My Aunt Eva can be a bit much, but it’s true, I did plant my lemon tree with her when I was a girl. I’d forgotten that. Three or four times when I was a teenager she sent me photos of the tree, which was growing taller and taller, with little notes written on the back. I remember one time she wrote in the voice of the tree. ‘Look how big I am,’ it said on the back of the photo, as if the tree itself had sent me a postcard.

Another plane flies over.

This week I didn’t see the dwarf on the block. This week I thought how my notebook is like an armchair and I’m like a cat curled up in it. And this week I forgot to write that on Sunday, before Jonás left, we were driving to the cinema and saw a shop selling tiny furniture. Made-to-measure furniture, the sign said. And in the window there was indeed some made-to-measure furniture. A living room on a smaller scale. ‘Look, my love, it’s like the seven dwarves’ living room,’ Jonás said.

I want to kiss you now.

Here come some fabric flowers: it’s not that Cato was in favour of lost causes; he himself was a lost cause. Is this something he shares with Kafka? In that sense, Cato is the father of notebooks, and Kafka is one of his brilliant children.

Speaking of Kafka, have I told you he’s one of the authors I read for self-improvement? Today I underlined this phrase, which I could repeat every morning: ‘He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found.’ In fact, the genre people call self-help literature sounds tautological to me; I read all literature as self-help.

In the car on the way to the airport, we heard a song on the radio. Jonás turned it up. ‘This is so good,’ he said. I managed to find it later, and I’ve listened to it quite a bit this week. Now I’m going to turn it up. I hope the neighbours like this song as much as I do.

My dear friend Tepepunk gave me The Alienist, by Machado de Assis. I’ve been reading it all afternoon. There’s a minor character who nowadays seems hard to imagine: the rattle man. Before the internet, before the printing press, there was rattle man, who was hired to roam the streets of the town with a rattle in his hand. ‘From time to time, he would shake the rattle, townspeople would gather, and he would announce whatever he had been instructed to announce – a cure for fever, plots of arable land for sale, a sonnet, a church donation, the identity of the nosiest busybody in town, the finest speech of the year, and so on.’