In which note-taking is not the only option
Last week the Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman wrote a piece about the complexities of note-taking. Do you listen, or do you write? Do you live the moment or miss it while trying to scribble it down? For me, note-taking has been a recent issue of contention.
Since the age of four I’ve been a diary keeper. Whether it was documenting a car journey to London complete with crayoned animations of all the family facing sideways while driving, or how Dexter, a friend’s dog, once had a poo at the foot of my bed – complete with curly steaming turd drawn in green because I couldn’t find the brown crayon – my stories were always, according to my primary school teachers, ‘very well-detailed’.
So before embarking on an epic journey around India by train, on what was set to be an awfully big adventure, the gathering of stationery was of paramount importance, especially as I was going to use the material to write a book. Fistful of cheap biros? Check. Large leather-bound diary? Check. Small Moleskin diary because it feels nice and looks cool, but will no doubt come home empty? Check.
But more often than not you don't take notes when you're having fun. It’s antisocial and more importantly you could be doing something else instead of diligently writing down the colour of the seats and what you ate for breakfast.
But when you’re tired, homesick and sad, the diary begins to swell. Cathartic though it is, it doesn’t make for pleasant re-reading. So what’s the answer? Right now, my answer would be the Livescribe Echo. After Burkeman raved about the genius invention, I decided I needed one too. The Livescribe Echo is a nifty pen that not only writes, but simultaneously records sound.
A camera in the tip means that you can make brief notes while chatting or during an interview, and when you tap it on a specific word it plays back exactly what was recorded at that moment. It also works as a translator. Write down the word ‘chocolate’, tap the word, choose a language and the mini screen flashes up the translation and announces it clearly. What a difference that pen would have made to my four years of Moliere lectures at university. http://bit.ly/b4LYlE
However, I have realised that my diary is by no means the only portkey to the past. We saved tickets from every journey, the thick sheaf becoming a directory of every train name, number, berth, class, date and destination. We refused to book even one train online so we could collect every ticket in hand.
Then there was our saviour, the beautiful Indrail pass. Flimsy and dated (the cover says 'FARE US $300 530', suggesting the last print run was back in the eighties), the paper susceptible to tearing if a mosquito so much as rubs its wings against the edges.
Having visited Shankar Dandapani and paid £350 for three months of unlimited travel in AC two-tier, we were able to hop on willy-nilly for most journeys and were simply assigned spare seats as the pass was pre-paid. All night journeys were booked, but for anything under five or six hours, we always found a seat.
Needless to say, Passepartout's 39,000 photographs are another source that add to the giant memory mosaic.
Personally, I'm a digital dictaphone fan. Slimline, long-battery life and unobtrusive - my dictaphone sits quietly on my lap while I listen closely to the ramblings, stories, musings and quips of our companions. No scribbling pen puts them off. Just a normal, natural, unhindered exchange that on playback takes me straight back to a carriage, complete with coffee-seller calls and climactic snoring.
Whether modern-day or old-school, digital or dipped in ink, the giant combo of paraphernalia that can log a journey is endless.
And my word is it fun to piece them all back together...
