Hello and welcome to my newsletter

And thank you for coming on a stroll with me!

To be honest, many of you receiving this email signed up so many moons ago you probably even forgot that you existed on my mailing list. So I am going to start by saying that if you are receiving this out of the blue, and for whatever reason this doesn’t make you wildly happy, please hit the unsubscribe button as I personally loathe spam, and pointless newsletters count as spam, this one included.

But if you did subscribe eons ago and you are happy to be here, well then! It’s taken me this long because honestly, the digital world is as exhausting or possibly even more exhausting than the real world, and creating content is often a very solitary process. My work load has been so enormous for a number of years now, and the thought of adding to it by learning yet another way of being in the digital world, frankly, it exhausted me even thinking about it.

So what changed? Why now? Well, there are some personal reasons which don’t need to be shared but they are wonderful and life-changing for me. But there is also the reality of my loneliness, a kind of post-covid-lockdown-struggle sadness, that is seeping into me. I will explain….

When I moved to France early in 2017, I thought I was going to be here for two or three months. And then I thought it was going to be maybe six months. And then longer. We started out in short-term AirBnB rentals in the centre of Tours, which is a major town on the Loire River, and we moved repeatedly for two years until, just before the first lockdowns in 2020, we finally moved 120km to the west of Tours, still near the Loire, but amongst the vineyards and forests, and into a very large ancient stone house with an enormous garden. Which was just as well because four weeks after completing that move, France shut down abruptly and completely for months.

I thank the goddesses above for bringing us here just before lockdown. If we had had to spend the repeated lockdowns of 2020-21 in our last apartment, I honestly don’t know how we would have fared. I think I would have turning into a wailing banshee! But at the same time, this new place was more expensive than our old apartment, and when covid came, my partner lost all his work, and I became the sole breadwinner.

All of this is a way of saying I haven’t had time to do much else but simply survive since 2017. We didn’t come here with an elegant French plan, or even an elegant French visa. We came with no visa at all, and certainly no plan to stay. I thought I was going back to Australia in 2018, but the fates conspired against me, and then covid walloped the last bit of that idea firmly on the head. In my mind, it has felt like I am trying to climb a steep rocky cliff to reach a pinnacle far above, with two children on my back, clinging to the ledges with my fingernails with all my might, and knowing that I simply can’t fall.

Our plans to open up the new house, my dreams of being less lonely here, of being able to invite people over, of cooking dinners for guests, of eventually hosting workshops, all had to get shelved, and not thought about. Covid took me into my small atelier with my camera and my iPhone and it closed the door and kept me there, mostly alone, for over two years.

It was a strange blessing, because I had actually already been doing exactly that for the two years prior. The blessing was that because I was already working online, in isolation, and already was visible on Instagram in the work that I did, my work survived where the work of many other people faltered and in some case entirely evaporated. In the brocantes, I was one of the few buyers who was able to keep selling, because I did everything online and already had all my networks and systems in place, and so as the brocantes closed down, I was still able to buy from the network of sellers I had built up over the previous three years, and they would come to me when it was allowed, and we would do deals through the gateposts, distanced, wearing masks. The sting in the tail was that I was now lonelier than ever, but that felt less painful during the repeated confinements when I knew I shared that feeling with so many people across the globe, and when I also knew I was far better off, safe, warm, fed, and well, with accessible medical care and a government who at least made a decent semblance of looking after its people.

But when lockdowns finished, I was so tired, and so lonely. In late 2021 I had a bit of a health crisis, a long time coming, caused simply by endlessly working, endlessly peering into screens, no days off, and never even going outside for days at a time. That finally forced me to look at what I was doing, and to address the multiple elephants in the room. And I have to say it out loud. I am very lonely.

Instagram is where I make most of my living and it demands so much of my solitary time. But with covid gone, or gone to the point where France has largely returning to normal, I find myself unable to keep doing the same intensive solitariness. My heart is rebelling, and it’s pleading with me to get out of my atelier, and to reconnect with the world, and to find people and be with them. And I know I must.

My personal circumstances have changed just at the right time. I must still keep working but I have right now a small moment of pause, just a short time where I can finally ask - what do I need. And the answer is very loud - I need to reconnect and come back into the real world.

What I envision for this newsletter is it becomes a journal of my reconnecting. I cannot of necessity drop the work I already do, but I can slowly and gently start to shape it into something a little more humane for the person at the centre of it - me, the person holding it all up.

I want to take you out of my atelier and away from my ironing board, and into the countryside. I want us to go haring off together. I want you to give me the excuse to bail up some of the wonderful people I meet around here, winemakers, mushroom growers, people who dry apples in labyrinthine caves following a 600 year old recipe, people who are even more obsessed with cheese than I am, people who live in ancient monasteries and make the best soap in the world. I know all these people because I meet them in my travels but never until now have I had the breathing space to ask the simplest of questions - ‘Can I come to visit you? Will you tell me about your work? Can I share what you do?’

I want to use you as an excuse to go outside! And to be your eyes, which means to be able to learn to use my camera as I once wanted to, many years ago, when my first ambition was not to stage pretty still-lives in static textiles, but to be a photojournalist. I’m not aiming high here, and I am going to warn you that my ambitions possibly far outstrip my available time, but please come along and watch me try.

I also want to use your presence for something else which is important to me. I am not an antique seller by nature. I am a writer. Over these past five years I have had a very intensive writing practice which involves fitting everything into 2200 characters, the maximum Instagram will allow. I love the work of Ernest Hemingway, Ian Fleming, Jean Rhys, Albert Camus - people who were adept at conjuring whole scenes with the sparsest possible use of words. But also, sometimes, often, increasingly, I want more of some of my other beloved writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Angela Carter, Patrick White, people who loved the sound of words, who felt them not just in sparse and profound meaning but in sonorous, rapturous sentences that sometimes require re-reading, and sometimes just fall into the ears before they imprint on the brain.

And lastly, Instagram, my public town square, my cricket pitch, my speed-dating service, has sadly taken a turn for the worse. Instagram had us all in a monopolised thrall for close on two years, but when our respective confinements gradually opened up, and we stepped out blinking into the light, we, many of us, found that we had changed, and that we too craved our fellow people, not the blue light of screens. Instagram is now throwing a tantrum about that, because when our attention leaves, so does our money, and Insta is losing money. In return, it is behaving in a terribly censorious manner, so that whenever you now mention a website, a workshop, a sign-up, anything that may take your followers with their money off Instagram and over to another place, or out into the real world, Instagram blocks the visibility. For me, a relatively small account, this is not having a huge impact. My readers and customers are pretty loyal people and many of them have put me onto their favourites list (ask me how to do that :) , or search me out. But for larger accounts, engagement has gone down by around 90% in some cases, and I have regular moments where I think ‘oh, I haven’t seen x for a while, I hope they are ok” only to go over to their account and find they have been posting steadily away and I have missed EVERYTHING. I see friends struggling and frustrated - their income stream, like mine, depends on dependable visibility, and that is not a given. So, many of us now need to watch carefully what we say or do. Instagram also censors anything political it doesn’t like, and again I watch engagement drop right down whenever I mention certain topics, like neocolonialism and white supremacy, both of which are topics it is necessary to unravel if you are to understand the textile trade of the past 600 years with any clarity.

In short, Instagram is becoming a very bland and very heavily monitored cash cow, and the sense of community and sharing has been eroded by an exhaustion and desperateness which doesn’t resonate for many of us who have been on the platform for any length of time.

So…I need another place, to write and share.

And I think this here is it. And so I am committing at the moment to writing twice a month, I am going to choose two days each month and stick to them, for my own discipline, and see how it goes. Please come along and watch me figure out how to do this, what works and what doesn’t, and in return I will try and hold myself accountable by getting out into the real world and seeing what is there. I am still learning how this platform works, whether or not it allows public comments, and how, but if you ever feel like commenting in a space where you can, please do. I read everything!

My next newsletter will be about houses, the beginning of my search for a place to live that is mine, which started just yesterday. I hope you can come along!