The notebook – the paper product, not the film, on the grounds that Ryan Gosling is no Ryan Reynolds – holds a special place in my heart. Its allure is as infinite as the promise of its blank, beckoning pages.
It has been thus since childhood. (What pocket, Christmas and birthday money didn’t go on books went on paper.) Spiral-bound reporters’ notebooks from WH Smith, orange Silvine exercise books from newsagents, floral beauties collected on holiday in Devon and Cornwall whose every detail I can still lovingly recall 30 years on. As the years passed, I graduated to Ryman’s proudly professional offerings, flirted with Filofaxes and John Lewis’s plethora of lined and unlined delights (I have not, nor will I ever, have any truck with graph or dotted pages), before finally discovering Muji and Moleskine, the Scylla and Charybdis of stationery fetishism. There is no escape – you are fated to lose yourself to the purgative utilitarianism of one, or the leatherbound decadence of the other.
Not even digital advancements change the seduction of the notebook. For one thing, they are a purchase that cannot disappoint. If you fall in love with one in a shop, it won’t look different or make you look fat when you get it home. It will always go with the shoes you already have. And there is an array of gorgeous options at every price point. You never regret buying a notebook. It is always value for money.
And then there is that infinite-promise thing. Pristine white, warmly welcoming cream (a daring sky-blue if you’re that way inclined) and as blank as Bellman’s map, its unsullied pages wait to be filled. They are so beautiful that you feel, like Oscar Wilde trying to live up to his blue china, that you must only bring your best self to them.
At the core of everyone’s heart, I believe, but certainly of the writer’s (right next to the little splinter of ice) , is the irreducible conviction that only the lack of the right combination of tools stands between us and greatness. The right pen (which is simply a Lamy Safari medium nib fountain pen, by the way, but I will discuss the vexed question of inks at a later date)and the right paper brought into conjunction is surely the way to unleash the tide of inspiration, the bold, brilliant, original ideas that will coalesce into an award-winning play, bestselling novel or whatever else it is that glimmers on the horizon of our ambition. Notebooks are our bibles, containing only one tenet: that it is this, not us, that stands in the way of perfection.
That is certainly what I believed when I was younger. Now that I am older and more tired, I love them more for the promise they hold of organisation. This will be the one in which I devise the systems, make the lists and design the timetables that will make my life run smoothly. Ars may be longa, but vita is increasingly brevis – and I need more help with the latter now. Muji, I know, will have the answer.
Moleskine Pro Notebook It’s a classic for a reason.
Liberty Morris A5 A trip to Liberty’s stationery department creates a hunger like no other. If I could collect this in all prints, I would die happy.
Muji B5 Notebooks (five-pack) Sometimes it’s good not to overthink things. Like a packet of digestive biscuits, a bundle of Muji’s no-nonsense notebooks will hit the spot.
Field Notes (three-pack) If you want to class up your utilitarian instincts, head to Field Notes and stay there.
Kate Spade Stack of Classics Take Note Xlarge Notebook Treat yourself. Go on. Or treat someone else. They will unwrap this and love you for ever
