Allow me a moment of indulgence...

I have a confession to make: the unadulterated joy I get from a fresh ink cartridge in a fountain pen.

In fact, not only a fresh ink cartridge in a fountain pen, but also using that fountain pen in a notebook with ridiculously flamboyant binding and thin-ruled lines (always thin-ruled. Never, ever wide-ruled).

Oh yes ladies and gents, after the previous thoughtful blogpost about not isolating yourself from the world around you by sticking your headphones in, this one is about the highly important and newsworthy topic of pens and notebooks. But then again, this is a blog about embracing the small pleasures in life, so bear with me.

I can try to describe exactly what this fascination with ink and paper is, but the words won't do it justice — either you get it or you don't. A bit like hereditary baldness.

And you know who you are if you're a member of this depraved club, and we have the ability to identify ourselves to each other with nought more than a loving sidewards glance towards and the stroke of a desired notebook. Do you guiltily have a drawer full of unused notebooks, that you convinced yourself you'd find a use for whilst handing over your money? Or perhaps they're hidden on your shelves in amongst your paperbacks. Or stacked in a corner of your room somewhere. Do you find yourself unconsciously gravitating towards the stationery section of a book shop, or The Pen Shop? Do you die a little inside if left with no other option than to use a pen that doesn't quite feel right? Or if the ink bleeds like a spider's web along the paper? If the first page of a virgin notebook doesn't look perfect once you've finally started writing, do you carefully rip it from the seams so you can start again? (I've ingeniously solved this eternal dilemma by leaving the problematic first page blank, and therefore unsullied). If the answer is a whispered, wide-eyed 'yes' to any of these questions, then I hate to break it to you but you're one of us. Embrace it. Admit it. Nurture it.

I'm not someone who rails against the lost art of handwriting, who refuses to go anywhere near a computer and laments the (exaggerated) reports of the death of the paperback. I've been known to lovingly paw my iPhone, I unashamedly adore my Kindle and I'm the first to admit my handwriting is ludicrously minuscule, becoming entirely illegible even to me if anything but the greatest care is taken whilst writing.

But there's something deeply, deeply satisfying about turning through the pages of a notebook or sketchbook that's been carefully inscribed with someone's handwriting using black ink (and again, always black. Never, ever blue. At a push then maybe sepia, but only if the colour of the paper is a complementary cream). It's as though the content is an irrelevant by-product of the form; it could be a catalogue of someone's sock collection or an original manuscript of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for all I care.

Maybe it's the inescapable link with the person whose handwriting fills the pages. If you're someone who loves notebooks and pens, then you'll know that feeling of looking back over what you've written and feeling undoubtedly and inescapably that it's you on those pages. When reading something that someone else has handwritten it's just so very personal — the unique tics in their scrawl, the particular way they loop their g's, whether it's neatly and painstakingly drawn out or scribbled as though they couldn't get it down quick enough. It's that same feeling you get when you come across a 15th century text in a museum; the feeling that the person who made the marks on the paper is there in the room with you, looking over your shoulder. It's something that you inevitably lose through typed words printed out onto A4 sheets of white paper or seen on a screen.

And this isn't a phenomenon reserved solely for women, nor a particular generation. I've had long conversations with various gentlemen about fountain pens, comparing nib sizes (bigger isn't always necessarily better folks) and I know of a young man, who shall rename nameless, who has recently bought at least two notebooks after squealing joyously at the look and colour of their bindings (you, yes you. You know who you are). With no hesitation I can think of at least seven people that I've had in-depth conversations with about the joys of notebooks and pens.

And so I make no apologies for this purely self-indulgent musing, and I leave you with two things. The first is a brilliant quote from the novel One Day by David Nicholls:

"She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of bus tickets, on the wall of the cell. Emma is lost on anything other less than 120gsm."

And the second is a photo of a page from one of my notebooks. *satisfied sigh*