Life in Greece in the 1960s

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

Relief! We are now the far side of our three slide show presentations to launch The Garden of the Grandfather. The first was on home ground in Hemyock; the second, a little further afield in Somerset; the third was held in Athens on October 7th at the Katakouzenos House Museum in Amalias avenue. That was very kindly opened by the British Ambassador and was very well attended. Our week in Greece was spent, half in Papingo, and half in Athens, with very good Greek friends met and made over very many years. We’ve made new friends thanks to The Garden. Among them is Sofika Eleftheroudaki who came to the launch in Athens. The famous bookshop is now closed, but there will be some kind of future. Writers, publishers and bookshops carry on, in one way of another.

Halfway through the slide presentation there were a couple of slides acting as links in the story. One showed the re-creation of a cartoon I did to illustrate a Paul Jennings’ piece in the Observer about funny mis-translations. The cartoon led me to a literary agent who sold my first novel to Michael Joseph and film rights to Anglo-Amalgamated. The next slide showed photos of two paintings Peter did for the Sunday Times near the start of his career as a wildlife illustrator. See below.

Flying water in all rooms