This is really a Commonplace Book

Kate, a university friend of mine, looked at my blog and decided it reminded her of John Julius Norwich and his Christmas Crackers:



I ordered the book and saw his collection described as a commonplace book.
One great piece in there is about an umbrella catching fire on a dry day in Paris...

How like a blog, I said to myself. Of course, others had thought of this before us:

"A Commonplace Book is an old idea that deserves remembering; a single place where we keep bits and pieces of language, knowledge, ideas that we run across. A kind of precursor to the weblog, where, as we read and listen to others, we pick up chunks of knowledge, blurbs, truisms, memes, that we in one way or another want to keep with us. So we write them down in a book..."