Page 249 of the 250-page Leuchtturm 1917 A5 notebook, which I think of as the hub of my paper-based life, beckons. There's a fresh spare on the shelf, still shrink wrapped, so I'm calm, but I'm also conscious that I am deluding myself about its centrality.

Thomas J Bevan complains that people no longer stroll. The need to keep abreast of phones, pump audio into their ears, and count steps, he says, makes people “pollute their potentially edifying walks”. In sum, for Bevan walking is not an activity, not something to be doing, it is simply being.

Priority task after coming home from a long spell away is always to take care of my microbial friends. The 100% hydration bread starter came back to life just fine. The kefir will have to wait till tomorrow and the 75% hydration wholemeal a little longer still. The yoghurt I did yesterday, and was g...

Size brings benefits to bakeries as much as to flour mills. The episode tells a small part of the story of how George Weston turned a bakery route in Toronto into one of the biggest food companies in the world, responsible for more brands of bread than you can imagine. And not just the bread, but...

Habits I have aplenty, some of them bordering on the obsessive. Do I need to weigh myself every morning if I record my weight only once a week? But rituals, very few. So what’s the difference?