I have always believed that the world is packed with the sort of small, delightful details that deserve to be written about.

There is, after all, a certain charm in the way a bus stop bench acquires a gentle, time-worn sag, or how a pigeon in a city centre can look simultaneously full of purpose and utterly lost. These are the sorts of things that catch my attention, and so naturally, I assume they will interest other people, too.

The problem, as I occasionally suspect, is that they do not.

This troubling thought most often arrives just after I hit ‘publish’ on my blog. I sit back, pleased with my careful observations on, say, the melancholic beauty of abandoned shopping trolleys, only for doubt to slink in like an uninvited dinner guest. What if nobody else finds this even remotely engaging? What if they are reading my post, brow furrowed, wondering why a grown adult has spent 700 words rhapsodising about the evocative placement of an out-of-service vending machine? What if I am, and this is an unspeakable horror, just dull?

It is a risk, I suppose, of writing about the ordinary. You find yourself peering closely at things most people have only ever seen in their peripheral vision, attempting to grant them a level of significance they have never before enjoyed. And on a good day, this feels like an admirable literary pursuit. But on a bad day—well, on a bad day, it feels like writing a poem about the precise moment a biscuit disintegrates into a cup of tea.

Every now and then, however, someone stumbles across one of my musings and tells me that, actually, they rather liked it. That my post about the wistful arrangement of lost gloves on railings made them smile. That they, too, have noticed how absurdly determined some weeds are, pushing through cracks in the pavement with an almost heroic vigour. And suddenly, I feel validated, as though my small, inconsequential observations are not so inconsequential after all.

So, I suppose I will keep writing about the small stuff. The half-deflated footballs stranded in gutters, the way a forgotten receipt in a bookshop always tells a little story of its own. And if nobody else is interested, well, at least I am. And pigeons, I suspect, would be too, if only they had WiFi.