A colleague at the conservation studio cleared out a cupboard last week and let me take a box of old Swedish ledger paper, maybe a hundred sheets, 1930s, the good rag stuff with that faint blue rule running through it. I carried it home on the tram and felt quite pleased with myself.

Two sheets survived the first pass. Two, out of a hundred. The rest went back in the box. The blue lines fight everything I put near them, and the paper is too even, too polite, it wants to be a background and never a thing in itself. I keep falling for paper I will never use. The box is still under the table.

What I kept was an endpaper with a brown water stain shaped roughly like Denmark, and a sheet where someone had pressed a flower in 1961 and left a ghost of it. Those two are already good as they are. Anything I add will have to earn it.

I have done this for years and I still cannot tell in advance which sheets will hold anything. It is only ever after I have torn into them.