentally appearing on camera. I had positioned my phone against a small stand I'd brought in my bag, angled for what I hoped was an artless and natural angle, and I was doing a very calm recording of myself apparently just reading and having coffee.

I had been doing this for about ninety seconds when the tray happened.

The café has a standing display of pastries near the counter — croissants, pain au chocolat, that kind of thing — on a large metal tray. I don't know the exact mechanics of what caused it to fall. One moment it was there; the next it wasn't, and every pastry in the café was briefly airborne and then on the floor. The noise was extraordinary. The silence that followed the noise was equally extraordinary.

I had, of course, got all of it on camera — every second, from the peaceful reading scene to the tray catastrophe to the moment the table of three people next to me all looked at my phone in unison, clearly clocking that someone had definitely filmed this. I smiled at them. They smiled back. I stopped the recording.

I did not use that footage. I should have. The office humor of the situation — the careful casual-content setup, the tray, the witnesses — was genuinely perfect. I was trying to make something serene and I got something human, which is probably more valuable, and I was too embarrassed in the moment to appreciate it. That's probably its own lesson.

Why I've started keeping the outtakes

I started, about two months ago, saving the failed takes and the accidental footage and the moments where something went wrong in a way that made me laugh. Not to use them — or not necessarily — but to have them. And looking at them occasionally does something useful for my relationship with the polished version of what ends up posted.

It reminds me that the polished version is real. It's not performed — it's a genuine version of me and the things I care about, in the best light I could find. But the polished version was built on top of all of this: the buzzer interruptions, the redundant softbox, the pigeon, the pastry tray. The good takes came after a lot of discarded ones. The ease that sometimes appears in a finished video was the result of many uneasy attempts that got deleted.

• The take where I forgot the word for "intentional" and improvised "on purpose" in a deeply unfortunate register
• The video I filmed vertically when it needed to be horizontal, only realising on playback
• The three-second clip I accidentally sent to a friend instead of saving to camera roll — she said it was the most content thing she'd ever seen, and she wasn't wrong

I keep them now because they're the true record. The final edit is the thing I was aiming for; the outtakes are the thing I was actually doing while I tried to get there. Both are real. Both belong to the archive.

Also: the pigeon deserves documentation. For posterity.

The thing I want to say about all of this — the buzzer, the lamp, the pigeon, the pastry tray, the three-second accidental clip — is that every single one of these moments was, in its way, a small reminder that making things is inherently ridiculous. Not in a discouraging way. In a freeing one. The solemnity with which I sometimes approach setting up a video, the forty-minute lighting deliberation, the careful composition of what is essentially me talking to my phone in my flat about how to live gently — it deserves to be punctured occasionally by a pigeon, or a buzzer, or a falling tray of croissants. It keeps the whole thing honest.

I think this is the part of the creator life that doesn't make it into the aesthetic — the fundamental absurdity of it, which is also part of what makes it genuinely mine. If you spend enough time making things in a small flat, the flat pushes back. Things fall. Pigeons arrive. Deliveries come at the fourth take. And you reset, and you try again, and eventually you get the version that goes up. That version carries all the discarded ones in it somewhere, silently. The blooper reel is the foundation. I'm glad I've started keeping it.