Border Crossings

Ever since I became an avid Bruce Chatwin fan, I’ve been passionate about Moleskine notebooks.

Before going travelling in the early 90s, I paid a special visit to the Parisian stationery shop on Rue de l'Ancienne Comedie, where Chatwin bought his notebooks. This at a time when the old Moleskine publishing house in Tours was in decline and on the point of winding up.

Then Nicky and I devoured Chatwin’s Songlines while we were in Australia, easily my favourite book ever. And finally, on a trip to mainland Greece, we stayed in Kardamyli, a small village where Chatwin just happened to have been buried after a turbulent end.

Kardamyli, Peloponnese, Greece. Photo courtesy of byrdiegyrl

So I keep my eye on the latest product development at Moleskine. I was excited to see preview notices of their new Moleskine Passions range – six different journals to record memories and thoughts about Recipes, Wine, Book, Film, Music and Wellness. Sounded like an interesting way of creating a personal archive dedicated to one’s passions.

Photo courtesy of Magic Madzik

Interesting to note, then, the disappointed response of some on the Moleskine fansites. One fan has written, “The Passions series defeats the purpose and mentality of the Moleskine brand (creativity and space to write, make art, and think freely). Another notes,

“I used to be fixated on compartmentalizing my life – including aspects of my life as I record them in notebooks. When I discovered Moleskine, however, I was beginning a new stage in my life where I realized that everything connects. Moleskine embodied this concept for me – that a notebook so simple and elegant could easily hold together all the various details of my life and form a cohesive reflection of my interests, passions and quirks, despite their differences”.

I must admit that I too have always valued a Moleskine notebook for notating thoughts, feelings and memories across every area of my life.

Experts in creativity like Michael Michalko, author of Cracking Creativity, maintain that creativity is about making unexpected connections. To stimulate creativity, we need to go beyond our usual tendency to compartmentalize, freely mixing elements from different areas as a master chef might blend unexpected ingredients. And, no, I’m not thinking of a deep-fried Mars Bar.

Photo courtesy of Whatleydude

We’ve recently come across a creative home for unexpected connections, a social enterprise based in London called The School of Life.

Set up by the popular philosopher, Alain de Botton, the school offers cross-disciplinary courses around themes like Love, Work, Death, Making a Difference, and Friendship. Drawing on unexpected songlines of learning from such fields as psychology, literature, philosophy and anthropology, it offers a melting pot of ideas guaranteed to rouse the dullest soul on a grey February day.

Curious photo courtesy of YOsi

Perhaps Moleskine could re-brand their Passions series along these thematic lines?

How about a Love notebook, where one could record thoughts about one’s beloved, aphrodisiac recipes or simply ones that set your tastebuds racing, reflections on the currently unloveable aspects of your life, or things you would love to love if you weren’t so busy hating them.

Whatever, I remain a committed Moleskine afficianado, forever grateful to its notebooks for their spurs to my creative reflection. A sort of portable school of life, the notes that I’ve made in them have triggered me to travel, to change life direction, or even just to change my wardrobe.

A tried and trusted friend, indeed.

Don't Waste Words

Since one of our friends recently bought a one-way ticket to Australia to emigrate, our travel juices have been flowing fast. The urge to pack light and buy a one-way ticket is very strong! This grey February hunger for travel has also taken us back to the times in our 20’s and 30’s when we each got bitten by the travel bug and headed off on adventures. As a result, we’re making plans to return to Morocco to explore Marrakech and its surroundings next week.


One of the things that we love about Morocco is the sheer visual impact of the country. Whether it’s the colourful souks of Marrakech, the lush green oases bordering rubble-strewn roads, or the undulating dunes of the Sahara, Morocco is a photographer’s paradise.

Sahara, courtesy of Stephi

Great to read then of the new exhibition Earth: Art of a Changing World at The Royal Academy which draws on photographic and artistic responses to travel, albeit with a twist.

Cape Farewell is the trailblazing organisation founded by artist David Buckland that instigates artistic responses to climate change. Over the last ten years, the organization has packed off some of our most interesting visual artists and writers to the furthest reaches of the earth, encouraging them to create work that reflects on what’s happening to our planet.

Buckland believes that we’re trying to communicate about climate change using the wrong language – that is, through words rather than in visual images. Words and statistics may be relevant to scientific documents and analyses. In Buckland’s view, though, nothing can replace the shock impact of photography and artwork that reveals the fragility of our world.

If you saw the film of The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, the true-life story of a man with “locked-in syndrome”, you may remember the hallucinatory sequence of icebergs melting. I remember how that brought home to me the impact of climate change more powerfully than anything I’d read until then.

Photo courtesy of nick_russill

Words are fine for conveying complex information but sometimes a well-chosen image has a quite different emotional impact on us. For us, travelling replenishes our creative wells and stocks us up with inspiring images for the next months and years of our lives.

So as the quotation engraved on the wall of Millican Dalton’s cave goes, “Don’t waste words. Jump to conclusions”.

Get travelling.

What is "Cool"?

Recently we’ve been contemplating the state of men’s fashion.

A trip to Regent Street – okay, hardly the cutting-edge of contemporary fashion but a retail landmark nevertheless – threw us into deep gloom.

Apart from the scintillating colours in Desigual, we found men’s clothing shops awash with blacks and greys. As if this country has elected to swathe itself in mourning for the remaining winter months.

What is it with the fashion industry? Do they really think that men are so terminally depressed as to want to wear black 24/7?

Brilliant then to find a pair of independent fashion blogs busting the myth of dull fashion. Welcome to the wonderful world of Steve Salter and Susanna Lau, real-life partners, and each with their very different but equally quirky sites at Style Salvage and Style Bubble .

Scrolling down through these blogs, one’s treated to a gallery of stylish, exotic and idiosyncratic designs. What’s more the ravishing images are matched by equally stylish and intelligent prose. And how about British designer Sarah Williams' fantastic luggage, posted on Style Salvage only yesterday.

Photo courtesy of Williams British Handmade

Contemplating some of the cool designs online, we’ve been reminded of an illuminating essay Cool Hunting With Aristotle by Nick Southgate, a trained philosopher. Southgate mounts a hilarious attack on companies’ desperate attempts to hire cool people to find out what cool people are doing.

As a philosopher, Southgate refuses to base his observations on fashion on anything as reductive as market research or commercial popularity. Instead, he enlists help from ancient philosopher, Aristotle, as his touchstone.

It was Aristotle who first outlined a series of principles concerning the virtues of life, many of which have direct application to an understanding of ‘cool’.

In recent years, fashion companies have tried to master the art of ‘cool hunting’, predicting coming styles through a mixture of market research and commercial trend analysis. Southgate contents that this way lies death. What are needed are designers and companies brave enough to follow their own instincts and to develop brands that play to their personal passions.

He argues that fashion design should constantly seek to push at the margins, linked to whatever its designer’s deepest values might be:
“If one thinks that sport should be democratic, then develop a sports brand that is about justice (arguably where Nike started, but not where they have ended up). If you think fashion is too magnificent, re-discover its generosity. If fashion is too witty, use it to tug at justice. If fashion dealing with justice is too rich for you, reassert its friendliness or truthfulness. Each will create new ways of being cool and maybe find an audience”.

They’re words close to our heart. At Millican, we believe in vintage, classic design wedded to strong ethical and eco standards.

One of our templates for design has been an old Victorian Dunhill bag that we own. Susanna Lau celebrates a similar bag in one of her January blogs. When we’re able to draw on such vintage design, combine it with contemporary functionality, and meet the highest sustainable standards, that’s given us the biggest kick of all.


Classic design combined with contemporary craftsmanship and ethically sourced materials and working practices. We’ve no idea whether that ticks any market research boxes, but it’s our idea of ‘cool’.

So rather than just wandering the shops of Regent Street lamenting clothes in the new grey or black, we’re taking inspiration from these fashion blogs and will do more of our shopping online with, for example estore Oki Ni and independents like Oi Polloi. We all need chain stores at times but for wit, originality and true style, it’s the independent mavericks that have it.

Winning The Work/Life Battle

Guest Blog by Matthew Entwistle

Achieving the right balance between work and leisure can sometimes be a real challenge. It's all too easy to neglect your passions after a hard day in the office, and the little free time we struggle to create for ourselves is so easily lost.

It was with this in mind that my partner and I decided to escape the everyday and claw back some "me" time by heading to New South Wales in Australia for five months of bushwalking, camping and fishing on the nations south east coast.

After arranging time off work and leaving everything behind we soon found ourselves with all the time in the world - but still with no time to waste, so we entered the bush at the historic National Trust village of Central Tilba at the earliest opportunity with just our faithful rucksacks (and the odd luxury of course!)

Whilst slowly trekking through the easy going rainforest gullies and the vast State Forests around Gulaga (Mount Dromedary) and Wallaga Lake it soon became apparent that there is nothing quite like taking life at your own pace.

Photo courtesy of TravellingTamas

I guess it is the element of freedom that is most apparent as every decision made is our own and any deadlines to work to are as flexible as we wish.

Imaginations and senses work in overdrive when travelling through the bush and are not stifled by traffic noise or TV and the like and it's easy to picture yourself as a gold mining pioneer or bushranger. Rediscovering good old fashioned enjoyment with only the basic things in life is wonderful - priceless in fact. Materialism is highlighted as unimportant and we find that our most treasured possessions are our lifestyles and sense of humour.

I love my creature comforts, but after living without them for a while soon remembered a thing or two about making our own entertainment. I mean, what could be better than cooking our own damper bread or flatbreads on the campfire washed down with billycan tea and reigniting our enjoyment of deep (and shallow) conversation interrupted only by the odd visiting possum or tawny frogmouth owl; or listening to Kerrie sing a few Neil Young songs? What could be more relaxing than reading great literature such as Marcus Clarke's 'For the Term of His Natural Life', or eating freshly made popcorn whilst in our sleeping bags mesmerised by the amazingly clear Milky Way? Is there anything more rewarding than a few hours fishing for flathead or bream early in the morning before breakfast?

Possum, courtesy of Jess, Beemouse Labs

It was whilst enjoying these simple things in life that I started thinking how such activities had originally introduced me to the story of Millican Dalton and his spirit of adventure.

Having been inspired by him for years because of his affinity with nature, his focus on living his own life, his dislike of modern living, and his uncompromising lifelong search for thrills and adventure, I had now found myself enjoying the same sort of things and living a similar active lifestyle (although, sorry to say, only on a temporary basis).


This led me to ponder "Can we all live like Millican?" The answer was - yes, well almost.

Although it would be practically impossible to live the life of a modern day caveman in the 21st Century (and who would want to anyway?), we can, most definitely, have our own bite of the cherry and make more time to search out our own thrills and adventure. It's all about focusing on what’s important and developing our own philosophy of life. We can all set free our spirit of adventure and follow it wherever it goes.

So, when my Australian escapade is over and I'm back at work, I'll keep the spirit alive by planning my next well deserved holiday and claiming another little victory in the work/life battle.

Matthew Entwistle

Visit www.mountainmere.co.uk for more information on Matthew and Millican Dalton.