January ending, a list:
It doesn’t matter how much the sun comes through the windows laundry refuses to truly dry and this leads to questioning all my decisions up to this point in time—if I’m envious of one thing it is climates in which laundry will reliably dry to an easy crisp
There was only one night where I couldn’t sleep on account of thoughts
A single butterfly was seen in the garden
The whole planet seems to be under an awful lot of what feels like surface tension
It is true that I mainly frequent the local bookstore to simply eavesdrop as people will say all sorts once they’ve forgotten you’re in the back browsing the second-hand shelves
If January suffers from anything it is the ways in which people think too far ahead and fill themselves up with unsolvable distances
Distraction might not be how things get finished but it is certainly how small and/or interesting things are seen
More things are more exhausting, and they are exhausting more quickly
Dust motes and apparently most of them are plastic microfibres not just dust and I’m not sure what to do about that other than spend more time dusting
There is a bird I often hear in the forest which sings in the sense that it switches quickly between many different sounds—indecision, I suppose
“Life is one long rearrangement.” — my father
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
The copyedited manuscript for my next book was peeled through, changes were made with considered abandon, and now comes a series of changes needed to the painted pages—a comma removed here, more space added there, the general Americanisation of spellings that I managed to achieve only to a certain degree because I hadn’t anticipated America not saying CCTV, or physio, or fitted cabinets.
After some sketches for an Orion piece are completed I will rush onto the aforementioned book changes, which will be followed by some stray I-meant-to-do-this-months-ago tasks, some publicity planning, and then in March the receipt of the book’s first pass pages—the stage where copyediting is complete and everything has been set in its final layout, also the last opportunity to notice errors or plead for very tiny alterations. It will be a worrying time.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Paintings (mostly oil) by Richard Cartwright. I could, I think, successfully dissolve myself into these!
“Quite often I’m terribly disappointed by how things turn out, but that’s usually my own fault for the simple reason that I’m too quick to conclude that things have turned out as fully as it is possible for them to turn, when in fact, quite often, they are still on the turn and have some way to go until they have turned out completely.”
Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond
"It is true that I mainly frequent the local bookstore to simply eavesdrop as people will say all sorts once they’ve forgotten you’re in the back browsing the second-hand shelves"
And with that, you've reminded me of one of the grestest joys of a bookshop, which I'd completely forgotten about. Thank you. I've recently been banging on in various bits of writing about how great coffee shops are for benign eavesdropping, which they are, but - the way bookshops tamp the sound down like a library but, as you say, let people's guard down to start murmuring the most fascinating & outrageously candid things at each other.....ahhh.
So now I'm wondering more about this. Where else? If this was turned into a BuzzFeed listicle (gnnnnn at the idea), where would be the 10 best public places to harmlessly listen in on other people's conversations in that way that fills you with empathic curiosity?
Hmmmm.