JOURNAL TOUR

This is where I track and jot quick thoughts about books, plays, film, TV shows, etc. that I watch/read. I do use Letterboxd on my phone, but this has EVERYTHING. I divide it by month, which gives me an opportunity to recap and see how much (or how little) I’ve taken in over any given month.

(One of) my everyday journals. If you’re not familiar with the Hobonichi systems… I don’t know what to tell you. Stay away? I’m only half kidding. They’re wonderful diaries with Tomoe River paper, which make them a joy to use fountain pens in. But they are pricey.

And addictive.

Here’s a breakdown of how I use my Cousin’s layout:

• Yearly Index: Habit tracker.
• Monthly Calendar: Pretty classic take of a monthly calendar: events, appointments, major astrology transits.
• Weekly Pages: I spin these babies on their sides and do journal prompts here. Each week gets a mini collage on the leftmost column.
• Daily Pages: Daily journalling with a sidebar tracking location, weather, step count, and astrology transits. Each first page of the month is a tarot collage featuring the cards from my annual year ahead pull.

This is my other everyday journal. Every spread is a day of the year, subdivided into 5 sections. For example, today has entries for July 3rd 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, and I’ll be writing 2026’s entry tonight. It’s a neat analogue way of getting an “on this day” snapshot of your life and avoiding the hellscape that is Facebook. Being on its last year makes for an odd mix of satisfaction and grief…

Lately this has effectively become my acting class notebook. Insights, and notes for shoutouts and takeaways. But it’s also a place where I can jot quick notes of all kinds while I’m out and about without a bigger notebook on hand.

A place to collect and save stickers from the wild. I hope that at least makes sense to my fellow journalling enthusiasts.

True to its name, my passport fits perfectly in this journal cover, so I often use it as an actual passport holder when I’m travelling.

My analogue equivalent of the Drafts app, at least the way I use it. Blog posts are often born here. Actually, this one was!

The first notebook cover to fall prey to my cross-stitching experiments.

My current commonplace notebook’s morphed into a quotes section for whatever non-fiction book I’m currently reading, rather than a collection of neat things I encounter on a day-to day from multiple sources.

For example, my last one has quotes from Co Rentmeester (that I stumbled on in KLM’s in-flight magazine, “Making an original picture is working with what you’ve got and simply looking at the world with different eyes.”), Anton Chekhov (which I heard through George Saunders, “A work of art doesn’t have to solve a problem. It just has to formulate it correctly.”), and part of Pope Leo’s banger of an address, Encounter with the World of Cinema (“The logic of algorithms tends to repeat what ‘works,’ but art opens up what is possible. Not everything has to be immediate or predictable. Defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence when it speaks and difference when evocative.”)

What I’m saying is I might need a new commonplace notebook.

My constant companion if I’m attending a talk of any kind, and the place where I write cleaned up notes from the classes or workshops I take. Leuchtturms are where my journalling habit (re)started a few years ago. In my pre-ecosystem days, everything just used to be in one Leuchtturm rather than across different books.