Newsletter #21

Currently wintering...

I am reading

I have just finished A List of Suspicious Things, by first time novelist, Jennie Godfrey, set in Yorkshire against the backdrop of the Yorkshire Ripper killings which were ongoing and headline news at the time. The story follows the adventures of two young girls, aged about 12 or 13, during their attempts to ‘find’ the Ripper. It examines their intense friendship, and the interweaving of their family’s lives with that of the close-knit local community. It is gripping and involving and there are some scary moments. Overall, I felt, a very realistic portrait of childhood friendship at the time, with its relatively innocent challenges and joys, before the toxic drenching of social media and Apps on young people’s lives that I now observe, luckily for me, from afar. I slightly feel that the ever present close proximity of modern technology in children’s lives through mobile phones, even if just the parents devices, is a bit like having an unpleasant, overbearing adult around and children have a lot less opportunity just to play and escape than we did. Instead, they are prematurely forced into the adult thinking world….

But hey – that’s just me, hopefully I am wrong, and everything is fine!

I am watching

Waiting For The Out on BBC iPlayer, a tender portrayal of a young philosophy graduate earning his living by teaching philosophy in a male prison. The main protagonist, Dan, does not fit in and is used to that, so teaching philosophy in prison does not feel odd to him, he would feel the same teaching anatomy to medical students. The students quickly pick up on the value of the subject that Dan has come to share and they look forward to his lessons. His demons run a bit deeper than simply not fitting in though and he suffers from sever OCD and terrible anxiety about who he is. His attempts to trace his estranged father lead to a dangerous situation and when things get ridiculous I enjoyed it less than the perfect tension depicted by the characters whose struggles I recognised and related to. Well worth a watch though!

I am listening

I have mentioned this Podcast before, it is my TOP favourite: Homing by Matt Gibberd of The Modern House

It has a new format, very simple – the home you were brought up in, a subsequent home and the home where you now live…

Plus, you can go a bit further now by subscribing to Matt’s Homing Patreon Page and see the beautiful homes that he is touring on film. What a soothing experience, I have just been totally lost in the Dan Pearson episode, above… Lovely does NOT cover it.

I am writing

I am just about to write up the Christmas feature we created in London in December, no real hurry obviously, it is for publication next Christmas, but the day was SO hectic, it gets dark so early in December there was so much to do on the day to create the imagery that I did not have time to interview the lovely textile designer and lecturer Kiren Passi, the owner of the house, so I will enjoy doing that later this week.

I am enjoying

Hibernating, the weather is rubbish, I have a lot of writing and life admin to do, so I am hoping to just hide until it is all done and emerge in the spring for more shoots and socials…

Happy days…