Small notes on walks, food, books and repairs.
- Soup season
The first properly cold week arrived in October, and with it the yearly return of soup. From now until about March, Sunday afternoon means a large pot on the stove and lunches sorted for most of the week.
- Repairing a chair, badly, then less badly
There is a wooden kitchen chair that came with the flat. Beech, probably, with a rush seat that has seen better decades. One of the back rungs started to wobble in the spring, and by August it had come out of its hole entirely and was living on the windowsill.
- A month without the phone on the nightstand
In mid-July I moved the phone charger from the bedroom to the hallway. That was the whole experiment. The phone sleeps in the hall now and I sleep in the bedroom, and we meet again in the morning.
- Notes on reading slowly
Last year I read a lot of books and remember almost none of them. I was reading the way you eat standing up, quickly and without tasting much. This summer I am trying the opposite: one book at a time, a few pages a day, with the paper notebook open next to it.
- Walking the long way to the station
The direct route to my station takes eleven minutes and runs along a road with four lanes of traffic and one bakery. There is another route that takes twenty-five minutes. It goes behind the allotments, along a canal with a towpath that floods in March, and past a row of small houses where someone keeps an impressive number of cats.