Hardback softback narrow feint spiral-bound

Now here’s a funny thing. People keep buy­ing me note­books. Not nasty cheap ones, I hasten to add — but artistically-bound examples, filled with qual­ity paper. Since my 29th birth­day (about one and a half years ago), on almost any occa­sion where gifts are involved I have received at least one such notebook.

You might think that by now I’d be fed up with them. “Not another one! Please! No!” But I’m not. Because every time I receive a note­book, it’s accom­pan­ied by a com­ment or note along the lines of: “It’s for all your writ­ing.” By this, they’re not mean­ing scrappy lists or notes of meet­ings — but thoughts, ideas and writ­ing for the sheer hell of put­ting words together in a pleas­ing manner.

And that makes me happy. People are think­ing of me as a writer. There’s some sort of instant asso­ci­ation going on in their minds. Amazing.

How­ever, there are two con­fes­sions attached to this. First, although I def­in­itely do use the note­books I’m given (some of them are burst­ing at the seams with an aston­ish­ing range of bad, self-obsessed poetry), I’m less of a note­book writer than I used to be — simply because I’m almost con­stantly around a com­puter these days. I’ve never been par­tic­u­larly fast at hand­writ­ing, and I find that my typ­ing skills man­age to keep pace with the speed of my churn­ing brain much bet­ter than my writ­ing does.

The other con­fes­sion, of course, is that upon receiv­ing another note­book, I always feel that there is an impli­cit under­stand­ing that I should hon­our the gift by retir­ing to my secluded writer’s den (if only I had one), to pen that lit­er­ary or the­at­rical mas­ter­piece I keep prom­ising to myself and every­one. Instead, I end up back here, writ­ing ram­bling entries on my per­sonal web­site, and won­der­ing when The Big Idea will even­tu­ally strike. Sorry to dis­ap­point you (and me).

Hell, I sound pretentious.

So the mes­sage is: keep giv­ing me note­books. Don’t stop. I’m touched, more than you would ever believe. I’ll keep writ­ing non­sense on their lined pages. I’ll keep bash­ing away at my key­board like someone pos­sessed. And one day, hope­fully sooner rather than later, I will put aside apathy and pre­var­ic­a­tion and the dis­sent­ing voices in my head, and I will write some­thing. It won’t be a mas­ter­piece, but at least it will be a start.

And you — yes, you at the back — stop laughing.