Friday, December 12, 2003

A few years ago, when I worked for PwC, their stationery cupboard used to be home to some really nice notebooks. The paper was nice and thick and brightly coloured, they were spiral bound, and they had covers hard enough to be half-decent to lean on. Unsurprisingly, at the end of my contract there I… liberated, shall we say, one from said cupboard and brought it home. Instead of using it up on pointless doodlings or ephemeral 'to do' lists, I decided to save it until one day it would cry out to me to be used on a project close to my heart.

Recently, I had a conversation about stationery with Vince. His notebooks for his film and novel were, I noticed when I visited, rather nice. Big A4 ones, with cartridge paper in, good for writing on and doodling in (or sketching, in his case). They looked and felt inviting, which is what a good notebook should be.

Neil Gaiman has just started writing a new novel. From what he says on his blog, it appears that he writes everything out long hand using a two nice Lamy fountain pens – one with reddish ink, the other with greenish ink, alternated so he can tell at a glance how much he's written each day – and luscious Moleskines notebooks.

I usually work on my projects mainly on the computer, but lately I’ve been working in fits and starts. I always used to prefer working from scratch on screen – typing seems to bypass my dyslexia to some extent, (and why is dyslexia such a bloody hard word to spell? Surely they would have given us dylexics an easier word to describe our condition?), making the writing process easier on my brain. For some reason, I’ve recently started to prefer handwriting things down instead.

And so, one train of thought derailed another and before you know it my spirit is crying out for my nice, brightly coloured (some might even say bold) blank notebook which would be just the perfect thing for me to sit in bed with and make notes about my sp for the next day's typing.

Except, I've moved. Everything is still in boxes. My nice notebook is in a box. Somewhere. In this house.

I can tell you exactly where it was in my old house – it was on the black bookshelves on the landing halfway down the stairs, on the bottom shelf, in between my lightbox and heaps of slides/photos. It was next to the yellow field notebooks which contain the majority of my second novel, written in long hand mirror writing and thus unread since cessation (rather than ‘completion’).

I can see it in my head, exactly where it was, where it had been for over two years. But now, well, it could be anywhere. I have looked in every single box. I have looked in the boxes downstairs in the dining room which I really have to move upstairs to the loft before Christmas. I have looked in the boxes in the eaves, despite the serious risk of sudden and unexpected spider discovery and, therefore, inevitable heart attack and death. I have looked in the boxes in my office. And the filing cabinet.

There aren't any other boxes left.

I remain, therefore, bereft of a decent notepad with which to work. Instead, I'm faced with a crappy cheapo old Pukka Pad, which inspires my soul not a jot.

Bum.

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