The notebook

When I was a child, money was in short supply - my mum struggled to make ends meet as a single parent, while my father, a selfish man, gave her a pittance (£5 a week was not a lot between two children even in the mid 1970's) but readily afforded foreign holidays for himself, new cars every few years, flying lessons and the most expensive camera equipment money could buy.

We had the essentials but treats were few and far between. We rarely had holidays, or went places. Following fashion was never an option, something for which I'm now grateful, it meant I learned to dress individually from a selection of the hand-me-downs we were given that were no longer in fashion. Paper was something of a luxury in our house, we never had much of it, nor felt pens. At birthdays and Christmas I was always thrilled to receive pads of drawing paper, colouring books, felt pens, paint boxes. When the paper ran out it was back to drawing on the backs of Christmas and birthday cards. Paper was always something of an issue with me - I drew a lot as a child and was always running out.

There was one saving grace as I grew older. We had a family friend whose father, I learned, owned a paper mill. Imagine that!! Every now and again he would visit our friend and leave her reams of white paper in all different sizes, heaps of A4, A3 and A1. I remember setting eyes on it that first time, piled high against her study wall - she must have seen me drooling for she immediately asked if I'd like some! I came home that day armed with what felt like the crown jewels... precious, precious paper! After that, every time her father came to stay, she'd pass on armfuls of paper in my direction and I'd go home feeling like I was the wealthiest person alive. Armed with the most valuable resource I could imagine, I could write and draw and paint to my heart's content.

You could say this love of paper (my son jokes about my obsession and how many notebooks I come home with!) has continued throughout my life, although as a parent myself I consider paper to be as essential as toilet roll, bread or milk, always making sure my children have had access to as much as they need, also felt pens, paints and lots of craft materials so we can be as creative as we like, when we like.

Funnily enough, for someone who largely lives life outside the box, my preferred choice of writing paper is squared. Don't ask me why exactly, but I do not like writing on heavy, thick lines, preferring feint, although this is not always easy to find, since manufacturers seem to produce a lot of heavily lined note books. Squared paper is nearly always feint! Anyway, to cut a long story short, I'd seen in the free paper that Lidl was selling its gorgeous spiral bound squared A4 and A5 note books again for only 89p each! It was on the walk to Lidl's today to get said notebooks that I came across this van parked up, bike attached to the back, sunflowers wound round the handlebars and the colourful LOVE on the back window. I couldn't NOT blip it, despite having taken an array of other lovely photos today... and arriving back home with my four new notebooks amused my son no end!