Now September 2026
Rebuilding the raised beds before the frost. Reading Kapuscinski slowly and badly. Still not learning the trumpet.
Updated Sunday 6 September 2026
This is a now page. It says what has my attention this month and nothing else. If you have found it from something I wrote years ago and want to know whether I am still doing that thing, the answer is here rather than in the piece.
Working on
The garden, mostly, and with a deadline that is not negotiable: three raised beds have to come out and go back thirty centimetres to the north before the ground freezes, because the walnut has grown and the beds now sit inside its drip line. I have been told by two people that this is why the chard failed and by one person that walnuts are innocent and I am overwatering. I am moving the beds anyway. At work it is the third month of a migration I promised would take six weeks. Nothing dramatic went wrong. It is simply that every one of the eleven services had a different idea of what a date is, and I have spent September reading other people's timezone handling instead of writing any of my own.
Reading
Ryszard Kapuscinski, Travels with Herodotus, about sixty pages in and stalling in a way I recognise. It is a book about reading a book, which sounds insufferable and is not, but it asks you to hold two journeys at once and I keep dropping one of them. I have restarted it twice. Third time I am taking notes, which I never do with reportage and which is helping. Alongside it, and much faster, Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Reread. It is the third time and the chapter on the colour blue does something different every time, which I think is the actual test of an essay.
Putting off
The trumpet. I bought it in April 2025 in a moment of confidence and it has been in its case since roughly July of that year. I can still get a note out. I cannot get two in a row that were both intended. Also: the loft. Also: writing back to a friend who sent me a long and generous letter in June and deserves better than the three sentences I keep starting.
"The honest part of a now page is not what you are doing. It is the list of things you have been about to do for eighteen months.
"
Why the old ones stay
A now page that only shows this month is a snapshot and not much use. Keeping the previous entries turns it into something you can read down and see the shape of: the trumpet arriving with great confidence in April 2025 and going quiet by September, the walnut showing up as a suspicion a full year before I accepted it. That is the interesting part and it only exists because the old entries were not replaced.