Take on Parkinson’s...

Where Emma ponders celebrity

Hello! Thank you for all the supportive words and messages about my upcoming art exhibition - remember if you can’t be there in person there’s an online version here. Love you xxx

When I first heard Morten Harket had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, I made a small, involuntary sound somewhere between a gasp and a swear word. It’s always jarring when someone you never expected to share your particular flavour of neurological absurdity suddenly joins the party. Especially someone you spent your entire preadolescence in an imaginary relationship with.

Because you see, dear reader, I didn’t grow up in an ordinary childhood setting. I grew up as the housekeeper’s daughter on an English manor estate where the roses were overblown and the peaches clung to south-facing walls like starlets in repose. The gardens were vast and secretive, stuffed with ancient yew hedges that whispered secrets and probably (definitely) housed ghosts. My companions were horses, dogs, and the voice of Morten Harket soaring out of a battered cassette player as I galloped around the place like a feral child out of a Merchant Ivory film.

At the tender age of eight, A-ha’s Take On Me wasn’t just a song—it was a lifeline. It was pure magic: longing, energy, escape, and that otherworldly falsetto that made my ribs buzz like a tuning fork. I didn’t know then what a synthesiser was, or that Norway had cool pop stars(I’m not sure they have since haha), or that grown men could sound like dreams but I knew I wanted whatever that was.

Fast-forward to now. Morten Harket - ethereal songbird, famously private, beautiful even in pixelated YouTube interviews has shared that he has Parkinson’s. My first thought was no. My second thought was yes, of course. Not because he deserves it (God no!) but because Parkinson’s is indiscriminate. It doesn’t care if you’re a global icon, or an artist quietly pottering away in a wind-battered Scottish kitchen.

And here’s the thing that stings and soothes in equal measure: when someone like Harket says the word out loud, it shifts things. Parkinson’s gets so easily shoved into this dusty box labelled “old men shuffling about”. Which, let me be clear, is also a valid and dignified existence—but it flattens the reality for many of us. The reality is more nuanced. It includes dancers, painters, rock climbers, bakers, woodworkers. It includes people like me, whose body fizzes with rebellion but whose brain is still throwing creative parties most days of the week.

Because Parkinson’s, in my experience, hasn’t touched my creativity. If anything, it’s become a lifeline, a place where I still have some autonomy. I might drop the paintbrush more often or spend longer unscrewing a pen lid than actually writing, but the ideas still come. I’m still driven by colour, story, and the joy of making something—anything—that wasn’t there before.

The physical side, though? Yeah, it’s a bastard. There are days when my hands feel like they’ve been outsourced to a toddler with an espresso addiction. But when I hear someone like Morten speak publicly, I’m reminded that this condition doesn’t erase who you are. If anything, it forces you to double down on the most essential parts. It makes you trim the fat of performance and dig straight into purpose.

There’s something especially poignant about a performer, a singer, developing a condition that attacks movement and vocal control. It’s a cruel irony. But also, I think, a kind of accidental spotlight. When a beloved artist reveals this diagnosis, it puts a very human face on something so often misrepresented. And when that face belongs to someone who was, let’s face it, most people's fantasy in 1985, it gives Parkinson’s a new kind of narrative.

I feel sorrow for Morten, of course. Parkinson’s is relentless and intimate and strange. But I also feel admiration. Because by speaking it aloud, he’s given permission to others. And in a world where everyone curates their life within an inch of its glossy limits, truth is a rare and radical thing.

He didn’t have to share it. Especially not someone as famously enigmatic as he is. But he did. And that matters.

So here’s to you, Morten Harket. For the soundtrack of my feral garden years. For showing that vulnerability doesn’t dull shine—it refracts it. For reminding the world that creativity doesn’t stop just because the body hiccups.

And to my fellow artists with rebellious nervous systems…may our hands shake but never our spirits.

with love

E xx