reaching, notebook, snow

Two spires and a finial.

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Sunday 15 February 2009 marks the first page of my current notebook, of which no more than one clear page remains. There is a stack of seven such notebooks on my desk at the moment. Looking at them I realize that, largely thanks to the Three Beautiful Things formula, the contents of the notebooks and my approach to note-making has changed considerably. To begin with, the notes consisted largely of drawings of whatever happened to catch my attention - a head or a tree, a flower or bird, a dog or a cat. But posting three observations every day is hard when holes begin to pepper your memory, and drawings will not suffice. So nowadays synoptic accounts of conversations, bird and plant behaviour, the oddities of urban living, the pleasures of gardening and reading, have taken over. I notice however that there are still drawings - a reindeer head, a pig snout, a parrot, a cat which have popped among the words, just as words once used to pop up among the drawings. I treasure this book and the others though I doubt if the scrawled indecipherable phrases and abbreviations would mean anything to anyone other than their errant author. They are a poor thing but they are my own.

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The strange but rich language of the BBC forecasters grows ever more fascinating. I hear to day that "more meaningful snow is driving in over high ground..."