5 Tweets That Brought Ordinary and Special Together

Inspiration for the start of the day.

Milk in the Fridge. Photograph by Author.

The snowplough scared the dog. So he came into bed early this morning. It was still dark, and whilst having my Marcus Aubrey moment of hot lemon and salt I attempted to write. The nearby phone was charged enough to let Twitter wave.

So, instead of my writing challenge “advice that I’ve been loving lately”, I browsed Twitter. I started to bookmark stories I liked and wondered why I had stopped on these? What was the inspiration I was looking for? Was it just a distraction? Was my sleepy salty brain in contact with a truer creative self?

This is the collection:

• Harry Styles’s New Look.
  Vogue tweet with photographs from the set of his new movie, and he’s wearing a suit. Vogue and Hello! are my go-to magazines when it sucks. For me, they are less hairdresser magazines and more hospital bed fodder. The importance of which bag Victoria Beckham is carrying seems to matter when the real world is about cardboard sick bowls. They are my distraction into a white carpet world and my inspiration into admiring the beauty and embroidery of Dior. The attention to detail, and the work that goes into making something look graceful and beautiful. Makes me get my appearance act together.
• Stacey Abrams and Romantic Novels.
  “Someone who sees that possibility for hope, and works to make it come to pass, is a quintessentially romance thing. You could just drown in pessimism, but she didn’t.” Ms Milan on Stacey Abrams.
  Stacey Abrams wrote romantic novels. When it feels like I’m doing unconnected things, Ms Milan’s observations remind me there may be a link. Sometimes it takes time or others to see it.
• Valor Glass Vials for Coronavirus Vaccine.
  Because of course glass breaks. With the attention on speed, which vaccine, and the distribution models, this tweet just made me go “Hadn’t thought of that”. I love those moments that make me stop and realise how much is going on that I’m not paying attention to. The full article in The New Yorker has beautiful photographs and begins with a story about Tiberius. A tweet that leads to an article about Roman emperors is a classical start to the morning.
• Milk in a Fridge.
  How we notice a change is sometimes not the change itself but the little ordinary things. Dr Vanessa Wong’s observation that there is milk in the tearoom fridge, as a sign that the campus is reopening is an example of a big event marked by a small moment. I need to pay attention to the fridge.
• Story of a Cobble.
  A challenge to write a story about the processes that left their mark on this cobble. The joy of technical words, such as porphyritic texture, reminds me of language I used to know, and have no use for in my everyday world. The video describes the geological processes with locations like the Appalachian Mountains and the Moormans River. This tweet reminds me to have fun playing with words, and how proper nouns can spark the imagination.

What do they have in common? There’s an imaginative call to glamour and distant places. There is an idea that there is a link between roles which seem different (romantic writer and political life). A joy of science, learning, academics and language mixed in with the practical world of glass, fridges, milk and cobbles.

The ability to bring ordinary and special things together and ask a different question. Cornelia Parker.

So what’s the advice I’m loving?

Take ordinary and special and ask “What’s your question for today?”