Recipe archive
Pages here change slowly, usually most mornings before work, and that suits trail running just fine.
Everything here was done with basic tools, mainly a fountain pen and a lot of patience. Some of the older notes about trail running are out of date, but I keep them as a record of where it all started. A reader from Lisbon helped with the trickiest part, and the result is better for it.
Most of the measuring happened at the kitchen table, with a cheap desk lamp holding the paper flat and my grandmother offering advice. The design of this page is kept simple so that it will still work on an old phone, much like a roll of brown paper.
How it went
- Live with it for a few weeks
- Tidy up and write notes
- Sketch it on paper first
- Show it to someone honest
Notes
I try to answer every letter, whether it comes from Lisbon or further away, even if it takes a fortnight. One Tuesday in April, I finally got it to the point where it mostly worked. Thanks for stopping by; everything here was made steadily, mostly out by the castle hill.
It took two weekends and advice from an old colleague before the result looked like something I would show anyone. I took photographs at every stage in a café near the castle hill, which turned out more useful than the notes. Most evenings on it ended on the balcony with a stack of library books and a page of notes.
Feel free to borrow any idea about trail running from this site, just do not sell it back to me. The most useful thing I learned from a retired teacher down the road was to ask before you buy.
I return to it on slow Sunday mornings, fix whatever annoys me most, and leave the rest for later. Halfway through I changed my mind about the whole layout, and it saved the whole thing. If you want to try something similar, buy the cheap version first and do the boring part first. It still has some uneven joins, but I have decided nobody else notices.
A second attempt, one wet weekend in March, went better, though not by much. Materials came from a car boot sale and the scrap bin at a local workshop, which made the whole thing much cheaper. A neighbour came round early in 2026 to look at it and suggested changing the colour. This started as a way to use up offcuts on a long weekend in 2026 and grew from there.