27 January 2009

Notebooks and memory

My notebooks go back more than two decades - nearly three. The red&black ones used to cost about 60p. There was always one in my bag, for those odd moments.
As well as a bit of agony over the years, they record a lot of pleasurable experiences - things read, things heard, things experienced. At first it was all writing, but in 1989 I started to draw. It didn't matter that the pages had lines on them - I was putting in the 150 hours of effort that they say you need to put in if you want to get to a basic level of competence.
Such faint pencil ... on the left, an ivory carving from the 11th century, probably in the British Museum (I would go there at lunchtime, back in the days when there still were such things as lunch hours); in pen, someone playing some Beethoven, at the Conway Hall ... strange, how things fade from the memory!; and below that, a fancy room, who knows where ... you do forget, so write everything down....

No comments: