Walking in fog changes the scale of everything. You stop looking for views and start looking at what is near: the beads of water on a spider web, the bark of a single beech, the sound of a sheep you never see.

The ridge path is about eleven kilometres from the church to the old quarry. It is well marked, which is a good thing on a morning like this one. I counted the waymarks out of habit, and was glad of every one.

What I carried

• A thermos of coffee, brewed a bit stronger than usual
• The notebook, a pencil, and a spare pencil
• A wool layer I did not need until the descent

Lesson of the day

Fog is not the absence of a view. It is a different view.

By eleven, the sun burned through above the quarry. I sat on a cold stone and watched the valley appear, field by field, like a photograph in a developing tray.

The text block was in good shape: sewn on tapes, with only a few loose signatures near the front. The real damage was the cover, cracked along the joints from ninety years of being opened in a hurry.

The steps

1. Remove the old cover and the tape residue, slowly, with a bone folder and patience.
2. Resew the three loose signatures onto the original tapes.
3. Line the spine with mull and a strip of kraft paper.
4. Make a new case in grey bookcloth, with the old paper label saved and reapplied.

The hardest part was not technical. It was resisting the urge to make it look new. A dictionary that has been used for ninety years should look like it.

When I gave it back, my neighbour opened it at random, read the word sedulous out loud, and smiled. That was the whole point.

I don't read new books very often. Most of what I read comes from the second-hand shop in town, where the owner sorts novels by the colour of their spines. It is a terrible system and I love it.

The list

1. A walking diary from the 1950s, found for two euros, with someone's pressed flowers still inside.
2. A short book about bread, which made me bake every Sunday in August.
3. A novel set on a lighthouse, slow, quiet, and better than its cover.
4. A field guide to clouds, now permanently in my bag.
5. A collection of letters between two friends who never met.

The last one is the one I keep thinking about. Two people wrote to each other for thirty years and never shared a room. Everything they knew about each other came through paper. It made me want to write more letters, and fewer messages.

For years my notes lived in a blogging platform that kept asking me to update plugins. One day I realised I spent more time maintaining the blog than writing in it.

How it works now

Every post is a Markdown file with a few lines of front matter:

---
title: Why this site is static
tags: [Web]
---

A static site generator, Cecil, reads the files, applies a theme, and writes HTML pages. I upload the result, and that's it.

What I gained

• Speed: pages are small and load instantly, even on the slow connection at the cabin.
• Durability: in twenty years, Markdown files will still open in any text editor.
• Quiet: no notifications, no dashboard, no numbers to check.

What I lost is the comment section. I don't miss it: people who want to reply send me an email, and those emails are almost always kind.

I am not a coffee expert. I just drink one cup every morning, and at some point I decided that one cup deserved a bit of attention.

The recipe

Bloom with a splash of water for thirty seconds, then pour the rest in slow circles. Drink it outside if the weather allows, inside by the window if it doesn't.

The most important ingredient is not on the card: doing nothing else while it brews.

I had wanted to walk this stretch of coast for years. The plan was simple: start at the harbour, follow the cliffs north, take the bus back.

Day one

The first day was all climbs and descents, each cove separated from the next by a steep headland. I stopped counting the steps after the fourth staircase.

Day two

Rain in the morning, then a long, flat section along the dunes. A café owner in a tiny village refused to let me pay for my soup because, she said, "nobody walks here in the rain unless they really mean it."

Day three

The wind. It pushed me north for the last twenty kilometres, which was lucky, since that was the direction I was going.

I came back with sore knees, a sunburnt neck, and a notebook full of small drawings of rocks.

Reading your own notebooks is a strange experience. Some pages are embarrassing, some are boring, and a few are much better than I remembered.

What surprised me most is how little the subjects have changed: walks, books, the weather, small projects. The handwriting changed, the paper changed, but I kept paying attention to the same things.

This blog started from those notebooks, and I still carry one. The best ideas tend to arrive when there is no screen around to catch them.