Strolling casually down the aisle at my local supermarket, I was well aware of the crime I was committing. Namely, the one that many 
women are accused of often when walking into any kind of shop: PROCRASTINATING. And me, wanting to avoid the mundane food aisles, had wandered into the more colourful lane of stationary, leaving a rather hungry man waiting for me at home with a growling, grumpy stomach.
I’m sure he won’t mind.
Fingering the crisp clean pages of the notebooks, I wondered what it would be like to be that clean, that blank that anyone could throw the smallest idea at you and you’d suddenly be something completely different.
Almost like how Banksy can take a brick wall and turn it into a love affair. Or C.S.Lewis can look at a wardrobe and see a portal to another world. Or a poet can gaze into a reflection and hear a song cry back at them.
It’s like a necessity to me. Where some women have shoes and men have their gadgets, I have paper. When I see a notepad or a blank journal…it’s like I’m drawn to it. I like to feel the paper on my hands, the roughness of the binding and dream of all I could fill it with. I have thousands of them at home, in the firm belief that one day I will imagine a world to write in them that is just as beautiful as their outer shell. Because then I’d know I’d written a piece worth something.
That’s what I’d be if I came back in another life: a notebook. Not too ostentatious or overpriced; just one of those pads that you instantly forget about after seeing-but which, in the right hands, could become the next Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings…or even the next instalment of the Bible. (It is a best-seller after all).
Wouldn’t that be grand?
…I reluctantly put the pad back down, fighting my addiction of buying notebooks, reminding myself of the disappointed yet faintly bemused face that would be waiting for me when I got back.
And walked away with a hole punch instead.
elspod 