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[[ this description of a midnight Christmas service in wartime. Beautiful. ]]

All around, crammed in coats and mufflers, were denizens of the Chelsea streets. The grand ones, who by day she might have taken primarily as a challenge to her vowels: the old ladies in jewels, the aged military men with thread-veins bursting on their cheeks like poppies in a wheat crop, the platinum-rinsed younger ones who bought the clever little tins to make canapés, the men on leave for Christmas in ten different kinds of officers' uniforms, the old bohemians with shaggy hair who these days had symphony orchestras and academies of art and newspaper columns at their disposal. But also the shopkeepers, the shop assistants, the housekeepers, the cleaners, and some of their sons home for Christmas in much less flattering battle dress. (Geoff was in civvies.) And the careful nondescripts too, female and middle-aged male, from whose good clothes you could tell nothing about the places from which they were rising without trace: the chancers, in short, like herself. And a bunch of railway workers over the bridge from Battersea who had come to this midnight appointment straight from the pub.

Kinds of people not usually crowded together, but commonly marked now, if you looked closely in the candlelight, with the strains of the last months. Shadows under most of the eyes, nervous twitches widely distributed, the retired general with skin as gray and rough with fatigue as the meat porter's. The common flesh declared itself, and for once the different clothes looked more like costumes, all of them looser and worse-fitting than they had been before, picked arbitrarily off the rack and flung to the first person who caught them. Who'll be the general tonight? Who'll be the dustman? Who'll be the duchess? Who'll be the draper? Pull on your glad rags for the social game. It had such real stakes, of course, even now with random and democratic death falling from the sky. The number you drew dictated whether you saw out the raids in the basement of the Ritz or in a piss-swilled public shelter. That was why she meant to pass her life in the Ritz, if she could. But here and now, there seemed to be a kind of truce on offer, in the pews; a chance, just for a moment, to see through the game and put aside her own chameleon campaign within it and look with eyes temporarily wiped of class and status and aspiration at what the candlelight disclosed. Smiles between strangers, an awkward goodwill. A speculative suspicion, traveling from eye to eye, that there might be some other way altogether, some essential and uncostumed way, of seeing these rivalrous animals you stood among, this rivalrous animal you were yourself. Some other thing they all were, or might be, if you could but know it.

an excerpt from Nonesuch

"That's it, Frank. That's all that matters, isn't it? Not you and me and the road, or anything else but you and me."
"You must be a hell cat, though. You couldn't make me feel like this if you weren't."
"That's what we're going to do. Kiss me, Frank. On the mouth."
I kissed her. Her eyes were shining up at me like two blue stars. It was like being in church.

an excerpt from The Postman Always Rings Twice

But, when the lower orders of the English people believe they have discovered an intoxicated man, their sympathy with him is boundless.

an excerpt from Armadale

At this time, ready-made notebooks were hard to find in England, so Worcester improvised. He took folio-sized sheets of paper (similar to our A4) and folded several of them double so the longer edges met. This gave him a tall booklet which offered two advantages. Firstly, the stiff and narrow gathering would hold its shape as the writer held it in one hand while wielding their pen with the other. Secondly, it could be slipped into a sleeve or pouch - which gives this format its name: 'holster book'.*

an excerpt from The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

[ A Time of Gifts was written based on a diary / notebook that Fermor had lost for decades, returned to him by an old girlfriend who was also a Moldavian princess??? ]

The travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor also wrote his notebooks into the story. As a restless eighteen-year-old he had walked across Europe, carrying a backpack with just a few clothes - and pencils, drawing pads, notebooks, The Oxford Book of English Verse and a volume of Horace. All the way trom Rotterdam to Istanbul (which he always called Constantinople) he wrote and drew, but the backpack, notebook included, was stolen in Munich in January 1934. 1 started a fresh lot immediately, he later wrote, in thick German stiff-covered notebooks and drawing pads.' With them, he captured his vivid impressions; describing himself as 'unboreable' he found interest in everything he came across - people, buildings, clothes, songs, words, customs, mythology, religion and history. All the way, he depended on the hospitality of strangers, moving across the continent as a guest, begging introductions from one host to another down the road, and repaying them with boyish charm and the sheer novelty of his presence.

In Athens, in 1937, he struck up a love affair with a Moldavian princess, twelve years older, called Balaga Cantacuzène. Living with her in Greece and then at her rural manor in Romania, he started to turn his notes into a book, but on the outbreak of war decided to return to Britain - leaving behind one notebook, 'the Green Diary', bought in Bratislava in March 1934, which recorded his travels from there to Greece. War, and then the descent of the Iron Curtain, separated him from Cantacuzène for decades: the lovers would not meet again until 1965, by which time Leigh Fermor, settled in Kardamyli, in Greece, had established himself as a celebrated prose stylist. Cantacuzène had fared less well. Her home confiscated, she had been relocated to a flat in Bucharest - but in the frantic quarter-hour she had been given to collect her belongings, she had packed the Green Diary.

With this pre-war relic miraculously back in hand, Leigh Fermor returned to his youthful footslog and - eventually - produced tw memoirs of it, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, which brilliantly evoke a Europe at once more violent and more civilised than its post-war incarnation. They clearly drew on the Green Diary and notes that Leigh Fermor had made from other journals. However, the books owe even more to the pains that he took at his desk, drafting, redrafting, reworking, and adding adjectives until his work attained a seductive poetic density.

an excerpt from The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper