The Moleskine Conundrum.

"That’s right. I was analogue, we all were. In the late 1970s if you held a kid too close to a magnet they would go blank and you’d have to start all over again."

Look, see? See? See what Cliff did? Damn, that's a funny guy. Read the whole post.

Done? I am also a stationery guy. Never stationary, though. I love pens, paper and all sorts of crap. I love writing letters, it connects me with a literary past - I feel like a man of words and letters and craftsmanship. In fact I don't merely write letters, I correspond. Even if my correspondence is done on bits of paper decorated with tulips I bought in a sale in a bookshop in Marburg.

I used to have a typewriter in my room too - writing letters to penfriends I'd found on this burgeoning, blossoming internet. My friend Ashley I've been corresponding with via paper and pixels since 1998 - I've known her longer than I've known most people - she's oddly one of my oldest, longest and newest friends. I used to start writing a book on the typewriter, because that's the sort of thing it felt like one should do with a typewriter. I arranged my desk how I thought a writer's should be - boxes to organise things, plenty of paper and utensils on hand.

There's such a lonesome glamour to writing with your stationery, there's a romance about jotting in your moleskine notepad that nothing else can hold a candle to. Although candles and romance do go nicely together. I had such an existential crisis when I first got my moleskine (I'm on my second now) - what to write in it? Words that were honourable enough to hold their own in a cahier costing nigh-on 13 quid? I soon realised that it wasn't the words that gave it all the sense of occasion, it was the sense of occasion. Celine Dion could fart the national anthem and it's still fairly likely to be world-class entertainment, because it's in her blood. If she was a 180-page leather-bound notebook, she'd be a moleskine. Celine Moleskine.