Girlbooker's Tea and Toast

Against the backdrop of the cafe’s low intensity weekday bustle, I had one of those wonderful, soul affirming catch ups with an old and dear friend. She’s a teacher, and we talked about how technology is changing so many things for students (and therefore teachers) these days. One of the surprising things we discussed was the importance of boredom. In particular, the necessity of boredom for creativity, and also for social as well as cognitive development.  Now that I’ve used a few big words in a row, I’ll try and explain what I mean like a normal person. Creativity only comes when we are backed into a corner and have nothing else to do except try to entertain ourselves. If you have a smart phone handy then you can easily use that to alleviate your boredom, but that means you don’t learn the skills to entertain yourself in any other way. You don’t invent games, ideas or coping mechanisms. The extension of this is that learning how to cope with boredom is great practise for hig...

I was waiting for a train the other day, and had a sudden flash of happy memory; a book I had read largely on public transport a few weeks earlier popped into my head and I enjoyed a brief moment of enjoying it all over again. (The book in question, in case you’re wondering is The Portable Veblen, one the best books you’ve never heard of, in my humble opinion). So this got me thinking about books and travel.   Are there certain kinds of books that are better suited to reading on the go than others? And if so, what are they? First and most importantly, it’s best to avoid deeply emotional tear-jerker books in public. I’m a big crier, and it really doesn’t take much to set me off so I need to be especially careful, but sometimes it’s just unavoidable. A couple of weeks ago, the woman standing behind me on the train was reading and working her facial muscles like a gymnast in order to hold back the tears. Personally, it just made me want to give her a hug and then become best frie...