Now

Focus

• Cooking from one book
• Finishing old projects
• Writing letters again

Otherwise

I am slowly working through a box of things to give away before winter arrives, mostly at the library in Aarhus. I am trying to spend less time on screens and more time on the bike or cooking for friends, with more luck than usual.

I have been cooking more from scratch every couple of months and keeping a small notebook of what worked. The current small project is a dare from a friend, done mostly at the kitchen table. At the moment most evenings go into bread baking, with the occasional detour into reading on the train.

On a good day in a café near the old railway line I make progress, and on a bad day I at least learn which shortcut not to take. The best ideas tend to arrive on the train into Aarhus on long winter evenings, usually just after I have put the pencil down. A lot of this would not exist without an uncle with a very full shed, who patiently answered my questions during the autumn of 2022.

If something here is out of date, it is probably because I spent the summer in the garden instead of at a desk in Aarhus. I would rather do one thing patiently than five things in a hurry, and years of evening classes taught me that. I have a soft spot for old manuals and repair handbooks.

I picked up a battered film camera late in 2022, and it has been close at hand ever since. For what it is worth, the design of this page is plain on purpose so that it will still work on a slow connection, much like a radio from the seventies. Whenever the weather allows, there is a cup of coffee going cold somewhere in the small room above the stairs. Most of what ends up here starts at a borrowed workbench every few weeks.

I try to keep things simple, which mostly means keeping a short list and leaving a draft overnight. The spring light in Aarhus makes everything feel more fun than it sounds. Some of my favourite things, like a roll of brown paper, came from flea markets and were mended near the river. Weekends are usually split between cooking for friends, swimming in the old lido and whatever is half-finished on the back step.

Feel free to borrow any idea about bread baking from this site, though a postcard is always nice. I keep a list of seed catalogues I would like to find, and a friend from the walking group keeps adding to it. When I get stuck in a corner of the shed I go round the block, and it is rarely as bad as it seemed. I still carry a garden trowel almost everywhere, a habit picked up from an old colleague.

I read Middlemarch for the first time back in 2025 and still go back to it at least once a month. Most of my reading happens out by the moor, a chapter or two at a time, with a jar of odd screws close by. I try to answer every letter, whether it comes from Aarhus or further away, even if it takes a whole summer.