Covers

You can't tell a book by them, apparently. Previous readers will know I'm a pen geek. Well, I'm a notebook geek as well. (All right, I'll come clean. I am a giant stationery geek. My favourite shop is Paperchase. End of.) I have a collection of notebooks, some of which are very old. I realise that there is no such thing as the perfect notebook, although I spent a long time searching for this Holy Grail, convinced that one day I would find it and never have to look again. Then I found out that some people had collection of notebooks on the go, a la Doris Lessing. I embraced this concept wholeheartedly, not least because I realised that it licensed me to have a wide variety.

In 2000 I went to Australia for five months, having escaped from Pensions. Before I went, I read Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, as a sort of preparation. (If you haven't read it, do so immediately. Go on. I'll still be here when you get back.) In it he describes the French notebooks he uses on his travels. Before his trip, he finds that the manufacturer has stopped making them, but manages to find a supply and Stocks Up. I was made mournful on reading this - I had never seen one of these notebooks but I Wanted One. In Australia, I stayed with friends in Melbourne for two months and then set off around the rest of the country, in the traditional backpacker way, armed with a rucksack and a long-distance bus ticket. I was not a traditional backpacker however, being older and in possession of funds that would allow me to take a plane if I wanted to. Gosh, it's a big country. The low point, travel-wise, was the 21-hour bus journey to Alice Springs (can't for the moment remember where from - could it have been Darwin? And why didn't I take a plane???).  On arrival at each place I made a beeline for the museums and art galleries (after finding a bed for the night, that is). Again, not your typical backpacker. After being amazed by many exhibits in the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, (including a room full of stones suspended by a web of ropes from the ceiling)

My first Moleskine, with black
Pilot Vball 0.7, to show size

I trotted into the shop and there, in front of me was a large display. I nearly passed out. Yes, there were the notebooks whose passing I had mourned in England - the famous Moleskine. With trembling fingers I picked one up and opened it, discovering a pocket in which there was a little leaflet giving their history. An Italian company had taken over the manufacture. In these interweb days, I would have looked them up on reading about them and discovered this beforehand, but such was the slowness of those times that I had to travel to a different hemisphere to find one. Reader, I bought one. And made my travel notes in it . I have not had such a perfect notebook moment since.

Speaking of covers (which I'm not, yet) here's one of my favourites.

this notebook

Now I am venturing into the world of the art journal, I have been enjoying my cache of stationery. I came across this notebook. Goodness knows how long I've had it. The price is still inside - £1.35 - so I bought it after 15th February 1971. I had used it at some stage, as some pages had been removed. It has blank pages of reasonable quality so I thought I would use it as an ideas book. Not with that cover though.  I remembered covering textbooks at school and thought I would just make it a plain brown wrapper but I couldn't find any brown paper. So I rummaged through my Collection of Things and found:

a gift bag

some bias binding

a gift bag (forgot to photograph it before I took it apart) and some bias binding. (I have no idea why I have bias binding. I have not used bias binding since about 1968. It is entirely possible that I bought it because I like the term bias binding.)

And - after only a little cursing - I have this:

this

To those of an artistic bent, it will not be impressive. But the idea that I would take a notebook and alter it in any way is a new and exciting one to me.

Thanks for reading. See you soon.

Laughing

I often find life funny. I believe that the only reason I managed 25 years in the pensions industry was that I was expert in finding humour in most situations. Well, perhaps not most - that might be rose-tinted reflection. I finally managed to extricate myself from Pensions (as it was known), with a nicely negotiated redundancy package. In the customary and embarrassing speech inflicted on leavers,  my manager said that an unexpected bonus of accompanying me to meetings with clients was the amount of laughing we did in the (usually long) car journeys and that she had had no idea Pensions could be so funny. Which was nice. Some twenty years earlier, a previous manager had said to me "Really, Small*" (not public-school formality - it was a nickname. It was a nickname-heavy establishment.  One of my colleagues was known as Horse and he was unwise enough to make it plain he didn't like it. Hmmm. Perhaps not so far from school) "you speak to me as though I were an amiable buffoon." I remember looking at him and taking just that little bit too long to lie and say I didn't think of him like that at all and he harrumphed off. As he regularly asked me to go and buy wrapping paper and then use it on various family presents, I felt entitled to regard him how I wished. Actually, I liked him a lot and I really didn't mind the present-wrapping -  it was better than manually calculating GMPs (don't ask).

(*Has this mode of expostulation fallen out of fashion? Billy Bunter was always saying it "Oh really, Coker" usually followed by "Ha! Ha! Ha!' yelled Bob Cherry. And "well, really" was a favourite of my mother's.)

In the last week I have found myself laughing out loud whilst on my own in cafes twice. (Gosh, what a dreadful sentence.) That is quite unusual - I might find something funny but I rarely hoot about it if I am alone. The cause of the first was a picture in last week's Guardian. As one of you knows, I laughed so much I stuck my finger in my coffee. The second time was caused by a rereading of The Hills Is Lonely. I read all of Lillian Beckwith's Hebridean books many years ago and I remember I loved them, but I had forgotten quite how funny they were. Are. There are only a few books which have made me laugh out loud and at the moment I can only bring one other to mind - the glorious, bonkers, perfect Uncle Fred In The Springtime, by P G Wodehouse (especially the bit about entering the Empress of Blandings in the Derby.)

I had considered having Charles Penrose with The Laughing Policeman as the musical interlude, but I've always considered it rather chilling. This isn't a song, but it makes me laugh. And the subtitles are a nice touch.

I couldn't leave you songless, though. Here you are. On Monday I shall be singing this with the Sheffield Singing for the Brain group in the Crucible. Yes, really. 

Thanks for being here. Back soon.