But these days we’ve all got a Notes app on our phone, meaning we’re all note-takers. ‘What an extraordinary insight, it’s like climbing into his mind,’ the defenders, usually publishers about to get very rich, will say.Īrtists always did keep notebooks, even when most people didn’t. You sometimes see the old notebooks of eminent artists and writers published long after their deaths. I like notebooks, but since 1997, when Moleskine was launched, the tendency has been to assume that the bigger, the more luxurious a notebook is – with leather cover, silk ribbon, Japanese paper – the better the writing in it will be. It was overrun by youths and their mamas buying obligatory textbooks, but the kind proprietor intercalated me in the notional queue and – hey presto! – a small spiral-bound feint-squared notebook (red), mine for 65 céntimos. Setting my interior compass and consulting a couple of old buffers in the park, poised to start a game of petanca any minute, I found the shop, a bookshop (librería) and stationer’s (papelería). When I told her, she apologised, but only as one might apologise for the rain – something that happens beyond one’s control.Īnyway, the second tobacconist had heard tell of a shop in the undefended settlement outside the walls where a notebook might be had at a price. Mind you, one had just sold me the wrong kind of stamps for postage to England. I had tried at both tobacconists inside the walls and they denied having any for sale. I wasn’t fussy, but that is the common type of notebook in Spain small enough to fit easily in the pocket. Something about four inches by three with feint squared pages and a spiral binding at top or side. I was surprised that the tremulant man was not weighed down with cheese, but I didn’t ask why not he had already told me all about his family at length in the bar the night before and my own mission was urgent. It was on offer because the supermarket near the little bus station was moving. Indeed, we were standing beside a grass-topped ravelin just outside the curtain wall pierced by a tunnel for citizens to pop out and fetch a bit of cheese. He spoke in Spanish because we were in Ciudad Rodrigo, that wonderful little cathedral city built inside a fort. So cheap.’ An ageing man in a rumpled T-shirt with a cigarette in his slightly shaking hand told me this at 9.15 on a rainy morning.
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