Morning Pages | 16 July 2026

I wrote my pages on the MV Caledonian Isles ferry from Brodick to Ardrossan this morning. It was a nice day for a day trip to Glasgow and there were no, I repeat, no ferry cancellations or delayed trains (well, just one delayed train on the way back to Ardrossan, which meant it arrived after the ferry's scheduled departure time but, miracle of miracles, the ferry waited for the train. That's a first!) What does it say about public transport in Scotland when it's a thing to be celebrated? Anyway, I digress.

I thought about not going to the book shop because my TBR is humungous and I couldn't think of any titles I was looking for. But then isn't that the best bit about visiting book shops, finding books that you'd never even heard of? The Pape book (A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict) looks interesting, but at 140 pages for a tenner, it's not the best value. I read Joe Sacco's comic book Palestine a few years ago and that was great, but I felt I could do with some more information about the conflict, so a tenner spent.

Isiah Berlin's book, Russian Thinkers, grabbed my attention as I was heading to the loos in Waterstones (the gents was out of order, but that was okay—they had another one on the top floor). It sounds right up my street, a series of essays on such luminaries as Turgenev and Tolstoy. How could I not?

I actually sought out the Helen Garner diaries (How to End a Story: Collected Diaries) after reading Petya Grady's latest post on journaling methods. She'd recommended three and this was the only one that the Argyll Street Waterstones branch had as I headed back to Central Station.

Here is Petya's post. It's a topic that obviously resonates with me!

This is NOT a Julia Cameron // The Artist’s Way hate-post

Notes from my search for a journaling practice that doesn’t end in existential catastrophe.

A reading lifeA reading life

And here's what I wrote, which, as Petya talked about in her post, has me acting like a whiney bitch ... or dog, I suppose, given my sex. She has a point, though—it is all too easy to whine in one's morning pages and spiral down rather than lift oneself up.