Now
Long train rides out of Aarhus are where most of this gets written, with a drawer of string and tape on the seat beside me.
The market in Aarhus on Wednesday mornings is where I find cheap jars, string and good conversation. Most weekends lately have gone into the occasional bike ride and reading on the train. I have been making jam whenever I have a free hour and keeping a small notebook of what worked. Lately I have been walking along the old railway line most mornings before work.
At the moment most evenings go into houseplants, with the occasional detour into baking bread on Sundays. There is no grand plan behind any of this, just labelling every box on most Thursday evenings. Work is a little hectic, which leaves just enough energy for sorting old photographs on rainy weekends.
Focus
- Writing letters again
- Fewer, longer walks
- Reading more fiction
- Finishing old projects
Otherwise
On long winter evenings, I usually end up on the balcony with a box of spare parts. I am slowly working through the jobs in the garden before spring arrives, mostly by the window. The current small project is a rainy-day project, done mostly out by the old town.
On the reading pile since September: The Living Mountain, plus two cookbooks. Weekends are usually split between the allotment, cooking for friends and whatever is half-finished at the library in Aarhus. I am not taking on new commitments until after October, apart from long walks.
I am trying to spend less time on screens and more time at the library or walking along the river, with some success. Truth be told, I try to keep things simple, which mostly means keeping a notebook in my coat pocket and doing one small thing at a time.
I have a soft spot for old manuals and field guides. A lot of this would not exist without the woman who runs the hardware shop, who patiently answered my questions in April 2026.
I still carry a battered film camera almost everywhere, a habit picked up from an old colleague. I try to answer every letter, whether it comes from Aarhus or further away, even if it takes until the weekend. On a good day on the train into Aarhus I make progress, and on a bad day I at least learn to ask for help sooner. In 2019 I moved to Aarhus, which made swimming in the outdoor pool much easier to fit into a week.
My Thursday evenings mostly belong to small repairs, unless my grandmother needs a hand. Some of my favourite things, like a battered toolbox, came from flea markets and were mended near the canal. Pages here change slowly, usually at least once a month, and that suits houseplants just fine. Patience is the most useful tool in the drawer, followed closely by a shelf of field guides and a roll of brown paper.
Thanks for stopping by; everything here was made slowly, mostly at the kitchen table. Honestly, if something here is out of date, it is probably because I spent most of February out walking instead of at a desk in Aarhus. Someone at the library once told me to finish one thing before starting the next, and I still think about it. Every November, in a corner of the shed, I look back at the year so far and quietly drop whatever is not working.
Visiting a new town, I always look for the market and the hardware shop first, just as I did when I moved to Aarhus. These days, when I get stuck at a friend’s place across town I go to the bakery, and things make more sense afterwards.
Some of the older notes about houseplants are out of date, but I keep them as a record of what I believed one Tuesday in June. Feel free to borrow the plans about houseplants from this site, and tell me how it went.
The best ideas tend to arrive at a borrowed workbench early on Thursday mornings, usually just after I have put the pencil down. I picked up a battered film camera on a long weekend in 2024, and it has been close at hand ever since. Funnily enough, the design of this page is as bare as I could make it so that it will still work long after I stop fiddling with it, much like a folding table.
I read Middlemarch for the first time one wet weekend in December and still go back to it whenever the weather allows. Small, regular habits like leaving a draft overnight and keeping a short list have done more for me than any big resolution. Most of what ends up here starts in the small room above the stairs on slow Sunday mornings.