When I visit my Granny at the retirement village where she lives, I’m always curious about the items that traveled with her from the home she had lived in for 35 years. There is a set of armchairs, a single bed, an ornate, wooden side table, an old cabinet, a chest of drawers, some basic appliances, photograph frames, piles and piles of papers, bottles of medication. The linen is clean but worn – in fact, everything is worn and not least of all my darling old Granny. She does

In my novel Letters to the Black Underground, society revolves sycophantically around consumption, which is undertaken as a compulsive daily ritual in ego-building as a substitute for real substance, real connection, real meaning. In this world, people are alienated from one another, isolated in cluttered apartments crammed full of unopened boxes of plastic crap that was purchased, delivered, and forgotten in the blink of an eye. In this society expression takes the form of 1

Now that we have explored my approach to dressing, something of the psychology of the person upon whom the backpacking trip was inflicted will have become contextualised. Two forces war within me and they are Minimalism and Compulsion. The Minimalist prunes the wardrobe, gives away possessions, packs lightly, goes on a roadtrip without a proper plan and sincerely admires the modest accommodations of the rural village and the freedom of spirit of those who would abandon securi

Far from being a pretentious vindication of the modus operandi of the women’s glossy magazine, there does seem to be quite a direct link between what you wear, how you see yourself, and thus what you are capable of accomplishing on any given day. I remember watching what seemed to be a legit YouTube clip once about ‘a study’ that tested how well one group of people performed on certain arithmetic tests while wearing a lab coat they were told was a scientist’s coat, versus peo