I'm writing this on my phone because annoyingly I left my notebook at home. My notebook is one of the small Molekine ones. I like how solid they feel when new and how the pages almost spring apart when full. I always buy the red ones, not because I particularly like the colour but much like with modern cars, there isn't a great deal of choice. I feel Moleskine could up their game here.
Writing in the notebook is part of my editing process. I can scribble away in it without worrying too much about the style, since I will be typing it up on a PC later and wrangling it into better shape while doing so. Ironically I'm writing this now in the mobile version of the software I would normally edit it in, which is the deeply unsexy Microsoft OneNote. Over the years I've become reliant on OneNote, using it for everything from day-to-day reminders to planning holidays. Its lack of enforced structure is its strength. It's the nearest thing I've found to scribbling in a notebook, which is why I'm using it now.
I'm writing this, as is sometimes the case, in the members bar at the Barbican. I had to run some errands in town earlier, which was made more complicated by the parts of the tube I needed to use being closed for engineering works. This is fairly normal and not a harbinger of the apocalypse, but the weather very much is.
I'm lucky in that not only can I afford to twat around writing blog posts that nobody reads in the Barbican, but I can also afford to run a portable air conditioner in my living room. The rest of the flat however, hasn't dropped below 32°C all week. That means my bedroom is 32°C when I go to bed and 32°C when I wake up. My flat is a new build - I am its first occupant and moved in back in 2015. It's always been crazily hot in the summer but every year seems to be worse than the last. I'm also old enough to remember the often mentioned summer of 1976. I don't remember it being so relentless, and it's also telling that nobody mentions any other years in the past fifty as evidence that the current trajectory is normal and nothing to worry about.
There's more, of course. The war in Ukraine is taking place on the edge of Europe, yet it occupies the same mental space as dystopian science fiction. We see clips of drone attacks on social media and file them alongside that episode of Black Mirror with the definitely not Boston Dynamics dog robot. This could so easily be our reality, but because we witness it through the same lens as our entertainment, it may as well be happening on another planet.
I won't even get into the situation in the middle east. I can be more forgiving with popular fatigue over what's happening there, because for most of us there's always been something going on there. As a Doomsday scenario, it's quite nostalgic.
Then there's Miner Willy from the '80s home computer games Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy. He had for a while lived on in the childhood memories of people of my age, but now we're starting to die off, his 8-bit spirit is restless. Last week I caught him collecting empty bottles from around my flat. As disconcerting as it was, I have to admit it was quite helpful, but his leaping from the sofa to the coffee table was irritating and beyond the stresses IKEA had considered for either of them. You might have woken up in the middle of the night wondering just who the hell is playing the Hall of the Mountain King over and over in such a screechy fashion? That would be Miner Willy, created by our collective imagination and now abandoned to fend for himself.
So why do I scrawl away in my notebook when the world's outlook is so bleak? Well, partly to entertain, and I count myself as the person being principally entertained. I like the process. It feels like I have organised my thoughts. The former is definitely the truer of those statements. A lot of what I write down I never read again, but in the process of writing my ideas down I refine them. It's some further iteration that gets typed up. Sometimes that knocks the sharp corners off, so this time I'm presenting this post with my insecurities about the state of the world unironically unredacted.
I also quite like having a glass of wine at the Barbican and seeing where my mood takes me. After all, how long can all of this last? It's important to make the most of what we have. Aside from the aforementioned mortal perils, there's also the danger that we'll end up like Miner Willy, desperately attempting to complete a task that everyone stopped caring about a long time ago. Except instead of collecting post-party bottles around a mansion, we're trying to sell copies of our books from an overheated one-bedroom flat. Oh dear. Maybe time for a second glass?
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