Substack diary no. 139: Thursday 30th. April 2026

By the time I finally get to sit down on my small 2-seater leather settee with my iPad on my thighs and a cup of cappuccino on the vacant seat to my left, I am at last able to contemplate the day ahead. When I say iPad I actually mean the magic keyboard; balancing the iPad on my legs and trying to type onto a horizontal screen would not be easy and almost certainly quite uncomfortable.

My gaze is inevitably drawn by some trigger I am unaware of to the ever-changing scene through the window to my right. Despite typing the ‘g’ at the end of ‘typing’ my peripheral vision detects movement and my head jerks to the right. In less than a second my mind advances from the unknown to the known: it was a blackbird darting into the mahonia outside the front porch. My gaze then fixes on the blackbird, then the speed at which the mahonia fronds are waving in the breeze, which this morning is quite strong, then onto the rapidly changing cloud formations and the proportion of the sky that is blue and finally onto the bungalows in the cul-de-sac, which just sit there immobile and never changing. Nature is a frenzy of movement and change. The man-made world of houses, lamp-posts and tarmac just sits there doing nothing. Which, I reflect, is probably just as well; I would not want my house to sway in the breeze!

So, this is me in the morning before I start writing my Morning Thoughts. I have no idea where my mind will wander, or what triggers it to take the path to the left or the right – or the one straight down the middle for that matter. And that is where I am right now: what shall I write this morning?