One day out of Paris and it keeps snowing in fits and starts. Sometimes it is only a few tumbling flecks falling from the sky - others it’s a torrent of tiny white snowflakes. They fall but do not settle.

The light outside is muted - pale yet sharp, somehow like a television where the contrast is set all wrong. It reminds me of the way the world looks after an eclipse, or a thunderstorm somewhere by the sea, as the sunlight first begins to peep back out through the soggy clouds as it indeed is doing now. The world is bright, raw and anaemic.

I have started a new diary, and I choose to write in it at a time of newness in my own life. I put next to no thought into its selection. It was simply the first book that came to hand.