A few seasons ago I interviewed Elizabeth Strout. The woman’s won a Pulitzer Prize, which isn’t to be sniffed at, but I was more aware of how artfully drawn her novels are. From the page - and I have spent happy weeks in her novels - Strout is clearly an astute observer. I get nervous before interviews as a general rule but I was particularly nervous before interviewing Elizabeth Strout.

When I did, she told me about all the jobs she did before she was published in her forties. She worked in the secretarial pool of the office of the college she had just graduated from (“that was fascinating… the people that came in were professors that I had had, and they were just so snobbish toward me, because I was just the secretary now”) and as a cocktail waitress and in a shoe mill. “All these different jobs that I had for, for those many years, have been enormously helpful for me to understand the people that I really want to be writing about,” she explained. “I watch people all the time. I mean, listen to people all the time. I've done it my entire life. And when you really do that, you learn a lot.”

I thought of Strout earlier this week when I sat on a bench in College Green, in Bristol, and ate an ice cream (more on that below) and watched people. I watched skateboarders duck and dive around pedestrians and a gangly pre-teen schoolgirl with her mother and a girl in crisp white ankle socks carrying two Tesco Finest pizzas and a young couple not quite sure of one another and a very thin woman running to the shop and returning with a bag of apples. I saw people making decisions and lost in their thoughts and staring at their phones and waiting for their friends and being caught up in their day.

I have to actively people-watch, have been trying to hone it as a practice for years because when there’s always a phone at hand it is easier - almost automatically easier - to scroll instead of look at what is happening in the world around us. Earlier this week we published an illuminating interview with Clover Stroud over on In Haste in which she admitted to the deletrious affect of her phone addiction. I could hard relate. Mine lives in the house when I go to the Hut, now.

More good things this week:...