Wonky shot glasses, burning cottages, and urgent gardening
With Molly Steemson, Francesca Reece and Melissa Harrison
I’ve always been prone to a bit (read: a lot) of procrastination. Perhaps the worst instance was when, as an undergraduate, I put off researching my final dissertation for most of the academic year and then panicked as I realised the deadline was approaching. Then — to stress myself into a heart attack — I decided to change my entire thesis a month before the deadline. I researched and wrote 10,000 words in four weeks.
You’d think I’d learnt my lesson, but I did almost exactly the same thing for my Masters, squeezing a 16,000 word essay into a clammy six weeks. It’s a funny story now; it was not funny at the time.
What was I doing the entire year, you ask? Well, literally anything except the dissertation. I signed up for society exec roles, drank copious amounts of very sugary coffee, helped run a student paper, and explored Warwickshire’s quaint towns. When the urgency of the situation became clear, I cleaned my room and spent an hour reading birthday cards I’d saved from school friends I hadn’t seen in years. At one point, I took up crochet.
While a year of procrastination might be a slightly extreme case of wilful distraction, I was comforted when Boundless editor Patrick admitted a few weeks ago that he spent a weekend planting a hedge rather than editing his manuscript. We’re all guilty of it — and it’s about time we admit that. So, we’ve started a new Boundless series to do exactly that: ‘What I was doing when I should have been writing’ asks all kinds of writers what their distraction of choice is, and the first instalment in today’s issue comes from Melissa Harrison, novelist, nature writer and creator of the app Encounter. I hope you feel seen and heard; I know I will.
Sadia Nowshin
Junior Editor
Burning cottages
Francesca Reece on throwing stones in Wales — a long history of protest
As any Celt will tell you, moving to the dominant nation of this island is an exercise in being misunderstood. To attempt to assert Welsh identity outside of Wales is more often than not to be met with bemusement: ‘Isn’t Wales basically a suburb of England?’ a fellow fresher asked me at a toga party back in Bloomsbury Antica circa 2010. Arrival in the English capital was to prove a jarring experience on several levels; I’d known this would be the case — the trope of the hick arriving in the big city was one with which I was well-acquainted — but I hadn’t been expecting the surreal experience of having to inform several of my peers that Welsh was in fact a separate language, not a dialect of English, and that no, the Welsh were not docile, and in fact just like their Celtic brethren in nations with better PR, they weren’t too fond of the Saxons either. Nationalism has existed in Wales for as long as the English have been attempting domination. Even the dragon depicted on the flag is emblematic of horn-locking with our neighbours; according to the Mabinogion, deep under Dinas Emrys, the red dragon is engaged in eternal battle with an invading white one – no points for guessing from whence he came.
As per the old adage, to write is an attempt to be understood, and I suppose it was thus inevitable that I would write a novel set in rural North Wales. Glass Houses is the story of Gethin, a forestry worker who is being slowly automated out of much work, and his first love, Olwen, a filmmaker who is back in town after more than a decade in London — charming, bourgeois (and English) husband in tow. Steamy and inevitably adulterous plot aside, it’s a novel about class, about landscape, and about history, as, in the words of RS Thomas, Wales is a place where you cannot live in the present. The particular history dealt with in the book is one that our neighbours across the border seem to have largely forgotten. When the novel was very much in its embryonic stage, I knew that if I was going to write about incomers, about second homes, and about rural-urban tensions, I couldn’t avoid writing about the 1980s.
Francesca Reece's Glass Houses was published by Headline in May 2024.
Francesca also joined Patrick Galbraith on the latest episode of the Boundless podcast to chat all things forestry, second homes, and the Gavin and Stacey effect. Listen on Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Flat stems and wonky shots
Sommelier and writer Molly Steemson on glassware and what it means
On my 18th birthday, my godmother gave me two short-stemmed lead-crystal glasses. They’re small and obviously hand-blown, one contains a few small air-bubbles, the other contains one big one. They do not match. She sent me off to university with them, so I could invite boys over to my room 'for a sherry', which is how I ended many a first and second date.
The godmother in question has her own, extraordinary collection of Georgian lead crystal. She uses these elegant, heavy-stemmed, straight-sided glasses for wine, water and everything else. She gave me my glasses ostensibly as an aid in the art of seduction but she knew, I imagine, that they’d also be the start of a collection of my own.
I bought 70s pastis glasses from a charity shop on Blackstock Road, and wonky little shot glasses on the Greek island Syros. The pastis glasses, I was told, came from an elderly French woman; the shot glasses were made in the 1930s, in the last glass factory in the Cycladies, then buried for safe-keeping during the war. The factory is long-closed, but you can still the remaining glasses from a small shop in Ermoupoli where, one summer, I got mine.
I nurtured my shambly collection. I bought a set of nine small Roemer glasses—the ones with the fat, flared green stem — after a particularly good lunch at Brasserie Zedel: when I ordered a bottle of Alsatian Riesling (to go with our Alsatian Choucroute), our normal wine glasses were removed and replaced with Alsatian Roemers. It was the type of unbelievably charming service point that made Jeremy King an extraordinary restaurateur, the delight in those small details.
What I was doing when I should have been writing
Procrastination: we’re all guilty of it. In this new Boundless series, we ask writers what they find themselves doing as distraction when the empty draft awaits
Melissa Harrison
Tea, toast, Instagram, tea.
Attempting to look alert in two-hour Zoom with Polish app developers.
Googling ‘What are app analytics’, ‘What is user journey’, ‘What are wireframes’,
‘What UX stand for’, ‘What API stand for’.
Staring regretfully out of study window.
Urgent, unfocused gardening.
Unnecessarily complex lunch.
Opening spreadsheet of 4,000+ British and Irish plant and animal species. Scrolling up and down.
Googling ‘How find duplicates Excel’.
Googling ‘Restore previous version Excel’.
Urgent, unfocused gardening.
Tea.
Googling ‘How write terms conditions app’.
Googling ‘GDPR simple explainer’
Staring out of study window. Small sounds of distress.
Opening novel-in-progress.
Closing novel-in-progress.
[WORKING DAY ENDS]
Melissa’s guided journal Homecoming was published by Orion in November last year. Her nature journal app Encounter is now available to download
This is brilliant!! (Love Melissa’s “Attempting to look alert in two-hour Zoom”!)