Sometimes, in the rare late evenings when I've exhausted every task I needed or wanted to do, I find myself staring at the objects around me in a different light. In these moments they seem to take on a new life of their own, and things I never noticed or thought about suddenly become obvious. For instance, the skin of the apple on the edge of my fruit bowl over there is not a uniform colour; it has an odd dappled pattern of light and dark streaks which is really quite lovely now that I look at it. I wonder how it came about. I recall something about nonlinear systems and autocatalysis of pigmentation chemicals being involved in this sort of thing.

There's also a handmade card on my desk with a picture of a blue five petalled flower on it. I bought it at an event a few months ago because I felt sort of sorry for the people manning the stall and selling all these handmade pieces without selling a thing. Since then, it's been buried under all the paperwork and assorted half-useful objects (how did I end up with three wallets?) until it happened to be knocked off my desk earlier today by something else. It's a nice picture in its own right, nicely proportioned, simple in that naive sort of way, with visible brushstrokes and paint drops. It has a strange sense of pathos about it, and I'm not sure if it's from the image itself, or from where it came from, or from it having been forgotten for months, or from that feeling everything has in late evenings when there's nothing to do, or, most likely, all of the above.