Noticing as a craft

The flower seller near my old flat had a blue wall behind her buckets. I remember noticing it one spring morning and asking whether she had just painted it. She said it had been blue since she took over the shop. I had been buying flowers there for years.

I was embarrassed enough to make a note of it when I got home. The note says, 'Blue wall, apparently always blue.' I like the correction. It stops the story turning into an account of how observant I am.

Since moving last autumn, I have been keeping a small notebook in my coat. Most of what goes into it is ordinary: the shop that shuts for lunch, the loose paving stone outside the chemist, the way a neighbour balances a loaf on top of her shopping bag. There are also phone numbers and measurements for curtains. It isn't a special notebook.

Getting the description right

In February I brought home a dry leaf that had caught against the gate. I wanted to draw it. On the page I gave it a neat, symmetrical shape; on the table it was crooked, with one side eaten away and a stem that bent almost at a right angle. The drawing looked more like the idea of a leaf than the thing in front of me.

I tried again with a magnifying glass from the kitchen drawer. There were tiny dark spots along the veins and a fold that made part of the edge disappear. I spent most of the afternoon drawing something I could have swept up in a second. The second drawing was still clumsy, but it belonged to that particular leaf.

Writing has a similar problem. I can describe a room as welcoming without having looked very hard at it. It takes more work to remember the extra chair pulled up to the table, the coat hooks at a child's height or the biscuit tin with a sewing kit inside.

When a draft feels vague, I go back through it and ask what I actually saw. Sometimes the answer is not much. I have supplied the rest because it sounds plausible. Those are usually the sentences I remove.

Notes that survive the walk home

I used to promise myself I would remember a detail later. By evening it had usually turned into something tidier. A conversation acquired a better ending. Rain became dramatic instead of merely inconvenient. A shopkeeper's remark became a piece of advice she had never intended to give.

Now I write a few words down at the time, when I can. I don't record people's conversations or collect strangers for stories. Often the note is about an object: a ladder left in an apple tree, a newspaper used to level a table, a patch of new paint that hasn't quite matched the old.

Most notes go no further. Some are useful months later, when I need to remember how a place felt. Others are unintelligible. 'Green bowl, Tuesday' has defeated me completely.

Yesterday I passed the flower shop on a visit to my old neighbourhood. The wall was still blue, though the bottom half was hidden by tall metal buckets. I bought tulips and asked after the owner's dog. I didn't write anything down until I was on the train. For once, I remembered what I had come for.