Mini Inklings and Synchronicities
A sort of writer’s playtime used to take place in our house. We have a professional writer-cum-journalist friend, John, who used to visit this city from time to time to attend an editorial meeting. He combine d th is with a spot of research in the university library. And he used to stay a couple of nights with us. Once he got in of an evening, the three of us w o uld settle down in the sitting room with cups of tea, English breakfast or mint, and some biscuits, lift the lids of our laptops (yes, we kept one eye on our screens as we chat), and launch off into a discussion of our visitor’s latest piece of writing and all kinds of literary and publishing themes related to it. It wa s like a mini Inklings. Some new line of enquiry that John ha d begun led to discussion, then Googling, Wikipedia-scanning, dictionary look-up, and further discussion. More tea (for John) and then we beg a n to stumble off to bed. Not long ago John was working on some papers and chanced on a re...