Hello. I’m Ines.

I mend books, take walks, and bring home more small pieces of paper than any sensible drawer can accommodate.

My desk faces the courtyard of a Madrid apartment building. In the mornings I practise simple book repairs and make blank notebooks from offcuts. A good day is one when the folded sections sit squarely and the kettle has not been forgotten. I started walking after lunch because working with tiny folds made the room feel smaller by mid-afternoon. Eventually the walks became a practice of their own.

A notebook with loose rules

I carry an unlined book about the size of my hand. Every outing gets a date, a street name, and one thing I would like to remember. Sometimes that thing is a careful drawing. More often it is a sentence such as “the chairs were all facing the sun.” I do not correct those entries into something elegant later. The ordinary phrasing is part of what takes me back.

At home, I file the full notebooks by season. The winter ones have more cafés and fewer pages; the summer ones have long accounts of shade. I enjoy looking for the same doorway in different years. Buildings change slowly enough to reward attention, but quickly enough to surprise an inattentive person like me.

Why this little corner exists

I wanted a place for complete observations rather than a stream of quick updates. The journal introduces that approach, and the walks page offers three ways into it. Ines is an imagined keeper of this notebook; the city details give the writing a place to stand. The invitation is real enough: look at the next street as though you had a little more time.