moleskins & the new year

Place: My Office

Poison: Cappucino

Favourite Things: My new 2007 desk diary

Okay, so it has been such an amazing couple of weeks, and I have not posted because basically I haven’t been bothered.

Hayley asked me today what my Christmas and New Year was like, and I described it too her ‘A Jack Johnson song’ Chilled, vibing, surrounded by great friends and family, a hammock, great fiction books (Self help books have been banned) and I basically didn’t HAVE to do anything.

I have such amazing photo’s from my camping trip to Margaret River, Christmas and New Year, but will take the next few weeks to unravel them.

Today I have driven the city to find my journal for 2007, which is a moleskin diary. All the regular haunches that sell moleskin, are all out.

I’m desperate, anyone know anywhere I can get them? or I may have to be in detox from journalling till I hit the UK (the birthplace of moleskin) in one weeks time.

Here is the history of the moleskin for those intrigued.

The history of Moleskine notebooks

Moleskine is the legendary notebook that the European artists and intellectuals who made twentieth-century culture used: from Henri Matisse to the turn-of-the-century Parisian avant-garde, from Louis Férdinand Céline to Ernest Hemingway. Writer-traveler Bruce Chatwin picked up this tradition and made it famous.

A simple black rectangle with squared or lined pages, endleaves held by an elastic band, an inside pocket for loose sheets, a binding in ‘moleskine’ which gives it its name, this trusty, pocket-size traveling companion guarded notes, stories, thoughts and impressions before they turned into the pages of beloved books.

Chatwin used to buy his moleskine at a Paris stationery shop in Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie. He always stocked up on them before going off on one of his journeys. He had a ritual set up over the years -before using them, he numbered the pages, wrote his name and at least two addresses in the world with the promise of a reward in case they got lost. “Losing my passport was the least of my worries, losing a notebook was a catastrophe”.

He even suggested this method to his friend Luis Sepùlveda on giving him a precious moleskine before the trip to Patagonia that they were never to do together. It was precious because by then notebooks were no longer to be found. In 1986, even the last producer, a small family concern in Tours closed down. “Le vrai moleskine n’est plus” were the lapidary words of the stationer to Chatwin who had ordered one hundred before leaving for Australia Chatwin bought up all the Moleskines he could find but there were not enough. Now, the Moleskine is back again. It can go back to being a witness passing from one pocket to another and continue the adventure. Its still-blank pages will tell the rest.

‘I never travel without my notebook. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

—Oscar Wilde

 

Here’s to a big new year of less stress and much love

Thanks for all who have been capturing moments with me in 2006…

The adventure continues

A