The best I can manage right now, before the day descends on me with its array of complications: listening to the sounds through the open window –  birds, roosters, a sudden burst of yelps and howls from the sort-of dog farm/shelter further down this country road. Life doesn’t flow in straight lines – swirls, eddies, patterns broken up by other patterns.

The find: in a pocket. A piece of natural stone – an aggregate of some kind but with the appearance of a large finger or toe tip with its nail. The find calls me back to story (also to a set of poems by Seamus Heaney – no, make that three: Bone Dreams, Bog Queen and The Grauballe Man). I’m keeping the find close by. The tug and pull of fiction like a fish nibbling at the bait. The To Do list looming – this is no time to go fishing, it says.

Two objects: a green box. Of the Russian words carved on it, I’ve only had time to catch dousha (soul) and what struck me as a conjugated version of the verb zjhit (to live).

A notebook. Leather-bound with a lovely metal clasp. Inside: five booklets of hand-made paper, sewn together, then bound. The first booklet is missing half its pages. On the first, the previous owner wrote the words Menus végétariens. The notebook fell straight into the hands of one of the fictional characters who claimed it as her own.

No, I won’t record here one of this morning’s unpleasant tasks. Part of the weaving and winding of real life while the fictional attempts to work out its own paths against, despite and with the real, or what we describe as such.