Confessions of a Stationery Mug

I'm a stationery mug.

Not a stationary mug, i.e. someone who is both daft and immobile.

No. A stationery mug, i.e. a liker of all the things you write with and write on.

Sure. The computer, the printer and Microsoft Word produce high quality documents with a little help from my fingetips – but I still like to write some things, holding a pen or pencil or ink brush, physically forming the words, ink flowing from somewhere deep within the mind, through hand and pen, and leaving a trail of meaning on the paper.

I own an expensive Waterman fountain pen which I use to write special letters and cards.

I own an equally expensive Waterman ballpoint pen to impress others when I am attending those committees where others tap away at various electronic artefacts, for my part preferring a well crafted lacquered pen like the unrepentant Luddite I occasionally am.

When it comes to what you write on, I like notebooks – especially A5 notebooks.

So like the stationery mug I am, I was browsing in The Works and came across cloth covered, finely decorated, A5 notebooks with good quality paper, a couple of hundred pages, and at a ridiculous remainder price.

In the big bookshops and other upmarket places that sell notebooks to the Journal writing public, you'd pay nearer £10 or more for a stitched quality notebook like these.

So. £2.99 each.

Stationery mug here buys 3 – one for my study desk in Westhill – one for my study desk at College, and one to replace whichever of these two gets filled first.

And what gets written in them? Some of the stuff that eventually makes its way into Living Wittily; plus other footnotes and quotes from whatever is being read; ideas as they form slowly, take and then change shape, and evolve into understanding; and those frequent fleeting gifts of thought that unless written down are like the sparrow in the Celtic legend, that flies in one end of the barn and flies out the other, and is gone, its vanishing intimating the brevity of life!

For years I've kept different kinds of what used to be called a Commonplace Book, a repository of what at different times has seemed apt, important, funny, significant, worth attending to, and to keep safe whatever is ( to coin a clumsy word) shareable, until the time comes to share it. Off to note down a thought I just had…..