I suppose that it’s a little strange in these days of weblogs where we share our innermost secrets with the world at large, that anyone should keep an “analogue” diary – that is to say paper-based. Well actually, I don’t share my “innermost” thoughts here you’ll be sorry to hear. What kind of fool do you think I am, as BA might have said in the A Team.
So today, while I was on a hunt for clothes hangers (and not some two quid each wooden affairs), I found and bought a Moleskine notebook. The website proudly announces that this was the brand used by “Van Gogh, Chatwin, Hemingway, Matisse and C�line” as though this might have some kind of bearing on the worthiness of my musings.
However it also has a quote from Bruce Chatwin, and I do vividly recall Chatwin buying his notebooks from a specific shop in Paris, so it’s nice to have something with some history. And the notebook does have a band to stretch around it, a bookmark and an envelope built into the back to save bits of paper. That’s what I call a notebook.
I could have started a “secret” online diary, on the basis that it’d be safer than saving information locally (hard-drive failures etc), but Google would probably have ended up indexing it inadvertantly, and is anything really safe? I’ve no idea what my host’s backup procedure is – and hence how safe this or any website would be.
Of course my flat could burn down, taking all my diaries with it, but there’s very little I can do overall. Even those big off-site storage places aren’t totally safe.
But this whole way of thinking does mean that I’m going to investigate some kind of backup procdure, at the very least for my email and documents.