I cannot resist rushing to get my camera when I see a sunset like this.   Not that this photo captures the true extent of it, nor its depth of colour.  Real-life experience cannot be beaten, even if you are a dab hand with photoshop  (which is certainly not me),

outside and then looking inside

Uploading photos is a good delaying tactic, a temporary escape from the prickly job of getting back into the novel I was writing before I began writing the text of The Garden of the Grandfather, Life in Greece in the 1960s.  That’s well over a year ago now.  I find fiction writing  both harder and easier than writing fact.  Harder, because you have to conjure and shape fiction from nowhere but your own mind; easier, because your own mind is the irrefutable source.  Getting facts right worries me – though in Trumpbrexitage, maybe accuracy matters not a jot.

Sofika Eleftherodaki came to our book launch in Athens last week.  She’s the CEO of the famous Athens bookshop, now sadly closed.  Let’s hope it’s only gone into a chrysallis stage, to hatch out in the future in a new form.   Sofika understands the importance of pinning down memories with photographs, as butterflies used to be in the past.  Most photos these days are taken on smartphones, hundreds of them never being saved in print form.  Even so,  there are some marvellous photographs being taken and printed by gifted photographers with amazing technical ability.  But technology cannot yet reproduce real-life experience.   That has become more precious in this virtual reality age.  Will Self has written a thought-provoking essay in this month’s Harper’s magazine.  The Printed Word in Peril, Reading, Writing and the Tyranny of the Virtual.  More about that another time.

For information about The Garden of The Grandfather, Life in Greece in the 1960s, go to this page The Garden of the Grandfather, Life in Greece in the 1960s