No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner.

Take a line for a walk and go and buy a pencil with Virginia Woolf. In this classic essay, the celebrated modernist describes the pleasure of finding an excuse to blur your edges in the sound and colour of Oxford Street at the end of the day. It’s an intoxicating picture and one which remains as fresh and vivid as the day it was written.