My notebook goes on holiday - without me

It is common for writers to follow in the footsteps of their more august predecessors, either literally or metaphorically. It’s less usual for their notebooks to do it for them. But that’s just what mine has done. The original footsteps are those of Robert Louis Stevenson, he of Treasure Island and Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde fame. When the great Scot was still in his twenties he spent twelve days hiking through the Cévennes, a wild and beautiful region of Languedoc, along the southern edge of the Massif Central. The result was a highly readable travelogue entitled  Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1878) , the donkey being Modestine, who emerged as one of the more vivid  – and indeed sympathetic – characters in the book. (It seems a good few of the locals were decidedly wary of the RLS, and kept their distance.)

I was near the Cévennes earlier this summer, and took with me a notebook, as I always do when travelling. It was rather a nice one - a gift - leather bound with a hard cover. I wrote many notes for The Valley of Unknowing in it, and I had I stuck to things literary, I might never have lost it. Unfortunately on this trip I used it to write down directions to a nearby supermarket (and a shopping list, for shame!) and then left it in the trolley, on one of those little fold-out seats used to torture small children.  I could never have suspected that the next person to use that particular trolley would be a man from the Cévennes, who makes a living taking visitors through the region on donkeys; but that’s just what Christian Brochier does.  (I am told that his donkeys are as lovely as Modestine was, but that the locals are now a good deal friendlier.  Nor are you required, as RLS was, to share a bed with any of them – unless you want to.)

A few weeks later, the notebook turned up again in England with a card from M. Brochier, in which he wrote: “I thank you for this moment of poesy and adventure in the great temple of consumption. I felt like a detective trying to resolve the question of the lost booklet – important for somebody, probably for a book or a film – and was especially puzzled by the map with the shops.”

I think the great writer would have understood this reaction very well. And I offer M Brochier my sincere thanks for his kindness.

Take note

After the enjoyable interruptions of the Book Fair, I am now back at work, although work of the lightest kind. I intend to start drafting in earnest at the start of June. Until then I am only reading, pacing the garden and making notes in a small hardback notebook which a friend gave me for my birthday.

The notebook is a great boon. It goes with me almost everywhere, and makes a welcome change from the bundles of scrap paper that I habitually use for scribbling down my inchoate thoughts. In our house all scrap paper is sourced from the stacks of redundant manuscripts and page proofs that lie around the periphery of my study, reminding me of how much time has gone by, and constituting a considerable fire hazard. Of course, the notebook notes are later sifted, assessed, roughly organised and written up on screen, so that I can refer to them easily when I need to. This I tend to do last thing at night, with musical accompaniment.

Meanwhile Mareike, our German au pair, having finally read her way through the Stephanie Meyer quartet, is now reading something quite different, of mine. It is at present rather short (lucky for her) – a mere 44,000 words – almost skeletal in its economy, which is in some ways the point. I will almost certainly expand it, but before I do, I’m interested to see how it plays in its anorexic state, especially among younger people. That’s why poor Mareike is getting the first draft. I don’t know many 20-somethings who like to read; my friends are a bit too old, and their kids aren’t nearly old enough. If the skeletal version plays well, then I will just have to write something else to go with it (sometime, Heaven knows when); because I’m told there is considerable resistance in the market for novels under 60,000 words. A case of giving value for money, I suppose, if rather an unsophisticated one.