By interlibrary loan from the Twin Falls Public Library I obtained and read a delightful little 2022 book by Miranda Keeling titled The Year I Stopped to Notice. It could have been subtitled The Joy of Noticing Little Things - which are what can make a speech memorable. That book has 177 pages and is just 4-7/8’ wide by 6-1/2” high. There is a Google Books preview through page 32. Her introduction begins:
“You might be reading this because the cover looked cheerful, or you’re frantically searching for a present for a friend. You might just be marking time in a shop because it’s raining outside and you don’t want to leave yet. Whichever way you found yourself here, hello.
It’s the small moments, like the one you’re having right now, that make up this book: a woman in a shop opens a book and reads the introduction. Perhaps she is wearing a yellow dress. Her brown hair is curly. It is swept up with a silver clip in the shape of a shark. It is chilly in the shop, and she places the book down to take a knitted green cardigan out of her bag and put it on. The wool is thin at her right elbow. Perhaps a man reads this page. He sits at his laptop in a café, looking at the book online. He has dark red hair. His hands on the keyboard are freckled. He is avoiding work. Underneath the café table a small elderly dog sleeps across the man’s foot – the dog makes short whining noises at something in its dream, Perhaps one of these people is you. Perhaps you are completely different.
Days can feel long, and years fast. Our lives are full, yet at the end of the day when someone asks us what we did, we can barely remember. This book is the result of me stopping to notice the details and finding that ordinary life is extraordinary in its own way. If you’re someone who can find the big picture a little overwhelming and need moments of peace in the storm, or who loves the busy, layered fabric of life and just wants some of it captured to enjoy over coffee, read on.
Everywhere I go, I record what I notice: snippets of conversation, images, an atmosphere. I have been captivated by the everyday since I was very small. I grew up in Yorkshire, the Netherlands, America, and London. As my mum and I walked around these places, she would often interrupt a sentence to say: ‘Did you see that?’ I loved the times it turned out that we had spotted the same, small thing. At art college I studied glassmaking. I made miniature sculptures – if you looked closely at them, you could see worlds of colour inside. I carried a notebook everywhere, Then, about seven years ago, I began writing them down instead. Not everything I see is lovely. I live in the world. But that is not what this book is for. You will find the melancholy and the surreal here, but that’s as far as it goes.”
Here are a half-dozen examples from the book:
Page 9 from January:
"Little boy on the train: Mama?
His mum: Yes?
Little boy: I never see you brush your hair.
His mum: I do a lot of things you don’t see.
(Pause)
Little boy: Like flying?"
Page 44 from March:
“A man on the train sighs as, having meticulously arranged his lunch on his little fold-down table, the woman from the window seat beside him needs the loo.”
Page 65 from May:
“A man has stopped on Oxford Street and stands in his socks, as he pours what appears to be green and pink confetti out of his shoes.”
Page 117 from August:
“A man outside a yet-to-open piano shop signals frantically to the woman inside to let him in. This is clearly a musical emergency.”
Page 137 from October:
“A little girl on a doorstep manages to negotiate eating an entire piece of toast while having her coat put on by her mum.”
Page 164 from December:
“Like an opening fan, five people at a bus stop lean sequentially to the left as they try to read the number of the bus coming up the road.
There is a 24-minute YouTube video at Carers UK on August 26, 2022 titled Stopping to notice with Miranda Keeling. And there is another newer book (I have not read) from June 2025 by Miranda Keeling titled The Place I’m In: What I see when I stop to notice, which again has a preview at Google Books. Miranda also has a podcast titled Stopping to Notice.
Back on February 28, 2014 I blogged about Speech topics from near your neighborhood, and paying attention to things - like a gold Buddha statue sitting on a white concrete bench next to the driveway of a home.
The train sign came from here at Wikimedia Commons.
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