TONIGHT: White Ink Creative Meet Up!
All the details you need to join
I have spent this week on holiday in North Norfolk with my daughter and my mum. We rented a little flint cottage and spent lazy days walking out onto the saltmarshes, watching the dog splash in the surf and reading – lots of reading for me as I am researching for my new book.
We stayed in a place called Blakeney that I have been visiting since I was a small girl, and I still love it so much, mostly because it hasn’t changed at all. It is a very small place, a village, with just one long road that wraps around the quay where on sunny days children delight in crabbing and in the summer evenings the teenagers play cricket without fear of traffic to ruin their game.
On the way home, we stopped by another of my childhood haunts, a village called Linton, just south of Cambridge, where I grew up and where my dad lived until he died. We walked through the churchyard, out to open fields and round to the old watermill which is now a set of smart apartments. We stopped in the ford where my daughter and the dog splashed around in the stream while we walked on the bank. It gave me so much pleasure that she asked of her own volition to do this as it is exactly what I did as a girl. She didn’t care that it would soak her trainers all her clothes, she just felt that compulsion — very much like the dog — to get in the water and enjoy a sunny day with abandon.
Again, I love it there so much because so little has changed. It is pure nostalgia for me, simpler times, and to add to the nostalgia in Norfolk we had also met up with old friends, people we have known for four decades, including two of my male friends who I met thirty years ago when we went to journalism college – the same time I met my bestfriend, Jane. It is her funeral this week and we went into the same church where my dad’s funeral was held 24 years ago to light a candle for her, and me and my male friends raised a toast to her, and just for a moment it felt as if she was joining us at the table.
I could happily live in either of these places I have described to you – I hope one day I will – but in the meantime it has to be enough to visit them and remember all the bits I love the most.
Anyway, I am home now, back to household chores, work and washing, and tonight, our creative meet-up. What with all this travelling and remembering I haven’t actually got around to organising tonight’s workshop and so what I thought we could do instead is have a troubleshooting hour, an ask me anything hour, a chance to discuss your work in progress, or an essay you’re having trouble with and let’s see if we can untangle a few knots. Remember it’s always good to listen to the things that other people are struggling with too as a way of unlocking your own work. I will also tell you a little more about my own creative process at the moment as I am writing and researching — how much research is too much research etc.
And anyway, it’s always just nice for this White Ink community to spend an hour together. Dial in, turn your camera on or keep it off, chat or just listen, but it would be lovely to have you there around my dining table.
And so, it is tonight at 7pm BST, it is for paid subscribers only, and so all the details you need to join the zoom are below, and if you are not yet a White Ink member, you can upgrade here: