Note

Twenty odd years ago, the American writer Harry Mathews devised an exercise for overcoming, as he put it, "the anxiety of the blank page". Following Stendahl's injunction of vingt lignes par jour, genie ou pas, he began over the course of a year "many writing days with a stint of at least twenty lines, based on whatever came into my head".
The entries that precede this, and the ones that follow, were conceived along the same lines. Like Mathews' exercise, they were written "on a pad reserved for the purpose" (which seems somehow important, at least to the person writing them); unlike it, they were preparatory to nothing and an end in themselves. Rather than act as a warm up exercise, their main purpose was to ensure that I wrote at least something on any given day, irrespective of whether it was useful or interesting. By addressing primarily myself, I found I was largely relieved of the pressure to be either.
The twenty lines in question refer not to sentences, nor even rows of print, but to handwritten lines in a notebook, which means that they are capable of standing for a variable number of words. Mathews' entries tend to average at three hundred; these, at five, come to a little more by consistently breaking the rule.