Melissa Kite Melissa Kite

Real life | 31 January 2013

When it is too painful to go forward any more, it is time to go back. And so it was that I found myself in the Oxfam bookshop down a little cobbled street, buying second-hand vinyl records. I had not gone into the Oxfam bookshop to buy vinyl records. I had gone in to see whether they stocked such a thing as a desk diary. I have been having an awful time since 1 January searching in vain for this most obsolete of items — an A4, one-page-to-a-day, wide-ruled desk diary.

‘Why don’t you just put all your appointments in your BlackBerry like a normal person?’ said a girlfriend snootily.

‘Because I don’t want to. I want to write them down. Then, when I look back over the pages in the months or years to come, I can orientate myself. I can remember things about any given day by looking at the style of my writing or the pen I used. Also, I like writing things by hand, I like turning pages. I don’t like pressing little buttons on my phone. I am a human being, not a number,’ I added, channelling Patrick McGoohan, as I usually do when thus frustrated.

‘Oh, but you need this app…’

‘Please do not speak to me of apps. I refuse to acknowledge that there is such a thing.’

‘You’re weird.’

‘That’s as maybe.’

Fortunately, the Oxfam bookshop not only looked like the past — on account of it having books in it — but it smelt of the past, too. In particular, it had the whiff of a slightly damp primary school classroom during breaktime on a rainy day when the children are cooped up with the wooden toys and the indoor sandpit. Breathing in the slightly fetid air infused me with a sudden sense that maybe, just maybe, despite the march of slick technology and everything hideously clever that was coming with it, including digital diaries, things might be alright, after all.

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