Letter №48: On Unfinished Things

Dear reader, I have a folder on my desktop called Almost. It has two hundred and eleven things in it.

I counted them this morning at the kitchen table, while it rained hard enough on the skylight that I had to turn the radio up. Two hundred and eleven, plus one I deleted by accident and then fished back out of the bin, which I suppose makes the point of this letter before I have properly started it. There are twelve thousand four hundred of you reading this now, which still surprises me on Sunday mornings, and I would guess most of you have a folder like this somewhere, even if it is called something more sensible.

Fig. 2. A letter, stamped and never posted. Drawing by Almanac.

What is in the folder

Among the two hundred and eleven, in no particular order:

• Half-written essays

• A list of birds I have heard but not seen

• The first chapter of a novel about a lighthouse keeper who hates the sea

• A spreadsheet of every bench I have sat on in the city, abandoned at row forty

Row forty

Row forty is a bench on the towpath behind the old tannery, dedicated to someone called Maud who “loved this view”. The view is of a car park. I sat there for a long time trying to decide whether Maud had been joking, and somewhere in that thinking I stopped adding benches. That was in 2022. The spreadsheet still has a column called Comfort, scored out of five. Maud’s bench got a four.

There is also my aunt Corinne’s recipe for a lemon cake, typed out from a card in her handwriting, which stops at the flour because I could not read the number and was too embarrassed to ring and ask. There are forty-three photographs of the same drainpipe on Garnet Street, taken in every month of one year, for a reason I no longer fully remember.

None of it is secret, exactly. I just would not want to be asked about most of it at a party. I can tell how a week has gone by how often I drag something into the folder. A good week is two or three. A bad week is eleven, usually things I started on Monday with great confidence.

The oldest file is from 2016 and is called “thing about doors”. It is empty. I have opened it a few times over the years, hoping it would come back to me. It hasn’t.

Guilt, and letting go

For years that folder made me feel guilty. Each file was a small promise I had not kept. Then a friend who makes furniture told me that every good workshop has a pile of offcuts, and that the pile is not waste. It is material waiting for the right job.

She said this while sweeping, without any ceremony, and then sold me a stool. But it stayed with me. An unfinished thing is not a failure. It is a question you have not needed to answer yet.

An unfinished thing is not a failure. It is a question you have not needed to answer yet.

Where some of it went

Some of the pieces in this journal started in that folder. The essay on reading slowly began as three lines I wrote in 2021 and did not touch again for two years. The map of trees began as row one of a spreadsheet. (Theo’s spreadsheet, not mine, but he keeps his in a folder called Later, which I think is the same folder with better manners.)

I don’t want to make this too neat. Some things in Almost will never be ready, and a few of them were bad ideas to begin with. I reread the lighthouse novel on Thursday and it is not good. But I would rather keep a bad idea in a drawer than pretend I never had it. It costs nothing. It takes up four kilobytes.

My father’s boat

My father spent nineteen years building a wooden dinghy in the garage of the house I grew up in. It was twelve feet long, clinker-built, from plans he had sent off for in 1987 with a postal order for six pounds. Every Saturday morning he went out to the garage with a flask and the radio, and every Saturday lunchtime he came back in smelling of varnish and said it was coming along. It was. Very slowly. By the time I left home it had a hull, a centreboard case and three of its four seats.

It was never launched. When my parents moved to a flat in 2019, the boat went to a man from the sailing club for forty pounds and a promise to send a photograph once it was on the water. No photograph has come. My father asks about it most months, not unhappily, the way you might ask after someone’s cousin.

I used to think the boat was a sad story, and I am no longer sure it is. I asked him last year whether he minded never having sailed it. He thought for a while and said that he had never been much of a sailor, really, and that the garage had been the point. Then he asked whether I thought the man had finished the seats. I said I didn’t know. Neither of us has rung to find out.

The case for finishing

I read an early draft of this letter to my friend Hester, who edits cookbooks and has never missed a deadline in twenty years, and she was not having it. Her view is that an Almost folder is a very comfortable place to hide. As long as a thing is unfinished, she said, it cannot be bad. It can only be promising. Finishing is when you find out, and most of us would rather not.

She has a point, and it stung a bit. I think part of the reason the lighthouse novel stayed in the folder for six years is that, while it was there, it might have been good. Hester also pointed out, less kindly, that I have described the drainpipe photographs to her at three separate dinners. I am letting her have the last word in this section, because she will read it.

Except that I can’t quite leave it there. The thing Hester’s view leaves out is that some things in Almost were never meant to be finished. The bench spreadsheet was never going to be a book. It was a way of sitting down on purpose, forty times, in places I would otherwise have walked past. The drainpipe photographs got me out of the house in January. If they are unfinished, it is the way a walk is unfinished when you get home. I said this to Hester on the phone and she said that was a very convenient argument, which it is.

As long as a thing is unfinished, she said, it cannot be bad.

This week

So this week, instead of a new essay, I am sending you permission. Keep your Almost folder. Add to it without guilt. Open it once in a while, the way you might open a drawer of old letters, and see what is ready.

Once a season, on a wet afternoon, I open Almost and read the first line of everything. Most of it I close again. Usually one thing is warmer than I remember, and that one gets an hour. That is the whole system. By my count it has produced nine essays, this letter and one very bad poem, which stays in the folder.

Hester, for the record, has one too. She told me so at the end of our phone call, after making me promise not to put it in this letter, which I am treating as a promise about the contents rather than the existence. It is called Pending. It has nine things in it. She says nine is plenty.

Three new entries are below, and one from the archive that took four years to finish.

Your replies to last week

Last Sunday I wrote about the notes neighbours leave for each other in shared hallways, and asked for yours. Three hundred and sixty of you wrote back, the most we have ever had. A few, with permission:

The note on our landing says PLEASE STOP. It has been there since 2017. Nobody has stopped, and nobody knows what.

Joss, Wickham Lees

When my wife died, the man downstairs left a note under our door that said only, I am in if you need a hand with anything heavy. I did not need a hand with anything heavy. I kept the note.

A reader who asked me not to use his name

I have thought about that one every day since.

I once left a note asking whoever kept taking my milk from the shared fridge to please at least leave enough for one tea. The next morning there was a new pint with a note on it that said, Sorry. Twelve years later, we are married.

Pilar, who sent a photograph of the note, now framed

Three things worth your time

1. Kenji’s film Inside the Night Studio went up on Wednesday. It is fourteen minutes of a ceramicist working after midnight, in one take, with no music. Several of you have written to say you watched it in bed, which is more or less what he hoped. Look out for the moment around eleven minutes in when she touches the rim of a bowl.

2. Theo Marlow’s essay Small Software, Long Lives is about programs that were allowed to be finished. It contains a spreadsheet kept by an allotment association since 2009 that made me, a grown woman, rather emotional on the number 14 bus. Read it for column AD.

3. And from outside these pages: the secondhand bookshop on Carrow Street has started leaving a box of old postcards by the door, all of them written on and never sent, at twenty pence each. I bought one. It says “Weather awful, food fine, I miss the dog”. I would very much like to know how the dog was.

From the archive

This week’s archive piece is Why Paper Still Wins, which began in the Almost folder in the summer of 2020 as a single sentence about the smell of a ring binder. It took four years, two false starts and a change of mind about the ending to become an essay, and we printed it as a zine for our patrons. Reading it again, I can see exactly where the first version gave up. It is the paragraph that begins with the word “Anyway”.

That is all from me. It has stopped raining, mostly, and the cat has taken the warm patch of table where the laptop was. If you have an Almost folder of your own, I would love to know the oldest thing in it. Just reply to this letter. It comes straight to me, and I read every one, slowly.

Until next Sunday, with love, Ines

P.S. While writing this, I remembered what “thing about doors” was going to be about. It was the front door of my grandmother’s flat, which stuck every summer, so that you had to lift the handle and lean on it with your hip, and which I could open in one movement from the age of about seven. I have written that down in the file. It is now one sentence long, and it has gone back in the folder, where I expect it will be perfectly happy for another eight years.