"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. As the foxhunter
hunts in order to preserve the breed of foxes, and the golfer plays in order that open
spaces may be preserved from the builders, so when the
desire comes upon us to go
street rambling the pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: "
Really I must buy a pencil," as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge
safely in the greatest pleasure of
town life in winter-
rambling the
streets of
London."
Virginia Woolf,
Street Haunting: A London Adventure, 1927
