Buying Stationery

I am about to start a second draft of my new novel. This means absolutely nothing. It doesn't mean that I have finished the first draft - far from it. It doesn't mean I will ever finish the second draft. It doesn't mean that I won't start the second draft and in three days time decide that actually I liked the first draft better and go back to it. It doesn't even mean that I won't chuck the entire novel out and start writing an opera based on the Muppet Show sketch Pigs in Space. I am not a particularly predictable writer. (I am, however, slightly obsessed with Pigs in Space.)

What it does mean is that I am going to have to do more planning, and in order to do said planning I am going to have to buy stationery. Stationery! I love stationery. This is a love that goes back as far as I remember. When I was little, people were always buying me stationery, and when they weren't buying it for me I was saving up my pocket money to buy it for myself. There was a fantastic stationery shop at the corner near where I lived which had paper of all different colours, in that heavy texture that assured me that it was important, grown-up paper as written on by important grown-ups. You could buy it by the sheet. And I had boxes and boxes of writing paper, much of which I can still remember in vivid detail: the little blue and white hinged box with the blue paper in, tied with a ribbon; the large flat white box with the paper that had a spray of purple flowers along one edge; the scalloped Snoopy paper, lined and bordered in red. It wasn't just writing paper that fuelled my obsession; there was nothing in the world more exciting than the weeks leading up to the beginning of the Autumn term, or La Rentree as the equally-stationery-obsessed French call it, a week in which I could legitimately claim the need for a new satchel, a pencil case - pencil cases in my youth were judged on how many doors they had, and you could easily get a dozen doors on one squishy pink pencil case, if it opened on both sides and had a spinning pencil compartment and a rubber compartment (by which I mean eraser, US readers - I was only 8) and a place to put your sharpener - a maths set, a four-colour biro, a smelly rubber (see earlier note) and a stylish French agenda, one of those exercise books with lots of different sections for different days of the week, marked with different paper styles and different colours, with perforations to pull the tabs off once you'd done that day's homework. French paper was always better than English paper because the rulings were more complex. Just the lines on the page were achingly beautiful to my young eye.

Stationery stationery stationery stationery stationery! Just the thought of buying it today gives me that old thrill. It's the nudeness of it, the clean empty pages, just waiting to be filled. This must be how men feel when presented with a new virgin. Of course, I don't recall actually writing on any of it ever, and I think when we moved house when I was eleven, I threw it all away. That doesn't necessarily bode well for the second draft, does it?