At the start of each academic year, usually when I have known them for a week or so, I make this confession to my students: ‘To survive this course you will need to have the stationery thing.’ It’s not a confession as such, but to get it they need to have it. Indirectly, I am telling them: I have it too. The point of this is not confession for its own sake, but to make the very serious point, hidden in plain view in the form of a personal anecdote, that if we do not note down that which amazes and inspires each day we will lose it in what Ted Hughes called ‘the crush of information’ of living.
I can always predict how this will go down. Half of the room will look at me uncomprehendingly. They do not say anything, but I know they are beginning to wonder if they made the right choice to choose my course. The other half of the room are nodding and making small squeals of approval. They get it. They touch their scarves and look as though they could curl up with a bowl of hot chocolate.
To make my point more memorable, more personal, and strange, I go into a riff about Great Stationery Shopping Experiences I Have Had (France: a Mammouth hypermarket; Switzerland: a Co-op in an out of season ski resort; the time I spent a whole day dragging my family round Stockholm in search of the famous Bookbinders Design shop. It was the last place we came to.) Just as half the room are zoning out and thinking about coffee, and the other half are starting to make orders on their mobiles, I read them some random (always random) pages from a notebook I have pulled from my shelf that morning.
It will say things like:
Carrots, Butternut, Car MOT (?) check
Dentist -family or just me?
Metaphor article by Cheryl -where is it?
‘Crystals of purpose’
Peter’s Book.
There is a silence.
Even those who are now looking out the window are now paying attention. The thing is, I tell them, some of this may not lead to anything, but nearly all of it nearly always does, because it teaches me to pay attention. Not just to the things I discuss over breakfast with my wife that need doing, but the really important leads like my colleague Cheryl’s marvellous article on memory and metaphor and the fact that Peter’s new book is amazing and I need to spend some time with it.
Over time, this has made quite a library of snatched moments of attention, what DH Lawrence called the ‘effort of concentration’ of looking at and capturing the world around me. Not to mention colourful Clairefontaine (of course) notebooks, with their grid lines and smooth, fountain-pen-friendly 90 gsm paper. My fetish has prompted me to wonder on more than one occasion that I engage in writing poems as a way of feeding my notebook-habit, rather than the other way round. Cloaked in this joke is the serious observation that years of note-making practice has taught me: it is not really about the notebook; it is about the noticing.
Somewhere (you’ll have to trust me on this) I have a one-page entry which reads: ‘The woman in the anorak at the swimming pool.’ I agree, it’s not much of an observation. But, in its way, it has become monumental to me, a touchstone which reminds me why I do this.
Picture the setting. It’s a Monday night in the depths of winter. I am watching my kids at their swimming practice, as I do every Monday, at the local baths. I am sitting alone on some tiered seats, a respectable British distance from the other parents, some of whom are eating, some chatting, and some shouting at their children below. I notice the man in charge of the swimming practice has a whistle and wears a black, skin-tight tracksuit. He is also shouting. My kids’ group is in the lane nearest to the tiered seating. I have a very good view of their progress.
But, being me, my mind wanders. I fidget. (This is in the unimaginable age before mobile phones and Facebook.) I look at my book. I close my book. I pretend to listen to the trainer. I fidget some more, finding with surprise that I have brought my notebook with me. I begin to flick through the entries, pages of lists and weird phrases I have no memory of writing. Then I see her.
At the end of the pool, at pool-level, is a small seating area. It is only ever filled by the good parents who arrive at the training sessions first. The woman who has caught my eye is the mother of a former friend of my daughter. We would have spoken, years ago, in the school playground, perhaps exchanged small-talk as we collected our daughters from parties. I have not seen her for some time. I notice she looks tired and a bit drawn. Like me she is not chatting to other parents or eating. She is watching her daughter intently, between glances at the pages of a magazine. No one speaks to her. At the end of the session, she smiles briefly at her daughter, waves, and puts on a blue anorak. Then she vanishes.
All I have in my notebook is: ‘The woman in the anorak in the swimming pool.’ I do not need any more. Since I wrote it thirteen years ago I have had cancer, lost too many friends to the same, and my eel-like kids have left home. But were an iceberg to float on the surface of that water, it would contain all the information I need: the smell of chlorine, the noise, the vast sense of isolation of a Monday night in December. Originally I thought it may go in a short story. I may never use it for anything. (In a sense I just have.)
Anthony Wilson 
Yes, you have, and used it most effectively, I might add. Very nice indeed.
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Dear Anthony Wilson, ‘Notebook’ is first coffee of the frosty morning additional happiness. Thank you very much.
Catherine Nicholls Ashbrook, Winsford Somerset TA24 7HN
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Thank you. I needed a timely reminder and you offered me one.
I so get it.
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Don’t all great writers have a stationery thing?!
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Ah the symbiosis of papers and pens. And the related obsessions. Like making my own notebooks. Kettlestitching.I was sad when I found kettle was German(ic) for chain. I don’t do the jottings thing. Tried for years. But workshop notes. Ah. There’s joy.
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beautiful and USEFUL!, its timely for me to be reminded of making my notebook moments a daily attentiveness.” A library of snatched moments of attention ” gorgeous… interesting to think about how the writerly aspect of snatched moments of attention later fermented is a mirror of readerly pools of attention when we are blessed by immersion in the page of a book.
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I lose them! Not on buses or trains but in the house. They’re all over the place, some half full, some quarter full, some empty. I can never seem to find the one I want so I start another one. They’re all floating somewhere in my unconscious consciousness, like little lilos.
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I’d have been one of the students nodding a relieved silent Yes! when you mentioned stationery. I’m a double addict; I carry word sketchbooks full of discarded haiku and tanka (they often grow into longer prose pieces) and also ‘quotebooks’ where I jot down the lines of other folks’ writing that leap out at me like signposts when I’m reading.
Thank you for this lovely, flowing piece, and a haunting memory beautifully captured and honoured.
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I love the idea of jotting down both trivial and inspirational things! I use the Moleskin notebooks, which have a little section in the back that holds stamps and other loose items. I prefer the mid-size journal. I’m sure your students are fortunate!
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As always there are so many moving elements in your post about the simple things of life. I especially relate to this pool scene you describe so well since I also took my kids to many swimming lessons and liked to stay away from the conversations going on around me, enjoying the rare moment of solitude (a treat with four kids). Noticing what’s around us is an important element for writers and jotting down small things can lead to bigger projects. We just don’t always know on the spot. Writing down ideas, names, setting descriptions, feelings, about pretty much anything is also something I do. And yes, a strange word or sentence which would remain cryptic to anyone will haul us back to the moment when we wrote these simple words.
Of course I smiled at the mention of the French Mammouth.
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Thank you for this post and I am so glad that what I do is not so unusual. The urge to write has taken over my brain, after laying dormant for so long. I am getting it in the neck for carrying around a notebook, I took it on the walk with the dog, if I am alone I can think, we notice things together. I also have one by the shower, since inspiration strikes at the strangest of times and one almost full by the bed. Special ones which friends have purchased as gifts, ones I have saved for when I have something interesting to write a special one which I picked up in Poland for a friends’ wedding. I should stop saving them for best. Stationery is so important! I also write on envelopes out of desperation or the nearest thing, put notes in my phone, but never seem to have the time to put them in the right place. Black and White, on paper, there’s nothing quite like it.
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A man after my own heart and those notebooks are divine. I love to write in different coloured notebooks…I’ve been told I’m weird but I can live with that as I’m happy in my world of coloured pencils and strange fetishes for pretty little things in which to recount my days and daydreams. A great write.
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I did this once for fun and discovered that is a great way to get ideas later for a story or whatever I was writing, I have so many journals with random stuff that is very useful!!
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Reblogged this on josie moyer and commented:
I have recently discovered a secret of learning which has altered (in the best sense) my perception of knowledge, made through an experience where I sat in on a class that contained subject matter I was previously completely unaware of. The realest beauty of learning, not simply in an educational sense, but in every way, is that all of the thoughts already recorded on any particular subject do not have to be reinvented by those that pursue it in the future, but after being learned are simply added to and grown.
I always had an unrealistic idea of teaching myself all there is to know, with merely the assistance of the knowledge of others. However, seeing the thoughts that so many with passions similar to mine have already shared, thoughts that are completely comprehensive but new…
It seems like a childish lesson to learn, and maybe the lesson is more closely related to a feeling than a concrete discovery, but it allows pieces like this, “Notebook” by Anthony Wilson, that cover a concept and lifestyle I have thought of often, to be that much more appealing and enlightening,
So much thought has been given, not always as a gift, but it can certainly be taken as such.
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I am always truly excited, when I get a new journal or new pens. My only problem is I don’t seem to fill up the journals, and I’ve noticed in this fast paced world, my mind races to keep up with it all. Much delightful truth to this.
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