Item: Pocket Notebook (used)

Item No: #037
Description: A small blank-paged pocket notebook, made by Moleskine. All but the last 6 pages have handwritten text on them.
Condition: Good, although almost completely used.
Type: Stationery
Materials: Paper
Year: 2010s
Production Location: Unknown.
Size: H140mm x W90mm
Cover Text (handwritten): A day
Back Cover Text (printed): MOLESKINE (R)
Inside Text (handwritten): The clock turns midnight and I’m in the kitchen finishing up a bottle of milk[#001]. It tastes a bit funny, a combination of having been left open for too long and the fact I’d brushed my teeth about ten minutes before (which I’d forgotten about until I began to drink the glass of milk).

I’d put a CD on in the front room and turned it up loud enough to hear in the kitchen a few minutes ago, but then there was a roar or two of thunder in the distance and now it’s raining so heavily I can’t hear the music at all, just the clatter of rain against the conservatory roof.

I go over to the sink and rinse the milk bottle out and leave it in the sink to drain itself dry before it goes in the recycling. Then I open the back door and stand there in the back porch watching the rain in the dark, while slowly finishing off my glass of milk.

The lights my mother has strung up around the shed windows at the end of the garden are on. They’re surprisingly bright for solar powered garden lights, with bulbs of yellow and and green and blue and red. On the table under the tree is another solar powered light, a small panelled bowl which glows dimly purple.

And there’s a flash of lightning but I never hear its thunder.

I finish my cup of milk and close the door, lock it out of habit, then go back into the kitchen and wash my glass up and then place it with all the other glasses I washed up ten minutes ago on the draining board.

I wipe around the edges of the sink, mopping up the bubbles and the water that has spilled over onto the worktop, then give the other worktop a wipe as well, cleaning away a half moon of milk and a couple of crumbs of icing and cake.

All the while I can hear the riff from Seven Nation Army that they play every time there’s a goal in the football, the same two seconds, over and over in my head as if it’s really playing but it’s not playing.

I turn the lights off in the kitchen, then in the hall, stand poised in the front room to do the same but I hesitate, and then don’t.

The CD from earlier is still playing – a Marissa Nadler album I got for my birthday last week from my parents (I can’t remember the name of it) – and I stand in the middle of the room listening to it for a bit, then go over and look at the Tove Jansson calendar we have hanging on the wall. Pictures of dwarves lost in the woods, a hobbit confronting a spider.

In the silence between the songs I can still hear the rain. I sit down in an armchair and stare round the room, write all this down, stare around some more while listening to the music, reading the spines of the books on the shelves behind me, the maps and the manuals, the DVDs and the computer games.

Yesterday the batteries in the clock on the wall ran out and I took it down and haven’t put it back up again yet. There’s a ring on the wall where it hung, a black smudged circle and then at the centre a black sooty echo of the box the batteries sit in and which houses the mechanism of the clock, and it looks a bit like a space invader there on the wall, but inverted now, a black alien against a white sky.

The CD finishes and I turn everything off – the lights, the amp, the Wii U that was still on standby – and then go upstairs in the dark. It’s just gone half past twelve.

In the bathroom the window is open slightly and when I turn the lights on a moth flies in, which surprises me a bit, because it’s still raining outside and I didn’t think moths would fly about in the rain. Although of course maybe it was already in the bathroom and the light just activated it.

Anyway it flies around the room dementedly while I’m on the toilet. There’s a spider in the bathtub too, and, after I’ve finished in the bathroom, back in my bedroom there’s a huge bloody fly. Insect madness. I shut the moth in the bathroom (and leave the spider be) and try and entice the fly out of my room and onto the landing by switching the lights on and off in succession.

Whether this has been successful or if the fly has just settled down somewhere in here I don’t really know. Oh wait, I’ve just spotted the fly on my curtains, almost perfectly camouflaged against the patterning of them.

This time I do manage to chase it out (using my hand) and it settles in the room opposite my bedroom. I shut it in, and then go and shut myself back in my room and get undressed and get ready for bed.

I take off my watch and put it on my desk, then empty out my pockets beside it (wallet, notebook, pens [#002], wii fit pedometer). I pull my socks off and drop them on the floor near the door, then take off my jeans and do the same with them, then remove my boxer shorts and put on another pair.

I ponder whether to risk trying to take my underwear out to the washing bin in the bathroom and risk the wrath of a thousand bugs, or just to leave them to fester on the floor for the night. I leave them festering. It’s four minutes to one.

I check my emails before bed. Hotmail has changed it’s entire design again. It looks, somehow, even more horrible than before.

There’s an email from an old friend from university who I hadn’t spoken to in fifteen years or more until she got back in touch with me last week to wish me happy birthday. I listen to the new Portishead song on youtube while I’m reading it, then listen to it again (the email is pretty long). After I’ve finished reading it (twice) I click on the button to mark it as unread, so I remember to reply to it in the morning.

All I’ve got in my gmail inbox is an automated message from kickstarter. I click on it but don’t read anything beyond the title.

I have a glance at other bits of the internet, but no one’s really said anything since I last looked an hour or more ago, and the news is too depressing, really. I’m already anxious enough about tomorrow’s (today’s!) referendum.

So I listen to the Portishead song (SOS) one more time and then close the lid on my laptop and go to bed. It’s a quarter past one.

I lie in bed for ages without getting to sleep, although I don’t mind too much. There’s always something strangely lovely about lying in bed in the summer with the windows open listening to heavy rain and the occasional far off murmur of thunder.

It’s well past two by the time I get to sleep, probably closer to three. I wake up on and off all night and it’s still raining whenever I do. I seem to be constantly dreaming of the rain and about whether Ireland are through in the Euros, as if the rain has something to do with it.

A burst of birdsong wakes me up slightly more and I get up and have a piss and it’s 6:46 and I go back to bed and I can’t get to sleep and I listen to the rain and eventually I must fall asleep because I dream various dreams – a post-apocalyptic gunscape where someone tries to shoot me and I try to shoot them back but our guns are keyed to DNA sequences somehow and refuse to fire on relatives, no matter how distant. We turn perhaps to knives.

Later dreams – John McEnroe tries to run me down on a quad bike and I launch into a furious tirade againsthim, explaining how I’ve got right of way. He’s not convinced. My anger briefly wakes me up and it’s still raining and then I dream again, of playing football this time, and watching it, too, and there’s something about being locked in a car park and then I wake up.

It’s not raining anymore but it is drab out there, impossibly grey. I get up and go to the toilet. The spider’s still in the bathtub. No sign of the moth.

It is 11:03.

I gather up last night’s washing from the floor and put it in the washing bin in the bathroom. I leave the washing bin’s lid on the landing floor and take the bin downstairs and put the clothes in the washing machine. There’s not quite enough for a full wash, so I search round the house for my jumper (it’s on the settee in the front room) and put that in the washing machine too and close the door and set it to wash.I go back into the front room and weigh myself on the wii fit. 18 stone 8. I’m heavier every day.

It’s not good. It’s not unexpected.

I pick up my towel off the banister in the hall (I’d brought it down with me when I carried the washing bin down) and take it with me to the shower. I take my boxer shorts off before I get in. I could have put them in the wash as well, although that would have necessitated a few moments of complete nudity, which even in an empty house would somehow feel a bit… well, a bit naked.

In the shower there’s not much hot water (possibly due to having put the washing on, and also the relentless drab weather meaning the solar panels on the roof haven’t had a chance to heat anything up for the last few days) but there’s just enough. I finish the last few dregs up out of one bottle of shampoo [#003], and then start another.

When I’ve finished showering I turn the tepid water off, get out, wrap the towel around me, retrieve my boxer shorts off the windowsill, and walk slowly through the house, being careful not to slip barefoot and wet on the kitchen’s lino floor.

I throw my boxer shorts into the washing bin in the hall, and then carry it upstairs and put it back in the bathroom (and re-unite it with its lid). While I’m in the bathroom I give my beard a quick comb and also my hair.

I go back to my room and sit at my desk in my towel, dry my hands a bit, and then open my laptop. It’s half past eleven now.

I look at the internet, going first to the forum me and my friends use. Only one person has posted since yesterday. I reply to one post with a crap joke, and then read the other thing he’s posted – an excerpt from a book from 1709 concerning clubs of the day. This chapter is about a farting club, for farting gentlemen. It is a beautiful thing.

I check my emails next. Gmail has a message for me from some political mailing list I’m a member of reminding me to vote. Hotmail (or outlook, now, which it probably has been for years) still only has yesterday’s message from my old friend from university. I still haven’t thought of anything to reply with.

Or, I’ve thought about what to say, indeed spent an hour in bed thinking about it last night, but still haven’t decided what exactly to say, or how to say it. I struggle with emails more than anything, really, oddly, unless they’re emails to people I message regularly.

I log into another forum, check my notifications (a handful of my posts have received positive votes overnight – the notification feature is something I have not yet learnt how to turn off), then read the referendum thread. Get depressed. Read a thread of people saying how the last episode of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared was awful. Get depressed. Read a bit about Jamie Vardy not signing for Arsenal, a bit about the new Nintendo console.

I get up from my desk and get dressed.I hang the wet towel over the bannister on the landing.

It’s midday.

I go downstairs to check if the washing is finished. It’s done, so I empty it out into a washing basket and go and peg it out in the garden. It starts to rain again when I’m almost done.

Fuck it, it can stay out there.

I peg the last few bits out in the rain, and then come inside. I eat a cookie [#004] and have a glass of apple juice.

I leave the house and go round to vote. It’s stopped raining again, and there’s a surprising number of people at the polling station. Usually it’s deserted when I go round. Maybe I never go and vote at lunchtime.

I get my voting slip and go to the booth and vote and take it back to the desk and fold it in half and post it in the ballot box. I say thank you to all the people working at the desk, and then leave.

I take a detour on the way home and stop off and buy a newspaper in the newsagents [#005; #006; #007; #008]. It’s still the same man working in there who’s been working there for 30 years or more now.

When I get home it’s just gone half past twelve. I take the newspaper with me and go and read it for a while on the toilet.

The moth’s still in there, so I open the main window and let it out. I try to scoop the spider out of the bathtub too and set it loose outside, but it evades my grasp, runs across my hand and round my wrist and drops back into the bath. It scurries all the way back to the other end and disappears down the plughole. My hand is covered in cobwebs that it evidently fired out in a panic. I wash them off in the sink.

At about one I sit back at my desk and look at the internet again. I post some inane comments and emails to people about having gone round to vote. I check the weather on the bbc – rain and thunder at about five or so.

I decide to go out for the rest of the day rather than sit around here fretting and watching the news and getting overcome with anxiety.

They’re showing a couple of films at the Colchester arts centre tonight (Videodrome, and Delirium – a recent ‘surrealist horror’ that I’ve never heard of before) so decide to go there.I check my wallet – I’ve got about four pounds in change, which should be enough for parking. I haven’t had any lunch yet but I can get some in Colchester.

I put a clean jumper in my bag, choose a cd to listen to in the car – Your Funeral, My Trial by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – put my shoes on and go. It’s 13:25.

There’s an absurd amount of traffic around the town (caused by a van parked on the High Street, and a huge truck unloading timber on the Causeway) and it takes me 15 minutes just to get out of Maldon.

The roads are all incredibly wet, and the fields are all flooded. I don’t know what was growing here but everything looks like it has reverted to sodden marshland.

As I approach Tiptree a bus coming the other way drives through a puddle and completely submerges my car in spray. I can’t see out of any of the windows, and for a moment I don’t know what to do. Then I slow down, adjust my hands and switch on the windscreen wipers, and everything is okay. I leave the wipers on, just in case.

Near Layer Marney the roads are flooded, foot deep puddles over both sides of the road for a mile or so.

I drive slowly, about ten miles an hour, hoping that there’s no rocks or branches or any other surprises hidden in their depths. I hope, too, that they really are only as deep as they look and no deeper.

They are and I get through them okay.

When I get to the car park in Colchester, there’s only one space left, a tiny one with a tree and a post in the way, making it quite irritating to manoeuvre into. The cd just ends and flicks back to the first track as I switch the engine off.

Parking costs £3, but the machines won’t take one of my pound coins at all and I don’t have quite enough change to make up another pound. I put £2.50 in instead, which takes me up to 6 o’clock. I’ll have to come back then and put another 50p in for the evening.

The time on the machine says 14:12 and I put the ticket [#009] on the dashboard of my car, get my bag out of the boot, and walk into town. I almost forget to lock the car but then I remember.

In town, I got to the high street and get £40 out of the cash machine [#010], and then go and get a toasted sandwich from the nice sandwich shop near HMV (it’s called Lunch). I get a pulled pork panini, with cheese and coleslaw in it, and it costs £4. I take it to Culver Square and eat it on the bench there. The sandwich is nice, as always, but the the bag they put it in is so deep that I can’t get it out without getting coleslaw and sauce and grease all over my hand and up my arm. Luckily I remembered to take some napkins from the counter and I rub myself acceptably clean when I’ve finished.

I wander around the shops for the best part of an hour. I buy the new Radiohead album in HMV [#011; #012], a small toy dinosaur in Wilkinsons[#013; #014], a pack of Tunnocks Tea Cakes in poundland [#015; #016]. In the Red Lion Bookshop on the High Street there’s a two for one offer on some books, but they’re a mix of things I’ve either already got or things I;’m not especially interested in. I loiter there undecided for a while, but decide against getting anything in the offer in the end and get something else.

I choose The Vegetarian by Han Kang [#017; #018; #019], and as I’m buying it the woman behind the counter offers me a free book from the shelf behind me. They’re wrapped up, and it’s a lucky dip of proof copies and promotional stuff they’ve been sent. I choose one at random [#020], thank the woman working there, and then leave, putting both the books in my bag as I do.

I walk down the High Street to the Firstsite Art Gallery and use their toilets.

There’s no exhibition on at the moment, although in the foyer they’re in the process of putting a new mural up on the wall. I get a slice of cake and a can of coke [#021] from the cafe and sit down at a table and write the last hour or so’s observations down.

In the square out the front of the art gallery there’s a bunch of skateboarders around as always, and the hula-hooping woman who’s always there hula-hooping. I watch her on and off while eating my cake. It’s strangely mesmerising and impressive just how effortless she makes it all look. She seems motionless, always, while the hoops are propelled somehow by their own means.

I get the free book out of my bag and open up the wrapping paper. The book is an uncorrected proof copy of A God In Ruins, by Kate Atkinson [#022]. On the cover it says £20, but also NOT FOR SALE.

They seem to have finished putting up the mural now. It’s a series of garish photos, close ups of sunburned bodies, blow-up dolls, cream buns, doughnuts, toys, shoes, all arranged in a grid, 8 pictures vertically, 19 horizontally. I wonder if maybe it isn’t finished, and they have another column left to do so as to make it up to 20. Possibly they’re just finishing up for the day and will be back tomorrow.

I take my plate back to the counter, say thank you, and leave. It’s 4 o’clock.

I go into the Minories art gallery opposite Firstsite, through the garden and in the back. I’ve seen the exhibitions in there already, and they’re not really interesting enough to look at again. I have a quick look round the shop instead, and end up buying a postcard [#023; #024]. Then I leave through the front door and go and sit in the park by the fish pond.They’ve cleaned the pond recently, and the fish in there look brighter than ever, that unreal orange colour goldfish are, shining brightly somehow even in this darkening gloom.

The pond is so clear you can even see the huge fish that usually lurk unseen in the muck at the bottom. Are they koi carp? I don’t really know.

It looks like it’s about to rain, but it has looked like that all afternoon really. I get out the book I bought earlier and start to read.

About 10 minutes later it starts to rain. Not much but enough to stop me reading. I put the book away and decide to walk back to the car. I have to go back there at some point before six anyway.

I walk across town. By the time I get to my car I’m pretty wet. I get inside, put my bag on the passenger seat, and wipe my glasses dry on my t-shirt (which works somehow despite my t-shirt also being wet). It’s 4:40.

I put the new Radiohead album on, and continue reading the Han Kang book, and sit in the car and wait until it’s six and I can get an evening ticket for the car park.

I finish the first story in the boon at 5:25. It’s quite good, about a woman who gives up eating meat and everyone assumes she’s gone mad. The horrible comic/terror/mania of some of the scenes remind me slightly of Philip K. Dick for some reason, that sort of heightened unreality fused with hysteria that flips constantly between high farce and utter horror and dread repeatedly as you look at it, never settling on one or the other, never giving you any of the comfort of certainty it would give if it settled on one.

The Radiohead album finishes a couple of minutes later. That seems quite good, too. And exactly as Radiohead as Radiohead always are.

I let it play through again.

It’s still raining outside. Another half hour to go before it’s six o’clock. I start reading the second story in the book. This story follows on from the first – perhaps this isn’t a collection of short stories, after all, like I’d thought, but a novel instead.

At about five to six it starts to pour again, and I wonder if I should just go home now, in case the roads get even more flooded and I get stuck somewhere in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.

I fish a tunnocks teacake out of my bag and unwrap it and eat it all in one go. The rain stops and I get out and buy a ticket for the rest of the night from the machine and put it on the dashboard in place of the other one [#025]. Then I get my coat out of the boot, lock the car, and walk back into town.

I go in the Slug and Lettuce on the High Street and look quickly at the menu, but it’s both expensive and rubbish looking (they used to do a £5 meal off on a weekday but don’t seem to anymore). So I go across the road to Love Thy Burger, a slightly expensive but not too expensive burger place that recently opened, and buy myself a burger [#026]. The last time I came in here I managed to burn my lip on a chip, but today I don’t order any chips so I should hopefully be okay.

In the toilets the lights are on timers and go off almost as soon as I’ve sat down. I have to proceed in the dark.

Once I’ve finished I go and find a table. They bring my burger out not long after I sit down. It’s nice (burger, cheese, bacon, some red onion relish that makes it all taste lovely) but it’s absurdly huge, as is the fashion these days, burgers too big for human mouths, and the contents too greased and molten to stay in the bun.

By the time I’m finished I’m covered in everything , my hands slick with grease, my beard thick with various juices and and sauces and bloods and oils. I use approximately my own body weight in napkins while conducting my meticulous after meal clean. Yet still I feel somehow greased and unclean.

It is twenty minutes to seven.

The arts centre won’t open for another fifty minutes, so I decide to go to the Hole In The Wall nearby instead and go there for a drink.

Halfway there it starts raining ridiculously hard and by the time I get there I’m soaked right through to the bone. My coat’s only a couple of months old, but even its unused waterproofing isn’t good enough to cope and the rain soaks through that and through my t-shirt and I can feel them clinging coldly and heavily against my chest.

My trousers are even worse, and it’s hard to walk, the material clinging obnoxiously around my thighs.

At the pub I take my coat off and hang it over the back of a chair, as if half an hour of hanging there might somehow be enough to dry it out. I empty my pockets out onto the table. My notebooks are all damp, the ink threatening to run and smear at the wettest edges. I check my pedometer – it’s still working. It says I’ve taken 10957 steps so far today. I order a drink at the bar (a pint of coke) and ask the woman working there if she’s got a carrier bag or something I can have to put my wallet and other things in so they don’t get any wetter later. She gives me a plastic shopping bag [#027] and we chat briefly about the rain, and how absurdly bedraggled I look.

Apart from a brief discussion with the cashier about the name of the dinosaur I bought in Wilkinsons earlier (it was an Apatosaurus) I think this is the only conversation I’ve had with anyone all week. It lasts approximately a minute and a half.

It is five past seven.

I wonder briefly if I closed the windows back home. I think I did but I can’t be sure. Mundane routine activities are essentially unrecollectable. This whole day would be as lost as all the others if I wasn’t writing it down.

It doesn’t look like it’s raining at all out there now, although when I get up and have a look out the door it still is. I go upstairs to the toilet, and when I come back down it really has stopped raining.

I put my notebooks and pens in the carrier bag she gave me, gather up my coat, and walk round to the arts centre.

It’s exactly 7:30 when I get there and the doors are already open. I put 3 quid into the bucket in the foyer (it is pay what you want) and take the flyer the woman on the door gives me [#028].

I feel a bit sick, really, the combination, presumably, of a pint of coke and a similar amount of burger grease, and so go straight and sit down, rather than to the bar. There’s about ten tables set out, with three or four chairs round each one.

I sit down at one of the tables towards the back, hang my sodden coat over the back of one chair, and sit on another and spread my notebooks and other stuff out to dry on the table. I put the carrier bag on the floor.

There are only about five other people here, which is a few more than I’d thought there would be, considering the weather (and considering the films).

They’re selling bowls of vegetarian chilli behind the bed, with great big wedges of bread, and I wish I’d gotten that now instead of the burger.

The first film, Delirium, starts showing at exactly 7:46 (by my watch, which might not of course be entirely accurate) and it finishes at 9:02 (9:04 by the time the credits finish).

It was a bit shit, unfortunately. I hope that Videodrome is as good as I remember. I’ve not seen it since the 90s.

I get up and go to the toilet, then afterwards get another can of coke from the bar and go back to my table and sit there on my own and wait for the film to start.

They’re playing Aphex Twin on the stereo. I think it’s Aphex Twin, anyway, or something similar enough I’ve got it mixed up. Actually maybe it’s not Aphex Twin at all. It’s definitely something I recognise. I’ll have to check when I get home.

Yeah, it’s definitely Aphex Twin. It must be. I’ll still check when I get home.

My trousers are still damp, but my t-shirt is at least mostly dry now. My shoes feel horrible, all wet and slimy, somehow warm and cold at the same time. My toes must be as wrinkled as walnuts now.

My coat feels mostly dry, although the sleeves are still damp, and the insides are probably still all soaked through.

Videodrome starts precisely (and abruptly – I had to write this sentence in the dark) at 21:20. It ends at 22:49.

It was as good as I remembered it being.

I put my coat on (it’s still wet) and leave. On the way out I put another couple of pound in the bucket on the front desk, leaving me with about 6 quid in change from the £40 earlier)[#029; #030; #031; #032;#033; #034; #035].

It’s clear outside now, clear enough to see a star or two. There’s broken glass all over the path and I get some stuck in the sole of my shoe and I have to scrape it out against the kerb. It’s exactly eleven when I get back to the car.

I put my coat and that carrier bag I got at the pub in the boot of my car. Then I go round to the front, get in the car, and drive off.

The roads are no worse than they were earlier, luckily, although no better really, either. There’s also patches of mist rising off the roads in places now too, so I never really get to go above 40 miles per hour at all on the whole way back. I put the windscreen wipers on again, just in case there’s a repeat of the puddle spray catastrophe from earlier. But there isn’t.

I barely see any other cars at all. Occasionally through the mists my headlights illuminate a stunted tree or some strange geometry of fence panels and roadsign poles and they loom up like odd alien beats for a second before my brain can decipher them. When I get back to Maldon a brilliant red orange moon floats above the houses like an egg of unearthly description.

A minute or so later I pull up outside my house and park in the bay across the road. It’s 11:44 by the dashboard clock.

I quickly get inside. There’s a letter through the door for my dad, but nothing for me. I take my shoes off (they’re still soaked).

I go upstairs and change out of my wet clothes. I notice that the spider is back in the bath. I decide to leave it there for the night. I get dressed, and then take my laptop with me downstairs. I turn the tv on, put the BBC’s referendum coverage on, turn the sound down low (but not quite off).

I open up my laptop and check my emails. I read the message from my old uni friend again, and begin to reply to her questions. I tell her what I’ve been doing with my life, reduce these last fifteen years down to a handful of lines. Tell her what I do now.

The clock turns midnight.

Maybe I will tell her, perhaps, what I hope to do in the next few years, my plans, expectations, dreams. And I expect, like I always do, I’ll leave unspoken the things I wish I had done, the things I wish I hadn’t.

Notes:

1. The handwritten text was composed throughout the day on June 23rd, 2016, reflecting as accurately as possible the writer’s actions and thoughts as, or at least just after, they occurred.
2. The transcript above has been mildly edited for legibility, including fixing spelling mistakes and punctuation errors.
3. The [numbers] in the text lead not to footnotes but to the listing of the relevant item in the collection.
4. I believe the photo mural being set up in Firstsite was part of a Martin Parr exhibition.

The Collection

There are 36 objects in The Museum Of Everyday Items. To learn more about the items in the collection, please click on the images below.