Postcards

Held for Collection

Welcome to Postcards

A year ago, we sowed something new and called it Brave Seeds.

Since then, those seeds have grown into a year of essays, a gathering of readers and, eventually, a book:

Postcards from the Platform's Edge.

So it seems only right that the journal should grow up a little too.

From now on, Brave Seeds Journal becomes simply Postcards.

A postcard is a small thing. A few lines sent from somewhere to mark a moment, share an observation, or simply say:

"I saw this and thought of you"... That's really what we've been writing all along.

No forwarding address. No subscription. No hurry. No membership required.

From this month, they're free for everyone. Read one or read six - and come back when you fancy another.

And if, somewhere along the way, Platform 13 earns a small place in your week, become a friend.

The October Omnibus

Memory - Our substitute for Love

"If there is any substitute for love, it is memory." - Joseph Brodsky It's a hard sentence to sit with, because at first it sounds like a consolation prize. Love, like Coca-Cola, is the real thing - warm and fuzzy and present in the room. Then whoosh… the rug is pulled, and we seem to be left with just a bunch of memories. Which, in the great theatre of our lives, looks rather like the understudy - the picture, not the person. You'd be forgiven for reading it as a bit of a do

🌱 Brave Seeds

8 min read

Objects that catch our fall

My Dad left me his watch. It no longer works particularly well, although it is certainly spot on twice a day, every day. But it's not about the watch. It's certainly not about being able to tell the time. Our smartphones carry the weight of that onerous task. So yeah... it no longer tells the time. But it tells me him. This is one item on a long list of peculiar things that happen when somebody close leaves us. Humble objects are suddenly promoted into classes way above their

Cornerstone - Featured - Free

5 min read

Food that remembers for us...

Marcel Proust got there first, as he usually did, and at considerably greater length than necessary. In his wordy work "In Search of Lost Time" he describes in encyclopedic detail how a mouthful of a Madeleine dipped in his tea, prompted his entire forgotten childhood in Combray to come flooding back. The small sponge cake unlocking several hundred pages of Proustian prose. Most of us might have just muttered "nice" and got on with our day. But young Marcel was onto something

🌱 Brave Seeds

5 min read

What old walls hold

Vanessa and I live in a French Château. Ok. Here's the actual truth of it... We occupy the back corner of someone else’s château. We rent it, we don’t own it. The central heating doesn’t really work, so in November the warmest room in the house is still the car. But... it is a total dream to live there. So before you picture me, at 8pm in a smoking jacket, dismissing the under-butler for under-polishing my teapot, thank you, we already bear a sufficient weight of imposter syn

🌱 Brave Seeds

5 min read

Getting over it...

It’s one of those phrases we reach for without thinking, always meaning well. “You’ll get over it. Time’s such a healer.” We say it to the bereaved the way we’d speak to someone recovering from the ’flu or a sprained ankle, as though grief were a fence to be climbed, or a stream to be forded - a single, tangible obstacle, with a clear far side, after which normal service resumes. It isn’t. And the fence is just the wrong metaphor on almost every level. A grief counsellor name

The French Connection

5 min read

Classic Novelty...

It was Paris Design Week. It's one of those things that I tend to go to as a bag carrier, rather than a fan. My taste in architecture, art, culture and cutlery looks mostly backwards rather than boldly towards a futuristic, cutting edge... I don't like reinvention for its own sake. For me, there is a huge difference between design and innovation. In fact the very word design should be legally obliged to be accompanied at all times, by a qualifying adjective. Interior design,

Cornerstone - Featured - Free

6 min read

Poste Restante - Held for Collection

Poste Restante is - or sadly perhaps was - the beautiful and graceful, old art of holding a traveller's letters at some far-flung counter, in the confident expectation of their eventual return, days, weeks or months later, to collect them.

No forwarding address. No hurry. Just words, kept safe, for whenever you next came by.

So it is here. This is where a year of postcards is held for collection - the essays, stories and observations that have arrived on Platform 13 over the last twelve months.

A place to wander slowly amongst the challenges of the human condition, the odd things that are friends with language and place, the important pleasures of food and friendship, and the many subjects that catch our attention along the way.

Read away, and let curiosity be your guide.