I have kept a paper notebook since I was nineteen. Not a diary, exactly, and not a commonplace book either: a working notebook, where sentences go to be wrong before they are right. People ask why I don't just use my phone. The honest answer is that the phone is too good at forgetting. It files things away so neatly that I never find them again. A notebook is untidy, and the untidiness is the point. I flick back for a train time and find a line I wrote in March about the colour of the canal. There is also the matter of speed. Handwriting is slow enough that I have to choose. I can type faster than I think; I cannot write faster than I think. So the notebook holds fewer words, and better ones. I buy the same notebook every time: A5, dotted, thread-bound so it lies flat. I number the pages on the first evening. When a notebook is full, it goes on the shelf above my desk with a date range on the spine. There are thirty-one of them now. If you want to start, start badly. Write the shopping list in it. Write the bus number. The good sentences turn up when the notebook stops being precious.
I can type faster than I think; I cannot write faster than I think.
Note 1
Thread-bound notebooks lie flat on a desk, which matters more than paper weight.
Note 2
Thirty-one notebooks, 2007 to now, on the shelf above the desk.
