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.

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.