Inspiration
Garner was inspired to write the story when he encountered a plate with an owl pattern. More than forty years later the design was attributed to Christopher Dresser sometime between 1862 and 1904. (It is a floral design in which some "flowers" can be read as "owls" when upside down.)
Peter Plummer described in 1979 a nationwide search for surviving dinner service with the same owl/flower pattern, conducted in association with TV Times during 1969:
- "I only know now that there are precious few of these sets in circulation.....(we) only managed to turn up three other copies, one of which, curiously enough, had been accompanied by very unpleasant associations of disaster in the family which had owned it (and one of the other families suddenly woke up to what it was they were eating their tea off while watching the transmission of the first episode)."
In 2012 Garner mentioned that he had only ever seen five plates with the design.
He may have drawn inspiration also from his school, Manchester Grammar School, whose badge is an owl.
Read more about this topic: The Owl Service
Famous quotes containing the word inspiration:
“What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Free labor has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“Poets should be lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead, the civil code, and the day’s work. But now the two things seem irreconcilably parted.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)