Take note of life’s passing moments

I like to feel the covers to see how pliable they are and if they could withstand six months of thumbing, coffee and wine splashing and the occasional smashed avo stain. Sometimes I like to sniff them too. I don’t know why, but I find it strangely comforting. A new vellum-covered notebook with creamy blank pages smells like steaming porridge made by your mother wafting up the stairs as you lie in bed at the weekend — full of promise and hope for the life ahead.

A good notebook has to be thick enough to feel as though your notes are worth reading, but thin enough to fit in your back pocket without looking like a mobile phone you might be mugged for.

I might remind note-takers here that the back pocket is not really the place to keep a valuable notebook. Like mobile phones, notebooks can be rendered useless if they slip into the murky depths of a toilet bowl during a desperate moment.

I was reminded this week of the writer’s attachment to notebooks when Australian comedian Peter Helliar reflected on how devastated he was when he lost one in the back of a taxi.

I thought well, if that’s a good enough subject for a famous comedian to write about then I’ll steal it because that’s what note-takers do. I’ve got notebooks full of stolen ideas.

I’ve got notebooks going back to when The Beatles were still in charge of the world and Biros were exciting because they could write upside down in space.

My teenage notes are full of love poems to Gillian Davies, drawings of my teachers and school mates, lists of guitars I wish I had, and bad song lyrics like: What’s gonna happen tomorrow? / Just another world full of sorrow/ People are living and people are dying/ and still everybody’s cheating and lying.

Or perhaps I stole that from The Eagles. I can’t remember.

Surprisingly, my song was never published or recorded.

My earliest notebook was a blue hard-backed exercise book handed out at Hendy Primary School in South Wales. For six weeks I kept a daily account written in a blue inky sprawl of my adventures along the muddy banks of the River Loughor with my mate Geraint during a summer holiday in 1963.

I kept it for 12 years until I foolishly took it with me when I left home. It was lost in the fog of drunken early morning scribblings and couch surfing during my college years. Without the detail contained in the old blue school notebook, my summer days on the Loughor with Geraint are now memories that ebb and flow like the murky river, but remarkably they are still vivid — probably because I had taken the time to write them down.

Today I have a collection of notebooks — thin, fat, hard and soft, some full to the brim with the electric fizz of life as lived in the moment, others with just a few pages of fidgety scrawl leaving the rest of the book blank. Some notebooks just don’t feel right, so a new one is required to continue the flow. My favourites at the moment are thin and palm-sized with soft charcoal-coloured covers able to be slotted into a jacket pocket without making you look like you’re packing heat.

I like to pull it out in cafés and bars to furiously catch the man in a cheap suit on the bar stool with a briefcase at his feet biting his fingernails as he watches the 3.30 at Doncaster before the image wriggles away back into the stream.

Of course, when you scribble in notebooks in public places you run the risk of looking like a Centrelink spy or a wanker.

But life is full of fleeting risks and wankers. Luckily, the nerd with the notebook is there to give them all some permanence.