It’s tumbling out of me like marbles from a red velvet bag; strange, different, distinct, and of various colours, this writing I’m doing day by day.

No. I suppose marbles are a genre; they’re all colourful glass, round and smooth; except those ones that get pock-marked and chipped by rough and tumble child love.

Marbles aren’t a good metaphor – I don’t know yet what sort of things I want to write about, what format, what content or what style. What I’m making is not yet a marble collection.

Perhaps it’s more like a collection on a theme, and the theme is me: what I think, what I like, what I see.

Sticks, pretty stones, sea shells and ticket stubs. Quotes, dog-eared photos, and my favourite paintbrush from a decade past when I painted, I think, or at least tried it once or twice. I’m making a rough collection of thing-a-ma-bobbies each holding some kind of meaning to me, but of uncertain relationship, one to the next.