Time Travelling the Everyday
Building a Compost Heap of Inspiration
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Hello Friends,
Happy Friday.
Today’s letter comes from a new location — I’m back at the home where I grew up for a few days.
The house isn’t exactly the same, physically, but the familiarity is comforting. Reassuring.
On the way here, I made a detour to London — a conscious decision to break the rhythm of the everyday and seek out some offline inspiration.
I’m learning that inspiration doesn’t strike like a lightning bolt. It’s not singular or sudden.
It’s compost: an accumulation of little moments, fragments, places, stories — layered over time until something new grows from it.
One of those layers was a visit to the Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, thanks to Huma’s recommendation in her wonderful newsletter.
I didn’t know much about Tirzah before. She was from Great Bardfield, Essex (also home to the best hairdressers, Kitten & Hare), and married to Eric Ravilious — a name I recognised. But like so many women of her time, her own work wasn’t widely seen.
She married young, had three children, and wrote with raw honesty about the challenge of continuing to create while running a household.
And yet — she made things: wood engravings, paintings, paper collages, delicate marbled patterns.
There was a quiet persistence to it all, and a kind of magic too — her work felt alive with tiny, tender details, as if someone had just stepped out of the frame.
It was also deeply moving. Tirzah lost Eric during the war, and died of cancer at just forty-two.
And still, her later works shimmer with grace.
Spanish Lady, a self-portrait in the form of a ceramic figure beneath a night sky, felt especially poignant. There’s sorrow in the story, yes — but also acceptance. Peace.
The exhibition closes in a few days, but it’s so worth a visit if you’re nearby.
Alongside the exhibition, just being in London always inspires me.
There’s a vibrance in the city’s rhythm — and I try to ride the bus whenever I can, to watch life unfold through the windows.
Past Mansell Street, where I worked in a stockbrokers at 18 — so clueless, still a baby.
Over Tower Bridge, the same route I drove at 23, visiting a boy. No sat nav. Just a scrap of paper with directions and my heart in my throat.
Then to Dulwich Village and the entrance to the park I used to run around when I was 27.
I’d forgotten I used to run around Dulwich Park — maybe because I’d blocked out the memory of the flat we lived in then: damp, barred-up windows.
But standing at the park entrance brought it all back.
It was time travel.
The lush green of May.
The majesty of the trees.
The distant hum of traffic.
All unchanged — except for the flocks of bright green parakeets, now squawking overhead.
They weren’t there before. They’ve moved in, en masse, in my absence.
Seeing them transported me again — this time to a city park in Sydney, aged 23.
Awed that a city could be so familiar and so alien at once.
And maybe this is where the real magic lies.
New experiences unearth old ones.
Present moments echo the past.
All of it layering together — the compost heap of inspiration, building quietly beneath our feet.
Until next week.
Wishing you all a wonderful weekend.
Becca x
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