Ersatz Life & Moleskine Notebooks

…Notandum,
A Rat had gnawne my spur-lethers; notwithstanding,
I put on new, and did go forth: but, first,
I threw three beanes ouer the threshold. Item,
I went, and bought two tooth-pickes, whereof
one I burst, immediatly, in a discourse
With a dutch Merchant, about Ragion del stato.
From him, I went, and payd a moccinigo,
For peecing my silke stockings; by the way,
I cheapend sprats: and at St Markes, I vrin'd.

Sir Politic’s Diary from Ben Jonson’s Volpone.

As an angst-ridden 12-year old in the early 1970s, the things that fascinated me about my father’s copies of Diners Club Magazine – to be truthful, the only things that could have possibly fascinated any adolescent about that depressingly staid publication – were the incredibly rich vistas of full and important lives revealed through the glossy advertisements for luxury diaries and appointment books.

No buying toothpicks or urinating in St. Mark’s for those who wrote in these magnificent works. Gazing at the carefully staged photographs with same lubricious intensity as my contemporaries might have applied to the glossy yet curiously sticky pages of Penthouse International, Electronics Today or Super Car, I saw a clearly leather-bound tome, artistically placed at an oblique angle alongside a three-quarter full, cut crystal brandy balloon, a verdant tropical house plant, and an antique globe (doubtless a disguised drinks cabinet). An expensive, gold fountain pen lay carelessly athwart the open volume, a magician’s wand or rather Byzantine bishop’s staff blessing the life within. The tasteful cream vellum-like pages had beautiful entries in effortless copperplate:

• Flight to New York
• Meet Maurice for lunch (Hyatt)
• Flight Paris
• Meeting with President
• Dinner with Marie-Claire at ‘Les Deux Magots’

In comparison, my own Letts Schoolboy Diary was anything but sumptuous; in fact, it was a stomach-churning mess. The writing was execrable and the doodled drawings quite appalling even by schoolboy standards. Between its embossed blue plastic covers, the scrawled entries were frankly rather dull:

• Research history homework
• Write history essay

After the first month, I usually gave up on even bothering to tear off the clever little perforated corner tabs.

Was it that if one acquired a diary of such magnificent opulence as that shown in Diner’s Club Magazine, one’s life would somehow be forced to live up to it? You couldn’t just scribble in “4.00 PM Dentist” on such pages; surely you would have to enter “Appointment with Sir Clifford, Harley Street”. The diary would force you to live such a life; it would elevate your existence beyond the quotidian world of history homework to virtually Elysian heights. You might indeed be gathered into the “artifice of eternity” to sing if not of “what is past, or passing, or to come” at least of breakfast at the Café Royale and transatlantic flights. Childish, arse-about-face thoughts but ones that have haunted me – and it would appear, many others in a less consciously articulated form – ever since. My appeals for a leather-bound journal and matching, preferably onyx or Chinese lacquer, deluxe fountain pen falling on baffled but resolutely deaf parental ears, I had to bide my time.

A decade or so passed and I acquired a modest income, a wife, an untenured teaching position and – at long last – a Mont Blanc (a gift from a well-heeled student) together with a leather-clad diary. Now life might begin in earnest. I set to work:

• Prepare lecture on Donne
• Deliver lecture on Donne

Admittedly this was a slight improvement on my juvenile efforts, but with eight weeks of much the same entry, it did get a bit monotonous. Adding the occasional social entry didn’t help matters much. “Meet wife for noodles” sounded abysmally trite and utterly lacking in the glamour of the exciting meetings, dinners and trysts recorded in the advertisements.

It is possible that John Donne’s own appointment book would have been equally dull (“Knock off yet another divine poem”); but fortunately he wasn’t exposed to the Diner’s Club Magazine at a formative age. Come to think of it, even the great Immanuel Kant’s entries wouldn’t have been all that exciting. Day after day one would have found the same item: “Carry on with Critique of Pure Reason”. But then, of course, neither Donne nor Kant had any need to record the snail tracks leading to their “monuments of unaging intellect”; their works alone suffice to confer immortality.

The most depressing thing was that my appalling handwriting bore no resemblance to the elegant flourishes that had so impressed me. Indeed, it took an enormous effort of will to first put expensive pen to expensive paper, to sully the textured pages with my constipated scrawl. Having forced a few lines onto the page a malicious little voice in my head would mutter “Now you’ve gone and spoilt it”. And I really felt I had inadvertently performed a sacrilegious action; it would have been far better if I had left the wretched thing alone as a mute reproach to a life not in the least less ordinary. If “the medium is the message”, as Marshall McLuhan wrote – or nearly wrote – then this particular medium’s message was nothing if not unambiguous: keep off the parchment.

Computerised appointment books and eventually Microsoft Outlook saved me from this dispiriting state of affairs. Appearing in neat type on the computer screen, first in glowing green on black and then in full colour, my appointments might have been just as monotonously mundane, but they were no longer scrawled and they gained a kind of spurious authority from the hi-tech context. Plus, with the advent of ‘cut and paste’ one could fill the eight weeks of similar entries in an instant, rather than have to laboriously copying them in by hand while miserably dwelling on the amount of repetition.

And of course with the advancement of maturity and the arrival of fatherhood, one became less self-obsessed, less concerned with some invisible critic looking over one’s shoulder. Was some higher power judging me on the quality of entries in my diary or even on that of the physical object itself? I no longer gave a damn, or much of one. I was too busy enjoyably living my life without worrying about the agenda. Sure I keep a sort of desultory diary – but that is stored in computer files and is a record of what has happened acting as an aide memoire rather than as an exercise in calligraphically perfect self aggrandisement.

One would have thought that in our age of texts, emails, blogs and social networks, an immature anxiety about writing one’s agenda on quality paper with luxury pen would have gone the way of the quill, the stylus and the wax tablet. However, it appears that the obsession with creating a meaningful life through the mere possession of elegant writing materials is as alive as ever. Take, for example, the recent rebirth of the Moleskine notebook – available from all branches of Waterstones at the princely price of £8.95 for the diminutive standard pocket version. Take too, the number of blogs devoted to the thing. Filled with informative interactive discussions on such topics as what pen best suits them, how to care for the simulated moleskin jackets or what to put in the expandable inner pocket, these sites even have loving photos of the things, these to me being curiously redolent of those old Diner’s Club Magazine advertisements. Needless to say, I bought one the other day; I couldn’t have done otherwise. After all, the advertisement does point out that “Moleskine was the choice of Picasso, Hemingway and Chatwin”. The next stop, it would seem, is to be Patagonia.