i was leafing through derek jarman's rather lovely sketchbooks the other day (the published version not the actual sketchbooks - good gallery here), thinking what lovely objects they were and, as is my wont, nursing a depressed, childish jealousy on account not having produced anything of a similar kind. which inspired me to dig around in some old bookshelves and gather together some of the notebooks i had made over the years. 

I've always been slightly embarrassed by my own scribbles and notes and writings-off-the-cuff (i think of myself as a good editor of bad first drafts) so i'd never done this before. What i found was a very happy discovery indeed.