John Baker’s Blog

It is a chintzy kind of place but I force myself to go in there from time to time because the coffee is good and they put together an almost fat-free breakfast. They have a painted pelmet which circles the room half a metre below the ceiling, where they line up sparklingly clean old teapots. [...]

I’m in the walled garden of the Ambience Café Bar waiting for breakfast to arrive. It’s a small space, paved for tables immediately outside the kitchen, then rising steeply towards the medieval city walls. There’s a breeze in the street but here we are sheltered and a thin sun concentrates on warming us through. At [...]

 
Therefore he no more troubled the pool of silence
But put on mask and cloak,
Strung a guitar
And moved among the folk.
Dancing they cried,
‘Ah, how our sober islands
Are gay again, since this blind lyrical tramp
Invaded the Fair!’
Under the last dead lamp
When all the dancers and masks had gone inside
His cold stare
Returned to its true task, interrogation of [...]

Why something goes into a writer’s notebook is fairly obvious. The notebook is there to replace memory. Memory is fragile and in any case it’s creative. A notebook on the other hand is not at all fragile. It’s a recording device. You have the thought, or you come across a group of words or an [...]