It's a furtive love, an embarrassed need. It's not the sort of thing that one can speak easily of in polite circles. Google it, and there is no automatic fill-in. Google it and the first ten hits contain two of my blogees, my Facebook friends. 331,000 hits suggests I am not alone
Dirty old men sneak guiltily into corner shops to purchase their porn and take it away under their macs or in a brown paper bag. Or wrapped in a Guardian. Even that's not true any more; porn mags are displayed at child's eye height and mainstream but niche hobby mags are out of reach of diminutive women.
I am not a kleptomaniac nor a thief by nature but my fetishist obsession has driven me to thievery on occasion. My all-time favourite item to be thieved was KPMG analysis paper, pads and pads of it, brittle like the paper of bibles.
I have collected notebooks for years, started small. Just the red Silvine exercise books, that came in so many models. Or nice little notebooks, often a passing souvenir of a museum or tourist spot visited. To accompany a souvenir biro which would bleed or crack by the end of the week.
I moved on up to neat spiral notebooks with brightly covered card covers.. From card onto plastic. From there to interesting materials: straw or velour. I was always careful, nothing too expensive, take advantage of the sales, grab when the line is being cleared.
Now it is utterly compulsive. There are people taking advantage of those of us with this shameful addiction. I have bought notebooks with Wedgwood designs, notebooks designed for the intrepid travellers to record their impressions of hot and dusty places. Notebooks better made and with better paper than the average published hardback book. I can't help myself. I go into WH Smiths to buy a birthday card and come out with three new notebooks. Sometimes I feel the urge to buy every size of every design. I'm killing time in the vicinity of a Paperchase and suddenly my bank balance is lighter and my rucksack considerably heavier.
Which then leaves the Big Question. What do I do with stacks of beautiful blank notebooks? Gaze at and sniff their unblemished virgin state. Well, yes, obviously. But I have a further urge. I need to fill them. Fill them with words. Word must be written with fountain pen. Fountain pen with ink has a sensuality that is the perfect partner to gorgeous notebooks with pages of smooth silky white paper.
I have hinted from time to time that I write fiction, purely for my own enjoyment. It's not about creating a product that's marketable. It's not about striving for literary credibility - although I strive for continuous self-improvement - but is it about release, about capturing and encapsulating the torrid creations of my fevered imagination.
It makes no sense. I have a computer with a word processing package on it. Word processing on PC is a much more sensible way of writing. Cut and paste. write out of sequence. Edit, rewrite. Delete, reword. Insert an extra passage. Clear up accidental or deliberate inconsistencies of continuity. Obliterate my worst verbal ticks: finding a word and over-using it (the Gotterdammerung post down below has too many 'culminations' in such a short space). Or long winded sentences. Too many "I/she/he realised"s, too many "each other"s. On PC they can be erased and eradicated.
But the prose doesn't flow if I don't adopt a bad posture and scrawl in convent girl script in black ink fountain pen in a notebook.
And yet it feels plain wrong to be writing smutty stories in beautiful smooth notebooks. Clearly, there is a role for carrying around a to-do list. Ring Gas Board, Go to Training Course, Acquire Self Knowledge. It's always good to have somewhere to write random thoughts. Random thoughts inspired by my mp3 player or the rolling countryside or the extraordinary people with whom I share a Tube carriage.
For many years I kept a paper diary. It started in top Juniors and it expanded and expanded. I used to write it at every snatched opportunity I could. In lessons at school (hardly surprising I never got a proper education), in Lambeth Labour Group meetings. They all thought that I was striving to be a political diarist in the tradition of Crossman, Castle and Benn. As if. Full of teen angst, even though, obviously, having been elected to public office I was somewhat longer in the tooth than teen.
It fell into disuse when I first got a computer at home. Although I did try - my first computer written diary entry for 1998
Diary covering January 7th to January 11th 1998.
So much for good intentions - yeah, thats right, a rushed job on the diary!
Not that there is a great deal to say for the period concerned. I have spent the weekdays in work - not really feeling particularly highly motivated, perhaps a result of being the first week back after Christmas.
On Tuesday I went to Southend, which, I guess was vaguely exciting - at least I had to concentrate and work! Had a bit of a nightmare journal there- I hadnt exactly got up especially early, so I knew I was running late. And to really make my day do you believe that the Central Line was really delayed. Originally they said it was due to somebody on the track at Leytonstone, but then they said it was because of Signal Failure. Hey, thats London Underground for you! So I was sort of aiming for the 9.20 train but, having just missed the 9.50 I had to wait until the 10.22!
So I was not a happy bunny. Actually Tuesday was my only night all week - well apart from Saturday and Sunday! On Wednesday was Council, and on Thursday and Friday, I attended a Housing Benefit Training Session. Which was quite interesting.Saturday was the day of great excitement: I had my computer delivered. And guess what I did practically for the whole of Saturday and Sunday. I spent quite a while unpacking the computer and everything that goes with it - not least about fifteen compact disks, and nearly as many floppy disks!
I even logged onto the WWW; I decided to go for BT Line One, on account of that was the software delivered. I spent rather a long time surfing- oh, well, its just a novelty!
And the very best news is that on Saturday United beat Tottenham 2-0 with goals from Ryan Giggs. The details can be found in the database in Works - I shall keep all the footie scores there. So United are now just massively in lead in the Premiership!
(What this quotation fails to impart was the excitement of being able to use ClipArt in my diary - I included pictures of a train, a computer and a footballer. The banality of my coverage of Lambeth full council is breathtaking: we were a hung council with no administration just four months away from the glorious revolution splendid victory of May 1998. No hints as to the stupid games the LibDims were getting up to in their increasingly desperate knowledge that New Lambeth New Labour were on the march ascendant. And work. It was a blooming private diary. No worries about disclosing official secrets in my private diary. It might have been at that time I was reviewing the then HM Customs and Excise Departmental VAT Return, the most ironic audit i have ever undertaken.
Four years later, having entirely abandoned paper diaries I started blogging in a much more innocent era. In those days one poured out one's innermost thoughts, believing that nobody was reading, or that one's only readers were fellow bloggers in on the secret. Gradually I cut back on the personal stuff. not as a conscious decision but with a growing awareness of the inappropriateness of talking about many aspects of work. Important not to express opinions on Real Life people. If you write about someone assume they will read it, but don't arrogantly expect them to. Do not write anything that expose my vulnerabilities for exploitation.
In a delicious squaring of a circle it has slowed dawned on me that I need to keep a paper diary. For my inner thoughts, for keeping a record of the vicissitudes of work of mental calm of relationships (not just Relationship), to get things off my shoulders.
From blogging I think I have a learnt a lot about how actually to keep a paper diary. Do not do a chronology, do not work from the bottom up. Note random thoughts, do not worry about maintaining a coherent narrative, enjoy the disjointed and fragmented, treat it as an exercise in creative writing rather than a school essay or an audit report.
And revel in the sensuality of black ink flowing from a fountain pen onto a virgin page of smooth white paper.
