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:
“Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Although this garrulity of advising is born with us, I confess that life is rather a subject of wonder, than of didactics. So much fate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown inspiration enter into it, that we doubt we can say anything out of our own experience whereby to help each other.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)