Taking note

I have a stationery fetish. More than that even. I'd call it an Obsession but I think Calvin Klein has that copyrighted.

After the book store, the library, and the private club down the road, the Stationery store is my favourite place in the world. You can drop me off in a stationery store and happily pick me up 5 weeks later, and I'll still have a tantrum and refuse to leave.

I love stationary. I love ink flowing from a pen for the first time, I love the smoothness of unsharpened pen and I love the perfect white of a blank sheet of paper.

And most of all I love notepads.

There is something magical about a new pad. You've felt it no doubt, that thrill page that runs up the arms and into the brain like a pair of athletic earwigs, when you open to the first clean page. Every new pad has the potential for greatness. By the time it has run out of pages it could contain a best selling novel, world changing philosophy, or the recipe for Kentucky fried chicken. It could be the pad that changes the world.

It never is though. A few pages in my writing stumbles into an messy four word pile-up, marring the beauty of the canvas. Leaves are torn out, floating to the ground as if ripped from a tree by a frustrated October Wind. Over the pages my handwriting decays until it reads like a intoxicated man declaring his love of underwear. The bindings bend and clog with the fragments of torn pages, the corners crease, the ink runs, and before long my dream pad has become a collection of half finished to-do lists and stick men doodles. In short, the notebook is no longer any good for anything except… well... notes.

Every single pad I’ve ever brought has gone this way, and I've brought a lot of pads in my life. Every new idea is too precious to live on the same pages of as a failed endeavour, so I buy a new pad to nurture it in, and put up fences so it won’t be disturbed by the neighbours. Then, like always, the idea falters and gets left on shelf to ferment, the pad once a infinite canvas of possibility now reduced to emergency toilet paper.

I've never made it to the last page of a pad. In fact I'm pretty sure I've never made it to the tenth page of a pad. My Bookcase has a whole shelf devoted to unfinished notepad, crammed in side by side. I get through more pads than a pre-menstrual woman, and have less to show for it. I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover I’m single handily responsible for Global Warming and...

Wait! That's a great idea! What if there was one person who wrote so much rubbish and wasted so much paper that he caused the ice-caps to melt, and whole nations to be flood, and became public enemy number 1. Living as an outcast on the edge of society, fighting for every scrap of paper, writing to keep himself alive for another day...

Quick, somebody get me a new notepad....

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