Old Tech

I don't really only do one entry every two years. I keep a real, old fashioned paper diary. Well, I'm on my third for this year.

Back at the end of 2005 it was fairly clear that 2006 was going to be quite busy for me - moving to another country, getting married, travelling around, eating, etc., and I didn't want it to just fly past in a blur of half-remembered names and long stares out of bus windows. So, I bought a diary - one of those linen covered things that you see piled up in every Paperchase in the UK. Four hundred pages, lined.

And by the end of May, I'd filled it. I started another one - and on the 15th September I completed the last page of that one, too. I estimate that I'll have finished the current notebook somewhere in the middle of December. That will be 1,200 pages of random stuff in a year. if you're reading this entry and I know you, yes, you're in there.

Most of it I would never put in a public place (though I did leave the middle volume on the bus once and almost died of fright - but then, this is Denmark and everything comes back to you unscathed), so I guess a blog has a very different function. So, do I really have space in my life for two writing projects (especially when one is consuming trees and ink at a scary pace)? I actually feel as if I'm cheating on my paper diary by putting stuff up here. Should I reconcile them?

I like having a paper book to flick through (I'm off on the old book thing again, aren't I?), and I enjoy the act of writing - and I don't mean "thinking up words to put on a page", I mean the actual dragging of a pen over some paper - even though my fountain pen sometimes does bad things to me vis-á-vis ink.