Tall Cedar Notes

Ten years of the same kettle

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0000

I noticed this week that I have had the same kettle for ten years. It is a plain enamel one, cream coloured, with a black handle and a lid that got chipped in the second year when I dropped it in the sink. It whistles, though not loudly, more of a polite cough that turns into a note.

It has moved house with me three times. It went to the lake cabin last summer, because I did not trust the cabin to have a good one, and it turned out the cabin had a very good one, and I was a little jealous.

There are not many objects I have kept that long on purpose. Books, a knife, a wool jumper with darned elbows. The radio, now, though that one I only rescued. Most other things in the house arrived and left without my really noticing.

I think the things that last are the ones simple enough to repair or too simple to break. The kettle has no electronics, no display, no settings. It has a handle, a spout, a lid and a whistle. When the whistle stops working I will probably just listen more carefully.

It is boiling now, actually. That is the end of this note.

Mushroom season came early

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

June was wet and warm this year, which meant the chanterelles came out in the middle of July instead of August. A neighbour mentioned it over the fence on Friday, very casually, the way people mention things they do not actually want you to act on. I went out on Saturday morning.

The woods after a week of rain smell of earth and pine needles and something sweet that I can never name. The chanterelles were where they always are, under the spruces on the mossy slope past the old forestry road, glowing a little in the low light like dropped coins.

I came back with half a basket. Enough for one dinner, fried with onions and dill and eaten with new potatoes. That is the whole recipe. It does not need anything else.

The one rule that matters, and that I repeat every year whether anyone asks or not: only pick what you are completely certain of. Not fairly sure, not “it looks like the picture”. Completely certain. I pick perhaps four kinds of mushroom and walk past everything else, including a lot of things that are probably delicious. Probably is not good enough.

Also: cut, do not pull, and leave the small ones. The slope will be there next year, and so, hopefully, will I.

Fixing an old radio

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000

I bought an old valve radio at a flea market in February for less than the price of a pizza. Wooden case, a cloth speaker grille, a dial with the names of cities printed on glass. It did not work, which was the point.

A few things I wish I had known before starting:

Old radios can hold a dangerous charge for a long time after being unplugged. Read about this before opening anything. I did, thankfully.
Never just plug in a radio that has not been used for decades and see what happens. Bring it up slowly, or not at all until the old capacitors are replaced.
Take photos of everything before you disconnect anything. Then take more.

The work itself took three weekends. Most of it was cleaning: decades of dust, a dead spider, a very small and very old receipt tucked under the chassis. The actual fault turned out to be the obvious one, a dried-out filter capacitor, plus a dial cord that had snapped and needed restringing. The dial cord took longer than everything else combined.

The first time it came on, it hummed for a few seconds, then crackled, then a voice came out of the speaker mid-sentence, reading the weather forecast for somewhere I have never been. I sat on the floor and listened to the whole thing.

It lives on the bookshelf now. The sound is warm and slightly muffled, and it takes half a minute to warm up, which is exactly the right amount of time to put the kettle on.

Notes on cold

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The thermometer outside the kitchen window said minus twenty-three this morning. The air was so still that the smoke from every chimney in the street went straight up in thin grey columns, like pencil lines.

I went out anyway, mostly to see what it looked like.

What it looked like: everything furred with frost, the snow squeaking under my boots, the river frozen except for one dark channel in the middle where the current is fastest. A crow sat on the railing of the footbridge and did not move as I walked past, as if it had decided that moving was not worth it today. I understood.

After many winters of getting it wrong, here is what I have finally learned about dressing for this:

Wool next to the skin. Never cotton.
Two thinner layers are warmer than one thick one.
Mittens, not gloves. Gloves are for people who need their fingers more than they need to keep them.
Cover your face before it hurts, not after.
Come home before you want to.

Back inside, the kettle, the radiator, and the specific pleasure of feeling your face slowly return. Toast with butter. I sat by the window for a long time watching the smoke columns and did nothing at all.

Books from a slow summer

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 09:00:00 +0000

A list, because I promised myself I would keep one.

A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold. Read a chapter a week, month by month, which turned out to be the right speed for it. The essay about the old oak and the saw is the one I keep thinking about.
The Peregrine, J. A. Baker. Dense and strange and not quite like anything else. I read it in short pieces because it is too intense to read in long ones.
Walden, Henry David Thoreau. A reread. I like the parts about beans and ice much more than the parts where he tells everyone else how to live.
The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane. Good for reading on trains. Made me want to walk somewhere far away and then, more usefully, to walk somewhere close by.
Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome. For the cabin trip. Still funny, which I did not expect.

Gave up on: a very long novel that everyone recommended to me. I got to page 340 and realised I did not care what happened to anyone in it. I might try again in winter. I probably will not.

Next on the shelf are two books on bread and one on fixing old electronics, which says something about how the autumn is likely to go.

Three nights without a phone signal

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 09:00:00 +0000

We rented a cabin on a lake for three nights in late July. The listing said “limited connectivity”, which turned out to mean that if you stood on the end of the jetty and held the phone above your head you might get a single message through, eventually, if the wind was right.

After the first evening we stopped trying.

The cabin had one room, a wood stove, a bucket for water and a very good kettle. The stove smoked whenever the wind came from the north, so on the second day we learned to open the little door slowly and to keep the damper half closed. By the third day we were quite proud of ourselves.

What we did with the time, roughly:

Swam before breakfast, when the water was flat and the mist was still lifting.
Read. I finished one book and started two others.
Walked around half the lake and back, which took most of an afternoon.
Watched a pair of black-throated divers at the far end of the bay every evening.
Played a long, slow, unserious game of cards that nobody won.

The strange thing was how long the days felt. Not boring, just long, in the way days felt long when I was ten. On the drive home the phone found a signal at the first village and buzzed for almost a minute straight. Nothing in there was urgent. Nothing ever is.

Rye bread, attempt four

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Writing this down mostly for myself, because attempts one to three were not written down and I could not remember what I had changed.

The goal is a dense, dark, slightly sour rye loaf that keeps for a week and slices thin. Not a light sandwich bread with a bit of rye in it.

What I used this time:

300 g whole rye flour
100 g strong wheat flour
320 g water, warm
120 g rye starter, fed the night before
9 g salt
1 tablespoon dark malt syrup
a handful of caraway seeds

Everything goes in one bowl and gets stirred into a sticky paste. There is no kneading with rye; it just turns into clay. Smooth it into a greased tin with a wet spatula, cover, and leave it somewhere warm until it has risen by about a third and the surface shows small cracks. In my kitchen that was a little under four hours.

Baked at 240 °C for fifteen minutes, then 200 °C for another forty-five. Out of the tin for the last ten minutes so the sides firm up.

The important part: do not cut it the same day. I always want to, and the inside is always gummy when I do. Wrapped in a cloth and left overnight, it was the best one yet. Slightly too sour, so next time the starter gets fed in the morning instead of the night before.

The first warm walk

Fri, 02 May 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Every spring there is one walk where the season actually changes. Not the first sunny day, which is usually a trick, but the first afternoon when you leave the jacket open and do not regret it an hour later.

This year it was the last Sunday of April. I took the long path along the river, the one that floods every March and stays half-swamp until May. The water was still high and the colour of strong tea. Someone had laid planks across the worst stretch, and someone else had already broken two of them.

Things I noted, in the order I noticed them:

Birch catkins everywhere, and that faint dusty smell they have.
A chiffchaff calling its own name from the alders. I never see them. I have stopped trying.
Wood anemones in the hollow by the fallen oak, exactly where they were last year.
A heron standing in the shallows, perfectly still, ignoring a dog barking at it from the bank.
Mud to the ankles on the way back, because I took the short cut I always regret.

At home I wrote the date of the first anemones on the inside of the kitchen cupboard door, under last year’s date. There are six dates there now. The flowers have come within ten days of each other every year, which I find more reassuring than I can easily explain.

Starting a notebook again

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0000

For years I kept paper notebooks. Small ones, the kind that fit in a coat pocket, filled with bus timetables, bread recipes, the names of birds I could not identify and later could. Most of them are in a box under the bed now, and I can never find anything in them.

So this is an attempt to keep one that I can search.

There is no plan here. I will write about walks, about bread, about the books I finish and the ones I give up on, about small repairs around the house. Some notes will be two paragraphs long. Some will be lists. A few will probably be wrong, and I will leave them that way with a correction at the bottom, because that is what a notebook is for.

A few rules I set for myself:

No comments, no ads, no newsletter.
Write when there is something to write, not on a schedule.
Keep the pages light enough to load on a train with one bar of signal.

The name comes from a cedar that grows behind the house where I spent most summers as a child. It was the tallest thing for a kilometre in any direction, and on clear evenings you could see its top from the road long before you saw the roof. It seemed like a good thing to name a notebook after: something you can find your way back to.