When A Potato Was Just A Potato

Description

When A Potato Was Just A Potato

A love letter to the simpler things, and to the quiet art of being human

Modern life is rich in options and poor in oxygen. These essays are a gentle argument for proportion — for coffee that is a companion, not an exam; for music that invites deep listening; for letters that take their time and return us to ours. The book is not a campaign against technology, but a defence of texture, company, and the ordinary rituals that make a day inhabitable.

Written in short, vivid chapters, When a Potato Was Just a Potato is a companion for readers who sense that pace has out‑run purpose. It is not nostalgia; it is an invitation to look again – to find what is durable, hospitable, and quietly joyful in the life already here.

Author: Agis Apostolopoulos
Publisher: Alpha Twice Limited
Publication date: 29 October 2025
Formats & RRP: Paperback £14.98 | eBook £8.98 | Signed Paperback £19.98
Trim size: 15.3cm  x 23.4cm
Page count 146 pages
Category: Essays, Culture, Simplicity
Language: English

 

Read a sample

Coffee Without Performance (excerpt)

There used to be a very mild sacrament at 8:15 am: a cup, a pause, and a small decision to belong to the morning. The staff knew how you took it by the third visit – enough to make you feel seen, not studied. No one asked your origin story; beans did not require biography. You drank it and felt more able to meet the day.

To recover the ritual is not to refuse craft. It is simply to remember that warmth beats score‑keeping; that a kettle can tutor patience; that conversation improves most beverages.

The Album Before the Algorithm (excerpt)

There was a ritual to listening. A record had presence in the hand, a polite gravity. You slit the cellophane, slid the sleeve, lowered the needle – and entered. The best records did not flatter our tastes; they stretched them. You could know a thousand songs and still belong to one album as if it were a street you lived on.

Streaming arrived like a river with no banks. Curation became a job title. But the cure for thin attention might still be weight – choosing fewer things, and loving them longer.

 

Quotes

“What I miss is not a decade, but a texture.”
“Coffee is a companion, not a performance.”
“A letter was not a notification; it was a visitor.”
“You travelled to go somewhere, not to become someone.”
“Light luggage invites detours.”
“When music was an album, we were promised less and given more.”
“Keep one lamp that flatters evening.”

 

Contents

1. Preface — An Ode to the Ordinary
2. Introduction — Why We Needed This Book
3. When a Potato Was Just a Potato
4. The Album Before the Algorithm
5. Coffee Without Performance
6. Letters That Knew Their Weight
7. Shared Tables, Unphotographed Meals
8. The Art of Waiting
9. The Journey Called Holiday
10. Sunday With Nothing to Prove
11. Home Before It Became a Project
12. In Praise of Sleep
13. Epilogue — The Simplicity Manifesto

 

Who is it for?

Readers who enjoy reflective culture writing, slow living, modern philosophy in plain language, and essay‑collections you can dip into at bedtime.

 

About the author

Agis is a London-based visual communications designer, writer, and digital artist whose work explores where art, philosophy, and everyday life meet.
Agis is also the author of Overcome Anxiety, Fear & Depression: How to Find Peace and Happiness, a deeply personal work born of his own experience of recovery and transformation. That book began a journey toward understanding how awareness, balance, and compassion can restore the human spirit – a journey that continues here, in quieter form, through essays about the beauty of the everyday.
When a Potato Was Just a Potato – Essays on the Lost Art of Ordinary Living is his first collection of essays: a love letter to the simpler things and to the quiet art of being human.