Reading · Encourage Meant

‘Field Notes for Curious Minds’, celebrating others, weekly.

In a world where volume drowns nuance, and over-assertion parades itself as discussion and debate, we hunt out and share the quiet voices. We are unashamedly optimistic and positive, hoping to lift spirits. Expect art, photography, architecture and insights to the world around us. Follow our trails of breadcrumbs to find moments of calm, kindred spirits, and ideas to be woven into your life well-lived.

There is an elegant simplicity to Danish design. It seems to inspire a sense of calm, offering rooms free of distractions.

As a child, photographer Matilde Viegas would be picked up from school by her mum and together they’d visit the local market for lunch. In adulthood, she fell out of that routine and into ‘frictionless’ modernity. This fascinating series of market images recaptures the hustle and bustle of everyday humanness she experienced as a youngster.

A POSTCARD FROM … Portugal

Looking at Matilde Viegas’s images of Portuguese markets immediately transported us back to a 3-month stay in (Jan-Mar 2021) in the village of Gouveia, not far from the Portuguese town of Sintra (site of a famous royal palace). Whilst Covid restrictions limited us to a 15km radius from our accommodation, we explored by bike and even cooked a Christmas dinner on a magical beach.

“I eat oranges, figs, and delicious pears, drink Colares wine, a sort of half-way excellence between port and claret, dream of poem after poem and play after play, take a siesta of two hours, and am as happy as if life were but one everlasting today, and tomorrow not to be provided for.”

― Rose Macaulay, They Went To Portugal

Talking of Portugal, this townhouse in Lisbon offers a sense of harmony; cool flagstones, whites and wood tones, and understated elegance.

If you like Portuguese interiors, you might also love:

Needlework holiday memories fit to hang on any wall.
The air of decadence hanging over this astonishing home in hills in the north of the country. Sometimes we all have to daydream!

‘How do you do it?’ said night

‘How do you wake up and shine?’

‘I keep it simple,’ said light

‘One day at a time’

Lemn Sissay

`Every week we seek out and highlight writers who stop us in our tracks with their words and ideas.`

Do, please, click a link or two and discover some amazing folk

Of course Solstice was a wee while back but the images and sentiments in this beautiful piece by Miscellaneous Adventures are timeless.
Talking of photography, it has been a while since we celebrated Andy Adams who in turn celebrates photographers like Robert Darch.
Firing off in a different direction … growing. We are VERY envious of the wonderful array of fruit and veg Kathy Slack is cultivating, particularly as our potager is suffering in the searing gaze of the mighty soleil. After a bumper cherry harvest, we only have tomatoes on the go now, but the hope of decent returns on the apple, pear and fig trees.
As we await the fruits of ‘our’ trees’ labours, we are touched by reflections from Patrick M. Lydon about how Koreans traditionally nurtured their relationships with ‘guardian trees’.

F I C T I O N

My lovely friend Matt Inwood gifted me ‘The New York Trilogy’ by Paul Auster. He guessed I would enjoy it. I loved it so much I wrote an homage clutching loosely at the style, characters and settings used by Auster to such good effect.