I live in London, which means that I have limited space, which means that I work at fairly small desk. Perhaps it would be better characterised as a bureau. It is, I guess, eighty centimetres wide, but I can pull out the table surface, which makes it quite deep, perhaps also eighty centimetres. This means I can rest my arms very comfortable on the table as I type or write in my notebook, which is useful.
Sadly, I have had an ongoing notebook crisis: ever since Leuchtturm decided to no longer produce the best notebook in the world, their A4 Jottbook, I have been trying to replace what’s been lost, but with little success. Moleskin has a range of large format softcover notebooks, their Cahier Journals, but they are not A4, or if they are, as their online shop claims (they call this size XXL, as if it wasn’t the only sensible size for a notebook), then Leuchtturm’s Jottbooks were bigger. I need space to think when I write, and it cannot be done in an A5 or A6 format; most thoughts are too big for it. When I lived in Manchester, I used to buy grey exercise books of the type you’d use in school at Blackwell’s on Oxford Road, but the quality of the paper wasn’t quite what I hoped it would be.
I am happy to report that the crisis has been resolved as of this summer, when I travelled to Avignon. I didn’t go to Avignon to resolve my notebook crisis; I went for the Festival d’Avignon, which was spectacular. Including on and off plays, there were 1,000 shows on every day, and I saw only six of them, but all six of them were a delight. My favourite was Frank Hoffmann’s La Peste at the Théâtre du Balcon, closely followed by Ben Duke’s The Last Hamlet, and the most fun was certainly Late Bloomers’ The Bakers, and the coolest was Laura Vazquez‘s performance of her poetry in French, of which I understood maybe fifty percent, or perhaps thirty, but I understood how the language flowed, and that’s very similar to my current experience of reading À la recherche du temps perdu (I’m on book two, and it’s the richest novel I have ever read: like a gift of nectar of the gods.)
As I was strolling through the streets of Avignon, I went into a bookshop, and then a clothes shop, and then a stationary shop, and guess what I discovered in this stationary shop? The perfect notebook! It’s the Conquérant Classique Large Exercise Book, which is bigger than A4 – at least as big as Leuchtturm’s Jottbook – and has a transparent cover, which means that it is white, which means that there is no distraction from what’s inside, and I can even slip things between the sturdy plastic cover and the paper and keep them safe, such as, most recently, a love letter, my Woolwich Works loyalty coffee card, and a receipt that I need to remember to file away for my taxes. They cost 2.60 EUR per notebook, which is beautiful, and I hope they never change. The shopkeepers, who seemed to me to be a mother and daughter duo, although I have nothing to base this on, told me that these are the standard exercise books for French schoolchildren, which is why they are likely to be around for a long time to come, and that they are larger than A4 so that pupils can store exercise sheets in them. France: a civilised country.
Ever since returning to London, I have realised that this means that whenever I run out of notebooks, I will have to go France to buy some new ones. A fatal error, or an ingenious way of making myself go on trips to France? I like to think it’s the latter, and that life can be very good to us sometimes.