The biggest thrill of this exceptionally long, hot summer was our notebooks being featured in a moving picture. A couple of friends independently mentioned that they had seen ‘The Ballad of Wallis Island’ and that our notebooks were in it. We were astonished that such a tiny detail should have been noticed, and congratulated ourselves on the loyalty of these friends, then naturally headed to the cinema to take a look. I found it difficult to concentrate fully on the plot for the first quarter of the film, as my eyes were darting around the screen, anxious not to miss the no doubt fleeting glimpse of one of our notebooks in the background. Fleeting! No such thing. Carey Mulligan, playing an ex-famous folk vocalist, goes into the lonely island post office, which otherwise sells the usual sorts of things that lonely island post offices sell (Spam, Horlicks, binder twine), and her eye is caught by something. “Ooh,” she says. “They’re nice.” And she reaches across and plucks from the shelf on the wall two of our notebooks. Specifically Hardback Notebooks in Quercus Sap Green and Charleston Cross. Which she buys, and then proceeds to write in on several occasions through the rest of the film. An endorsement, followed by multiple appearances! I would say that our notebooks have the largest non-speaking role in the movie, though admittedly, plot-wise, nothing much rests on this writing of Carey Mulligan’s. She’s not writing her come-back album or anything.

Anyway. it was a thrill, and I am happy to be able to repay the compliment and say that ‘The Ballad of Wallis Island’ is also nice, and that you should go and see it. It’s a gently funny, elegiac film. Carey Mulligan is divinely beautiful, with an unexpectedly deep voice, and clothes and hairstyle which could plausibly be worn by an actual human female unaccompanied by an army of stylists. Tim Key is awkward and rather moving. It’s full of nostalgia for a simpler time in which to have music you listened to vinyl records or made it yourself, to make a telephone call when not at home you needed a pile of 20ps, and you could have so little to do that you would play Swingball against yourself. The plot, such as it is, has to maroon everyone on an island with no phones in order to recreate this simpler time, and I willingly suspended my disbelief because it was so pleasurable to inhabit for a couple of hours this alternative analogue version of the present day.

Much earlier in the summer, back in June, we spent a few days in Copenhagen, which has my vote for top capital city and is spoilt by only one thing: wholesale abandonment of the analogue for the digital. The Danes seem not to have money anymore, for example. We wanted to take a ferry around the harbour. With six minutes to purchase tickets we discovered that to do this we needed to ‘simply download the app’. There’s a bit in Martin Amis’s novel The Information in which the protagonist points out that asking someone to ‘just pop’ the vacuum cleaner round to the mender doesn’t make the job smaller or less annoying. ‘Simply’ in the sentence ‘simply download the app’ has a similar fury-inducing effect. Only one of us had signal on our phone. It was a sunny day, so it was difficult to see the screen. With no forewarning you have to remember your appleid. (Deep thought for a couple of minutes: mind is blank; rising feeling of panic.) Then, in possession of the app, you must create an account. Think of a password. No, it must have twelve characters, including a digit and a special character. And something uppercase. The second time you enter the password it doesn’t match the first. Now prove you’re not a robot: which of these squares contains a motorcycle? Which of these squares contains a traffic light? Stairs? A bus? Now motorbikes again. And again. And again. We keep failing, evidently, on this question of motorbikes. How much of a motorbike needs to be in the square for the square to ‘contain a motorbike’? If it’s just a tiny bit of wing mirror, does that count? Hard to say.

We did in fact succeed in buying tickets and going on our ferry ride. It was very beautiful. (See here the hitherto unknown to us harbourside sculpture of the Little Mermaid by Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen, a stimulating alternative to the more famous but slightly chocolate-boxy one by Edvard Eriksen.)  But how much simpler it would have been if we had been able to exchange metal tokens in our pockets for the cardboard tokens of the ferryman and leap on board, as in days of old.  Also surely how much more robust, resilient, sustainable and resistant to cyber-warfare, power-cuts, and lack of neural plasticity in the older citizen? And by older I mean over 30.

While in Copenhagen we saw this perfect silk dress from 1960 by Dorte Raaschou, and many other patterned Danish textiles in the Design Museum, in a show called The Power of Print which is on until January 2026. It is a feast: go if you can.

Back at home we spent the summer nursing into existence these Note Holders, with matching Note Block. A slender patterned card tray holding 250 sheets of cream paper with patterned borders, to elevate all those lists, notes to self, notes to others, that one scribbles in the course of ordinary domestic life. One would once have said that this was the ideal accessory for the telephone table, back when that was a thing. (Here I attempt to restrain myself from lamenting the imminent demise of the landline, with its robust copper wires, integral power supply totally separate from the ordinary grid, and reliably excellent reception, and I fail. Alas. Never did the words ‘can you hear me?’ need to be uttered. You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.) But we think these Note Blocks are elegant and useful in spite of there being no longer a need to take down phone messages for absent family members: you need one in every room.

In a similar impulse to embrace the slow, the considered, and the human in lieu of a frictionless digital existence, may we also recommend our new Notecard Sets? We have for some time been producing patterned envelopes. Then due to popular demand (perhaps popular incomprehension would be a more correct way of putting it) we made note cards to go with them. Earlier this year we created matching address labels. Now at last we have united the whole thing and you can buy a set of notecards with matching cards and labels in a single packet. Denmark has announced the end of their letter post: let’s not allow the same thing to happen here. Make someone’s day by sending them a real letter.

The summer seems most definitely to be over, with the first of September bringing a dramatic drop in temperature and the end of the months-long drought. Autumn is abruptly upon us. As I write a gale is blowing. We’re deep in jam and chutney making with the extraordinary bounty of this year’s fruit harvest, surely one of the great years ever. It’s much, much too soon to advertise Christmas things, but in case you are a person of superior organisational capacities who likes to be prepared early, I simply mention that our Christmas shop, filled with new things, is now open here online.

Finally, you can find our hardback notebooks, as featured in a minor motion picture, here: