February 28, 2021 – Antidote to Throwaway Culture
The only antidote to throwaway culture is to keep. So I am an obsessive keeper … Your first habit should be turning your clothes inside out and reading the label .. polyester sheds millions of microfibres … It has been found in the bottom of the ocean and the top of Everest. Every time you wash a piece of polyester, about 500,000 microfibres are released. So, how do you buy polyester? You buy something that doesn’t need to be frequently washed. You don’t buy polyester underpants; you buy a polyester overcoat that you can learn how to sponge-clean.” – Loved Clothes Last by Orsola de Castro
February 21, 2021 – It’s Never Too Late for Britain’s Oldest Debut Author
It’s fair to say I didn’t expect, aged 93, to become Britain’s oldest debut author … I wanted people to know what it was like for the boys back in those days … My alcoholic, gambling father who deserted us; leaving school at 13 to help my struggling mother make rent. And then there is Jim: how we met at a dance and travelled the world together. My doomed love affairs, too. Even as I was writing I asked myself, who the heck would want to read all this? But once I got started, it became a joy …
My family isn’t perfect, and neither am I, but I laid it all bare. Writing it all down was liberating really; it taught me not to care.
I’ve had no children, that never quite worked out, so I had nobody to pass all these stories down to. But I still wanted to leave something behind, a footprint, to show it happened … Now I can get on with the next one … I’ll be 95 in May, I’d better hurry up.” – Margaret Ford, 94, Britain’s Oldest Debut Author, A Daughter’s Choice as reported in The Guardian & The Observer.
February 14, 2021 – Inspiration is Overrated
When I say something like ‘inspiration is overrated’, it’s not because I think you don’t ever need to be inspired. What I’m trying to tell you, and what I still tell myself frequently, is that inspiration is rarely the first step. When it does come out of the blue, it’s glorious. But it’s much more in your own hands than the divine-intervention-type beliefs we all tend to have about inspiration. Most of the time, inspiration has to be invited.”
– Jeff Tweedy, How to Write One Song (View on Amazon).
February 7, 2021 – Being Young Again
There was always the feeling that one would get around to being young again. And that when one was young again, life would resume the course from which it had so shockingly deviated.”
– Deborah Eisenberg, short story writer, Your Duck Is My Duck (View on Amazon)
January 31, 2021 – When Fiction Comes Alive
If fiction can come alive in this way then it will always be on the side of life, it will always have vitality, even when dealing, as it often does, with the more painful aspects of human experience. At best it will be a celebration of life and at least, when times get hard, it will be a glow in the dark.”
– Graham Swift, on his recent novel Here We Are (View on Amazon)