We talk about the blank page. How full of potential it can be. How intimidating. How the potential is intimidating.

Parchment and vellum were expensive. So people used to recycle. Scrape or wash the ink off and go again. Sometimes more than once.

How blank is a page? It's haunted by everything you've ever written before. The spectres of everything that could still be. The possibility of perfection. The page isn't blank. It taunts, it beguiles.

This page isn't very easy to read. But then real palimpsests aren't either. They need multispectral imaging and X-ray fluorescence and many were destroyed by earlier attempts to uncover them.

It is the same blank page everyone starts with. The greatest book and most beautiful poem all started here. Laws, songs, manifestos, peace treaties.

There are works from Archimedes and Cicero that only survive as overwritten palimpsests.

We are layers on layers: the books we read as children, the style of our favourite authors, tortured love poems we wrote as teenagers, the music we were listening to in the moment.

Paper as we know it, made from tree pulp as standard, wasn't even a routine thing until a hundred and fifty years ago.

Art is forty thousand years of handprints on cave walls. Underneath every whitewashed wall lurks the Wenhaston Doom. Or it could.

Before that it was mostly made from cloth rags. Like old underwear. Before that... all sorts.

The Western canon built what we think of as stories. The Romantics, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Chaucer, Euripides, Homer. Is that a good thing? A bad thing? Bit of both?

A medieval culture war: the vellum-loving Catholic church disdained paper as heretical because it was used by Islamic states.

Modernists wanted to burn it all down and start again. James Joyce did it by rewriting one of the oldest myths. Gertrude Stein wrote like a Cubist and only sold when she didn't. Standing on the shoulders of giants and realising we can't get down.

Now most of our pages are pixels. The page and the bound codex usurped scrolls. Now we scroll down pages and bookmark the ones we like. Maybe cut and paste a good bit. We still use the words. The words have changed with us.