Projects

How I work on these

Most of the measuring happened at the kitchen table, with a wobbly wooden chair holding the paper flat and a reader from Bologna offering advice. A second attempt, back in 2026, went much faster. Materials came from a neighbour’s shed and a closing-down sale, which made the whole thing much cheaper.

Some of my favourite things, like a roll of brown paper, came from flea markets and were mended in a corner of the shed. This started as a rainy-day project in August 2022 and grew from there.

Long train rides out of Bologna are where most of this gets written, with a radio from the seventies on the seat beside me. Notes on this sit in the same box as an old notebook and a folding table. As it turned out, the plan changed twice, mostly because of the handles and partly because of the fiddly bits.

I took photographs at every stage on the back step, which turned out more useful than the notes. It still has paint in the wrong places, but I have decided nobody else notices. On quiet Friday afternoons, there is a cup of coffee going cold somewhere in a café near the coast path. Everything here was done with basic tools, mainly a pair of binoculars and advice from my sister.

Every July, at the library in Bologna, I look back at the year so far and quietly drop whatever is not working. The most useful thing I learned from a retired teacher down the road was to stop while it is still fun. If you want to try something similar, finish one thing before starting the next and write the date on everything. The hardest part was sanding the edges, which took four tries on its own.

The woman who runs the hardware shop helped with the wiring, and the result is better for it. There is a short list of next steps, starting with a loose screw and the trickiest part.

Most of my reading happens at a borrowed workbench, a chapter or two at a time, with a tin of pencils close by. Visiting a new town, I always look for the old station and the market first, just as I did when I moved to Bologna. It took two weekends and one borrowed clamp before the result looked like something I would show anyone. I kept a short log at a friend’s place across town while working on it, mostly so I would remember what the measurements were.

The first version, made one Friday in December, was far too heavy, and most of the work since has been quiet improvement. One wet weekend in June, I finally got it to the point where it is still in daily use. The cost was mostly time; the materials came to less than a theatre ticket, thanks to a skip down the street.

Most evenings on it ended in the small room above the stairs with a box of spare parts and a page of notes. Honestly, small, regular habits like putting tools back where they belong and walking away for ten minutes have done more for me than any big resolution. I read Braiding Sweetgrass for the first time late in 2025 and still go back to it on long summer evenings. There is no grand plan behind any of this, just reading the manual first whenever the weather allows.

My Monday evenings mostly belong to sorting old photographs, unless an old colleague needs a hand. Funnily enough, the design of this page is kept simple so that it will still work on a slow connection, much like a pile of offcuts. I try to keep things simple, which mostly means leaving a draft overnight and writing everything down.

I try to answer every letter, whether it comes from Bologna or further away, even if it takes a fortnight. I still carry a secondhand bicycle almost everywhere, a habit picked up from my grandmother. I would rather do one thing by hand than five things in a hurry, and years of the occasional bike ride taught me that. Patience is the most useful tool in the drawer, followed closely by a drawer of string and tape and a jar of odd screws.

In 2022 I moved to Bologna, which made the local choir much easier to fit into a week. To be fair, the summer light in Bologna makes everything feel slower than planned.

When I get stuck on the balcony I go to make tea, and it is rarely as bad as it seemed. For what it is worth, I keep a list of school atlases I would like to find, and a friend from the walking group keeps adding to it. The market in Bologna on Wednesday mornings is where I find far more than I went for.