From felt-tipped obscenities to sketches of his aunt stolen at a tube station, our reviewer writes about his life in the margins
One for dreams, one for writing down things you might otherwise forget, one for composing drafts and organising your thoughts: in the end, they all get mixed up, but that’s half the fun of keeping notebooks. You could use your phone, but it isn’t the same. Unlike JMW Turner’s sketchbooks or his palette, you can’t stick an iPhone in a vitrine in some Tate archive show – should you end up there. It might ring. Nor would you pass it on as an heirloom. That would be mad, although I do still have an old answerphone cassette where I could, if I dared, listen to decades-old chivvyings from former editors and messages from the dead. This is a question less of technology and more of feeling haunted.
If you are going to the bother of using a notebook, why not a real book? A book will almost always help the time pass more quickly on your travels, even if it takes you back to the 18th century or even further, say to the early northern Renaissance. There’s always a lot of catching up to be done. A book quells anxiety, even if it is one that dwells on the anxiety of others. You can’t open a book without finding something troubling, in my experience.
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