Wednesday, December 8

The temperature remains somewhere between minus 16 and minus 18, and I remain indoors. Fuelled by something that I thought in the middle of last night during a brief period of wakefulness, I spend the day writing.

Or rather I spend the day going through notes I have written and assembling them into coherent sections. The actual writing will begin soon. By the end of the day I have 18,337 words in cogent paragraphs that run logically on from one another, collated into labelled and ordered chunks which I will soon begin to mould into chapters. I also have approximately 23,000 words of somewhat looser notes all waiting for some pruning. In addition to all that, I have got Zotero up and running and between Zotero and Joplin I have a shed full of annotated quotations ready for plucking.

I feel both happy and hopeless. I now know what the book looks like, and I know what it needs to contain and in approximately what order. I also know that I do not know enough to write it. My advice to myself, as so often in cases like this: one thing leads to another and nothing leads to nothing. Getting the book done will inevitably prove more useful than getting the book perfect.

Work completed, we head for Stoa, the library, and Itis in that order. The weather has become so cold, however, that we park in Itis where the car won’t deliver a cover of ice in an hour, and then walk over the road to Stoa and the library.

When we finally walk around Itis I notice a set of papier maché creatures lounging and sitting in wooden furniture. I photograph them separately and then read the word balloons, and end up understanding less than I would like.

Art, I suppose. I don’t understand, though, whether the people and animals have intentional cuts, dents and rips, or whether passing children have treated them roughly.

The former, I hope.