I was talking to a friend recently about a party she attended that was packed with “influencers” – shiny young women who go to the coolest parties and restaurants and wear the latest clothes and document it on Instagram stories that disappear in a day. For some reason, it made me think of my grandparents who rarely had new clothes, who didn’t have a television until late in life, whose biggest outings were to town on Saturday afternoons and church on Sundays. They led hardscrabble lives of utmost simplicity and grind-you-down physical labor. I don’t know what they hoped for when they were young, but I think their adult lives mostly involved hand-to-mouth survival and raising their children and bringing in a good cash crop of tobacco to see them through the winter. My mother was a teacher who heaved my brothers and me up a little higher than subsistence farm life, but still struggled to get some security. I couldn’t wait to leave it all behind—what I considered bare-minimum dreams, small-town myopia, a life with limits. And I’m glad I did, but when I remember my grandparents in their tiny sharecropper house, of running barefoot with my gang of cousins, of the smell of honeysuckle outside one of our ramshackle rentals, I’m thankful they were the early, indelible influencers in my life. 

I discovered oatcakes the first time I went to London, but I couldn’t find the same brand here in the U.S. I’ve gone through a couple of unsatisfying brands since then, but just discovered Effie’s Oatcakes at a local supermarket (Earthfare, which I travel across two bridges to reach). I think they’re the perfect accompaniment to cheese of all kinds, but the texture is what really sets them apart. Kind of sandy and sturdy, and they complement the cheese rather than just serving as a bland delivery method. 

I'm not an opera fan, and I didn’t see the premier of Unholy Wars opera conceived and performed by Karim Sulayman (praised by BBC Music Magazine for his “lucid, velvety tenor and popstar charisma”) at Charleston’s Spoleto Festival, but the video preview of him singing Schubert’s “Nacht und Traume" was so haunting that I had to download his acclaimed album  Where Only Stars Can Hear Us.  

Whenever I stop drawing in my journal for a while and have to ease back into the practice, I do Blind Contour Drawing. I’ve just started again and can’t remember why I ever stopped.  And NO, you don’t have to be an artist to get the benefits of it. Blind contour drawing is meditative and rewarding even if you’re stuck at stick figures. 

I have an addiction to spy novels, with John le Carré and Mick Herron being among my favorite authors. The Spy Who Knew Too Much, however, is a true story that reads like a spy novel and poses the question of whether the KGB had a mole in the CIA who was never caught, and it’s keeping me up at night. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I love listening to The Palace Papers on my walks. It’s a gossipy, irredeemably frivolous look at the “Real Housewives of Buckingham Palace.” My take? Aristocrats are not all that.