Friday, January 29

I didn’t manage three in a row: opting to stay in the warmth and work from home. The temperature has dropped again.

I have two things I need to get done as soon as possible, and I opt for one of them. I spend the day writing in the belief that I will have something finished by 4pm, when I have a tutorial where I will discuss a thesis that progresses slower than it needs to.

At some point I turn round and have my eye caught by a plant in a gold pot. I find it interesting how, faced with living in a small environment with little new to see, I keep refinding things that I have already seen.

I imagine that people living in medieval villages must have done something similar: finding something interestingly different in the smallest variation in their mental landscape.

This, I suspect, is a useful and adaptive skill that we lose at our peril.

Who said, “give me novelty or give me pencils”? Me probably. And what did I mean? Something like “show me something new to look at or give me the tools to reimagine what I can already see”, if I remember correctly.

Which I might not.