‘These last few days — brittle-cold, but dry except for an occasional skiff of something that can’t quite decide if it is snow or hail — I’ve been walking around the city with paper, a blue Conté crayon, masking tape, and a can of hairspray to use as fixative, making rubbings of bricks, tiles, grills, street signs, manhole covers, embossed ironwork: any surface that pleases my eye enough to convince me to take off my gloves, exposing my hands to the freezing air, and carry out the process of taping the paper to the surface that has intrigued me, running the crayon over it, spraying it with hairspray and allowing it to dry for a minute or two before sliding the finished rubbing into a cardboard wallet with the others.’