Holiday journalling
How to do it and why you should...
A few months ago there was an estate sale for various items belonging to the late, great Joan Didion. Among the lots were the tortoiseshell sunglasses she wore in the 2015 Celine advert, her black lacquer drinks tray and her collection of art.
But the most coveted items of all were her notebooks. Although the reserve price was $100-200 for a twelve book bundle, at auction they went for an astonishing $11,000. It was a lot of money under any circumstances, but especially given that the notebooks were blank, (anything she’d written in was sent to archive.)
Yet perhaps the emptiness of the notebooks was the beauty of them. They contained essays not yet written, stories not yet dreamt-up. They are a way of imagining more wonderful words that Joan could have written.
Like most creatives, Didion was a big fan of notebooks. Anyone who has read Slouching Towards Bethlehem knows this because there’s a whole essay on them - On Keeping a Notebook - in the book.
By her own admission, Joan wasn’t much of a diary keeper, but notebooks were where she stored all her thoughts and observations, although as she points out, they were less a reflection of fact and more; ‘How it felt to me. That is getting closer to the truth about a notebook.’
I thought about that line this week when I found an old holiday journal in the back of a cupboard. Usually I just use photos taken on my camera phone to document a holiday. But that year, on a trip to St Ives, I’d taken a morning journalling class with my artist friend Zoe Eaton.
Under Zoe’s guidance, I’d backed a cheap exercise book with fabric in the colours of the Cornish ocean. I’d done some line drawings and watercolour paintings and stuck them in the book, alongside beer mats from a favourite pub, stamps with St Ives post-marks, and pages torn out of a tourist guide, highlighting the places we’d been to - a farmer’s market, a gallery, a garden.
The end result was a scrap book that years later, made me remember that holiday much more clearly - right down to the vase of sweet peas on the table of our holiday cottage. It was a notebook about a moment in time and what it felt to me.
As Joan Didion pointed out in her essay, keeping a notebook is really about remembering.
‘We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.’
How quickly the details of a great holiday become hazy. I can’t even remember much about my own honeymoon beyond a comfy hammock and great Caribbean food.
I used to think that photos helped us remember, but finding that holiday notebook made me realise that pictures aren’t enough for capturing powerful memories.
Instagram can be a visual diary, a way of reminding us about selective past pleasures, but it can only go so far. We might take a photo of that delicious smoothie we had at a beach cafe, but how can we really remember it when we don’t know the ingredients?
Instagram is really for other people. Our way of projecting the best bits of our lives to the wider world to get a tiny shot of status. Notebooks on the other hand are private and uniquely personal.
‘An indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker,’ noted Didion in On Keeping a Notebook.
They are a line back to our thoughts and feelings at a certain moment in time. Things that spoke to us, that we found interesting, amusing or appealing, like a huge wall of pink hydrangeas on the coastal path or a burger with all the trimmings. A whole family could go on the same holiday, and yet if each person kept a notebook, I guarantee they would all be different.
This year I’ll be starting another holiday journal. Unlike last time’s burst of creative energy on that journalling course, it will be a work in progress over our two week trip. Something I intend to start on the first day and add to on a daily basis. A recipe, a song I hear in a cafe, colours that I see on the beach that I will then paint onto a page, a book that catches my eye. Maybe I’ll dry some flowers and press them between the covers. Perhaps I’ll even write a poem. I’ll just see how I feel…
And perhaps, one day, when Instagram is a forgotten social media fad, I’ll find the notebook at the back of a cupboard, and flick through the pages to remember a holiday that by then, I can hardly remember. And it will stimulate all my senses. I may track down the song I wrote in the journal and play it. I might re-read the book. Perhaps I’ll make the Banana Snickers smoothie I scribbled down the recipe for - bananas, oat milk and peanut butter. And drinking it will take me back in time and it will make me feel good.
So find an empty notebook and wherever you go this summer, start feeling.
And then write or draw it all down, so that one day, as Joan Didion once said, you can ‘remember what it was like to be me.’
Making my holiday journal
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