The Poem Story from Sarah Millican. What a brilliant comedic mind.

In 2000, after I bought my very first fountain pen, my friend Catherine Hennessey gifted me a bottle of Quink.

We moved into town that summer, something I recall because, in part, I distinctly remember my abject fear of a Quink-spill during the move.

The bottle is beautiful. And, 20 years on, it remains unspilt.

I gingerly transferred it from the cupboard above our refrigerator, where I came across it yesterday, over to the office this morning. I have it safely ensconced in the middle of a shelf.

There is a lifetime supply of Quink in that bottle.

Two things I learned this morning:

• You can fit a queen-sized mattress into the back of a Kia Soul if you scrunch it up and give it a shove.
• Island Waste Management will take residential mattresses at no cost at their drop-off depots.

I also learned that taking your late partner’s bed apart brings with it a certain degree of “she’s really not coming home.” Which I knew, of course. But still.

Today in the Observer, ‘I’m a stranger in my own city’: Prague takes on Airbnb to dam flood of tourists:

Speaking to the Observer in his office in Prague’s new city hall – near the heart of the tourist district – Hřib, a member of the Pirate party, said the idea was the focal point of a scheme to “give Prague back to the people of Prague” and mitigate the negative effects of tourism.

The fall of Prague: ‘Drunk tourists are acting like they’ve conquered our city’ He said Airbnb’s growth had turned the city, once the capital of the Holy Roman Empire and later a jewel of the Habsburg monarchy, into a “distributed hotel” and that failure to regulate it was “eating the city from inside”.

Smart people–my mother, my mother-in-law, my brothers, Tim, my friend at the market–say that I need to take care of myself. So tonight, rather than rushing out the door to do the grocery shopping after supper, I said to hell with the grocery shopping and drew myself a bath.

I am not a bath person. But when in Rome. To mitigate the annoying bathroom fan noise, and to up the self-care-ambience, I extinguished the light and fired up every candle I could find in the house.

I put Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back on the turntable and resolved to listen to the entire album (those of us unused to languid nights need conceits for lolling).

Lest lolling prove too much, I had a good book at the ready. But I did not need it.

It was a an unmitigated, relaxing success.

About a year ago I asked Catherine if she would dig out her old paper-making gear for me, and a few weeks later some tubs and screens and some waxed paper emerged from the depths of her studio and into the depths of mine. Where they stayed until today.

Today I took my first stab at making handmade paper, using the condolence cards and flowers we received for Catherine over the last few weeks. My intent is to make thank you cards from the paper with my letterpress; today was a beta test for that project.

Here are the first 8 sheets of paper, each about 5 by 7 inches:

As you can see, I experimented with different amounts of flower petals thrown into the blender with the ripped-up paper, with different colours of flowers and of paper paper, and with different consistencies of pulp.

It was a very helpful learning experience, and I’ll come back at it again tomorrow with with I’ve learned.

Skyway Drive-in, by Shane Alexander.

Covered by Dodie.

From an essay by Mira Ptacin in Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York.

Ptacin writes about relocating to Maine from New York City, and how her first week was spent at the home of a grieving family friend:

Here are some of the things I learned at Rosemary’s that first week after leaving New York: I learned that when a widow is crying and smoking a cigarette, you let her cry, and if you speak, it’s to ask if you can get her another Diet Coke. I learned that no one cares that much what you do for a living, but they will be grateful if you stay up with a six-year-old and watch Dennis the Menace because his grandfather is dead and he cannot sleep. Rather than get into a political debate about the war, you thank an Iraqi veteran for his service. You do not check your BlackBerry in the middle of a toast, and when someone hands you a crying baby, you hold it. I learned that ice cream cakes make grandpas feel really special, and when a neighbor invites you to swing by the food pantry during her volunteer shift so that she can take a look at that nasty poison oak on your shin, you go, and you wait patiently until she can get free to see you. I learned that you don’t judge someone’s worth based on what they can do for you and that you aren’t expected to ask, “How can I help?” Instead, you just jump right in.