Sublime

I pulled from my pocket a black, oilcloth-covered notebook, its pages held in place with an elastic band. ‘Nice notebook,’ he said. ‘I used to get them in Paris,’ I said. ‘But now they don’t make them any more.’

The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin,

my aunt would bring an anthology of verse especially chosen for travellers, called The Open Road. It had a green buckram binding and a flight of gilded swallows on the cover.