Starting a notebook again

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.