Anyone who spends any amount of time with me will know that there is a little space in my heart that will always be reserved for a good notebook.
Perhaps it is because I'm an old romantic at heart, or perhaps it's because me and Microsoft Word have a...strained relationship at best, but I've always found that I manage to put down all the stuff and nonsense I carry around in my head best when I have pen and paper to hand.
I'm not particularly fussy, either. I love the glittery spiral-bound notebook I bought at a car boot sale when I was twelve just as much as the fancy-pants Moleskine journal I cart around nowadays. And don't even get me started on typewriters. My Dad had to ban me from buying the things from junk shops and jumble sales when I was a Jack Kerouac-obsessed teenager because I kept messing up my bedroom carpet with the ink from the ribbons.
So, its not all that surprising that I've fallen in love with the rather wonderful blog Strikethru.
Strikethru is a blog which heartily approves of typewriters, fountain pens, junk cameras, retrotech, Rhodia, Myndology, Apica, and Moleskine notebooks, woodcase pencils, ephemera, Polaroid, rubber stamps, and fellow paper-based romantics who like the sound of a typewriter bell at the end of a sentence. All of which sounds like the contents of the shelves in my bedroom.
Perhaps what's best about it is the love it has for the way the written word looks on the page. The lady behind Strikethru will often write out her posts or type them up on one of her (numerous) typewriters, annotating and adding pictures cut out of magazines as she goes along, creating something that makes you feel as though you're going snooping in her secret diary.
It's also responsible for making me think that the next thing I need to buy on my junkshop travels is a writing desk (although seeing as I live in an attic, lord only knows how I'm going to get the thing up the stairs).
In an age where everyone from David Cameron to the old woman who lives next door can set up a Blogger account, it's nice to see someone actually treating the format like an actual diary, complete with the smears from leaky pens, spelling mistakes and strange annotations.
