On Friday I attended the launch of The Gentle Author’s London Album. He’s the man behind the exhaustingly wonderful blog Spitalfields Life.

I was there, ostensibly, to complete an assignment for my MA. But when I spoke to the Gentle Author he gave me a quotation so glorious I thought it needed to be published in full.

Thank you sir, for both your patience on Friday and your endless stories.

“I think that something very political happened 200 years ago when they started printing newspapers. It created this thing that they call mass communication. But it wasn’t mass communication, it was mass distribution. And it created this myth of ‘the masses’ and this idea that everybody else in society is ‘the masses’. That became very exploited.

The outcome of this is that in big cities people don’t want to talk to each other, they’re scared of each other. I think that’s a great big lie. The point of my work is to write about everybody in a personal way. If everybody begins to know who everybody around them is, the world becomes a personal place.

That’s the great, liberating potential of the internet. Everyone can actually talk to each other and you can have mass communication. And in a very small way, that’s what this book and the blog is about – the potential of that.”

– The Gentle Author

You can purchase the book here.