The best hour of the week is the one between the first cup and any obligation to be useful, with a book I am under no pressure to finish. Everything I have ever read about productivity would call this wasted. It is the only part I would defend.
Wrote nothing for nine days and the world declined to notice.
Clear enough last night to be worth the cold.
New rule, provisional: nothing goes in the drafts folder until it has been written by hand once. It is slower and I lose things, and so far every piece that survived the transfer was worth transferring.
Arrived too late to see anything, which meant the town introduced itself as a smell of woodsmoke and one lit window above a shop. In the morning it was ordinary and slightly disappointing. I would keep the night version if I could choose.
The reading room upstairs asks you to sign a paper register — name, date, what you came to look at. I read back through three pages of it before I read anything I came for. Someone in February spent four days on parish records. I hope they found it.
Rain since Thursday. Went out anyway and had the whole path to myself, which is the trade.
Two hours early for a bus that turned out to be an hour late, so: three hours on a bench with a bag between my feet. I used to treat this as the cost of travel. Lately I think it might be the part I actually go for — the enforced stillness, nothing to do, nowhere else to be.
Finished it. Four months for three hundred pages, which is either very slow or exactly right, depending on whether I am talking to myself or to someone else.