Curiosity without a deadline.

At 7:10 I was dressed for the studio. Monday is now one of the days I don't go in.

Put the jacket back. Kept the shoes on for another hour, which seems a fairly accurate summary of the arrangement so far.

The kitchen table is wider than it looks when covered with drawings. Without them I can see a pale rectangle where the old fruit bowl stood. I moved it years ago and apparently never looked at what it had left behind.

Three days at the studio, two days elsewhere. That was the sensible plan. I hadn't specified what elsewhere meant.

Bought the least expensive sketchbook. The expensive one had beautiful paper and would have required a more interesting person to own it.

First drawing: the receipt. Second drawing: the corner of the receipt, because the first was too ambitious.

Lunch with Teresa. She arrived with a parcel tied in string and wouldn't tell me what was in it until we'd ordered. Seeds from her balcony. I had forgotten saying I wanted plants.

We have known each other long enough for her to tell me when I'm answering a question she hasn't asked. Today I gave her an account of the studio handover and she said, "And on Mondays?"

I said I was drawing. It sounded like a claim I might be asked to substantiate. She simply asked what.

A receipt, so far. She laughed for so long that I did too.

Chair: four legs, four opinions about perspective.

Leaving it.

Looking longer

Went out intending to draw a tree. An unnecessarily difficult object. Thousands of decisions, none of them perpendicular.

Tried the shadow instead. It crossed the path and climbed a little way up a wall. By the time I had its shape the sun had moved. I was irritated with the sun, which at least made a change from being irritated with the drawing.

At the studio I can often tell a junior colleague what a line needs to do. Here I couldn't tell myself where to begin. I kept pressing harder, as though uncertainty could be made convincing by darkness.

A child stopped to look. I braced myself for a question about what it was supposed to be. She said the purple was nice. I hadn't brought purple; it was grey over the red showing through from the previous page.

I have spent thirty years trying not to let one drawing interfere with another. Perhaps I could allow it in a sketchbook.

Three hours on the stair detail with Joana. Proper work. I enjoyed it.

Left at four as agreed. At four fifteen, on the bus, I thought of another way to resolve the landing. Opened my email. Closed it. Opened it again and sent the sketch.

Part-time in hours. Full-time in my head. We will have to work on both.

An afternoon I didn't know what to do with.

I dislike admitting this because everyone has been congratulating me on getting time back. They say it as though someone is returning a coat I left at a party. Here it is, exactly as you remember it, ready to wear.

My sister asked what I had done today. I described the errands. There were two. Made them sound like four.

Agapanthus. Teresa wrote it on the seed packet so I would stop calling everything a lily.

They are everywhere. How can something be everywhere only after you learn its name?

Mended the pocket of the blue coat. There was a pencil inside the lining.

No drawing, but an additional pencil. A net gain.

The same chair again. It almost stands up this time.

I haven't been drawing every day. Some days I resented the sketchbook for being another place to record whether I had done what I said I would do. I left it under the newspaper and found that a very effective arrangement for not seeing it.

Today the newspaper went into recycling and the chair was still there. Drew it in pen so there would be less discussion about correcting it.

The back is too wide. The shadow is good. Both facts fit on one page.

Joana asked how I know when a design is finished.

We were looking at a plan for a small renovation. I could see three things I would change. I also knew she hadn't asked me to redraw it, which has not always prevented me from doing exactly that.

I told her about the doorway in the first flat I worked on. I moved it twice on paper, argued for the second position, then visited after the clients moved in and found they had put a bookcase in front of it. They used the other door. Their arrangement was better.

She asked whether I was telling her to stop. I wasn't sure. We went through the plan together and she noticed a storage problem I had missed while thinking about circulation.

It is uncomfortable to discover that some of my certainty was just familiarity with being the person asked. I still know things. I know a great deal about stairs. But I don't want to make Joana carry my need to remain necessary along with the actual project.

On the way home I bought bread and forgot milk. Drew the bread before cutting it, which delayed dinner without improving it.

I found a drawing from my first year in practice while looking for the bread knife. Wrong drawer, but there it was: a folded copy I'd brought home to show my mother. My name in very small letters beside the senior architect's. I remember being proud of those letters. I also remember him drawing over my work while I stood there holding the cap of the pen he'd borrowed.

He was often right. That complicated the resentment. For years I told the story as an example of how much I learned from him. Today I remembered wanting him to ask me why I'd put the wall there before moving it.

I could have told Joana that story instead of the bookcase story. It might have been more useful. It would also have made me less comfortable, because in today's version I was the one holding the pen.

Put the old drawing back. Then took it out again and left it on the table. I don't want to turn every object into an instruction, but I would like to remember this feeling for longer than the bus journey home.

Question for Thursday: ask her what she decided before showing her what I would have done.

Market colours:

• plum skin, almost black
• dull tin
• the cut end of a cabbage
• blue plastic under everything

Bought pears. Drew none of them.

The sketch group had a spare chair and three conversations already in progress. I was relieved not to be introduced to everyone at once.

Rui, who organises it, asked whether I wanted to draw the view or the people. I said the view. People move, and I was already managing enough movement internally.

The woman beside me drew in a tiny notebook with a pen that leaked. Her page was better than mine by every measure I could invent, and she was annoyed with it. This ought to have comforted me. Mostly I wanted her pen.

Stayed for coffee afterwards. Didn't mention my job until someone asked.

Rain cancelled the walk. Teresa brought out a box of photographs instead.

There was one of us in our twenties, seated at a table I remember as enormous. In the photograph it is a perfectly ordinary table. We must have put six dinners on it and called it a party.

Teresa remembers me being fearless. I remember checking the last bus time twice before going anywhere. We argued about this pleasantly. It is strange to be a different person in someone else's archive.

Cup handle still wrong in the drawing. Tea still fits in the actual cup.

Pencil from the blue coat sharpened. Very short now. Will keep it until it becomes impossible to hold, apparently.

Lunch with Teresa. She asked about the seeds. Changed the subject so badly she noticed immediately.

Bus stop drawn while waiting. Bus arrived before I finished. Considered not getting on; got on.

Email from Joana: a photograph of the stair model. No question attached. I enjoyed being shown something without being needed to fix it.

Left half the page white.

Not in an interesting compositional way. I was tired and the woman on the bench I was drawing went home. The old instinct was to finish from memory, make the page look like a completed afternoon.

Instead I wrote the time in the corner: 16:40. Then I went home too.

The seed packet is still on the kitchen shelf. Teresa will ask. I could say I am waiting for the right time to plant them, which might even be true.

Paint on my finger at dinner. Left it there until the washing-up. Wanted somebody to ask, which is embarrassing but true.

Made a space for two sketchbooks between the cookbooks and the telephone directory nobody uses.

I thought the shelf would make them look more established. Mostly it made me notice how little space two books need. All this rearranging of work and time, and the visible result fits in the width of my hand.

Inside: a chair that improves and gets worse again, several receipts, part of a tree, Teresa's parcel, Rui's left shoe. There are pages where I can remember exactly who was talking beside me. There are pages I don't recognise at all.

The studio still matters. I don't want to write an ending in which I discover it never did. On Thursday Joana wants me to look at a stair detail. On Monday I am meeting the sketch group. These can be two appointments, rather than rival explanations of who I am.

Planted the seeds. Possibly the wrong season. Have kept the packet.