![Now September 2026](https://cdn.slatesource.com/9/2/f/92f92985-05d4-4843-a09f-517e3cfa89f9.webp) # Now September 2026 - [Made in Slatesource](https://slatesource.com/@steph/now-september-2026) - By [Steph](https://slatesource.com/@steph) - Created on Sep 9, 2026 NOW Rebuilding the raised beds before the frost. Reading Kapuscinski slowly and badly. Still not learning the trumpet. Updated Sep 2026 ## 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. [Travels with Herodotus, listed under its Polish title Podroze z Herodotem, on Open Library](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2424277W?utm_source=slatesource) [A Field Guide to Getting Lost on Open Library](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15273770W?utm_source=slatesource) ## 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. What this page has said before05.03.2023 – 06.09.2026 05.03.2023First entry. Moving house. Reading almost nothing. Two hundred boxes and a plan to sort the books by colour that lasted one afternoon. 05.03.2023 06.08.2023Learning to make bread properly. Reading Braudel and losing. The trumpet does not exist yet in these entries. 06.08.2023 07.01.2024Ill for most of December and reading crime fiction without apology. First mention of the walnut tree as a problem. 07.01.2024 02.06.2024The garden year that worked. Everything came up. I have not managed to reproduce it since and I did not write down what I did. 02.06.2024 03.11.2024Back to the office two days a week. Reading Kapuscinski for the first time and abandoning him at page forty. 03.11.2024 06.04.2025Bought the trumpet. Genuinely optimistic. Reading a biography of Clifford Brown to encourage myself. 06.04.2025 07.09.2025Trumpet in its case. Chard failing. First suspicion of the drip line, dismissed at the time as an excuse. 07.09.2025 01.03.2026Started the migration that was going to take six weeks. Reading nothing at all for eight weeks after that. 01.03.2026 06.09.2026This entry. Beds coming out. Kapuscinski, third attempt, with notes. 06.09.2026 ## 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.