Notes on a life of travel around the world

Is that a book? My interrogator, a groovy young social media ‘influencer’ of some sort, could hardly have been more surprised.

Social media influencers have a 'different way of keeping records'.

Is that a book? The question comes with a degree of astonishment as I sit in the reception area of a trendy Melbourne hotel reading a rather good crime novel set, appropriately, in the Victorian capital (Into the Night by Sarah Bailey, in case you are interested).

My interrogator, a groovy young social media “influencer” of some sort, could hardly have been more surprised if I had been cradling a baby baboon wearing a top hat (the monkey, not me). We are to be spending the day together as guests of David, a tour operator. She is bright and bubbly and we get on fine, but we need to adjust to each other’s working methods. I use a Moleskine notebook; she taps notes into her phone. At first I think she is being rude and texting while David speaks. But hers is just a different way of keeping records.

She is fascinated by my Moleskine with its elastic keeper and creamy pages. We look together at my notes and I am ashamed to realise that it’s an enormously long time since I won the penmanship prize at grammar school and was feted with a monogrammed fountain pen. My writing looks like ant trails and she is sceptical that I can read it. I wonder, too, and realise I must not let my notes go “cold” as we used to say back in my early reporting days. At least my memory seems to be OK.

I have kept all my Moleskine notebooks from a writing career in Japan, Hong Kong and, of course, Australia, interspersed with stints in northern India and at refugee camps on the Thailand-Burma border. They are lined up, spines straight, as present and correct as tiny soldiers, across a cabinet in my home office. Occasionally I dust them and move a few aside and out might fall a used theatre ticket, a dried leaf or a boarding pass for Air Bangladesh. The earmarked and occasionally dusty pages are embedded with memories, arcane facts and evidence of various transgressions, such as being detained in China in the 1980s for photographing a military installation that I thought was a power plant. My release form has a few words in English: “Prisoner realised (sic) by authoritarian.”

My influencer companion in Melbourne runs her life from her iPhone, photographing, Instagramming, relentlessly checking for likes and comments, and taking selfies in front of the attractions David is showing us. She’s charming and I can see why she is popular but how ephemeral it all seems. Nothing tangible or tactile to have as keepsakes, just the here-today and gone-tomorrow digital record. But at least I have a convert to Moleskines. We found a stationery shop. Who knew such things existed? She bought a nice blue one. She’s giving it to her grandmother.