I have a problem.

Dear Internet, I have a confession to make.

My name’s Claire, and I have an uncontrollable addiction to diaries.

At the end of 2010 I bought a small, slim 2011 diary from WHSmith. It had a week to view, with a page for notes facing each week. Small enough to go in my handbag, plenty of room to write. Perfect. Yet within a couple of weeks I’d bought an A5 sketchbook and a packet of sticky squares. I pulled all the pages out of the diary, and stuck each one onto a double page spread of the sketchbook. Much nicer! Still a little organised weekly diary space, but much more room to write and draw and doodle. And much nicer paper to do it on. I stuck to that one for several months, using it as a scrapbook as well as a diary. I glued in flyers and tickets from events I’d attended, wrote shopping lists and drew designs for lingerie.

And then it started to look a bit full, and the cover started to split, and it wouldn’t stay closed, and it looked a bit scruffy. It was much too fat to fit easily into my handbag, and I fell out of love with it. Decided that tidiness was the order of the day, and replaced it (in about July) with an 18-month Moleskine. No doodling in this one, at least not in pen, as the paper’s too thin. But the book itself is nice and smart, with a notes page against each week so there’s plenty of room to write. Except it does than annoying thing of squishing up the weekend days into half a space… and in September I got a weekend job, which meant squeezing a lot of writing into a very small space.

The two diaries shown above, I bought yesterday. The top one’s another Moleskine, this time a brand new teeny-tiny one. (I may have also bought a matching address book and a couple of teeny-tiny notebooks to go with it. As you do.) It has a day to a page, so plenty of room to write even though it’s such a little book, and it doesn’t squash up the weekends when I have a lot to fit in. There’s deliberately no room for notes and tickets and doodles – this is just for keeping a track of what I’m doing and when I’m doing it.

The other one‘s more of a journal I suppose, and I have to admit that I feel faintly embarrassed about showing it to you. Every year those calendar stalls appear in shopping centres, every year I look at the Llewellyn calendars and diaries, and every year I walk away without buying one. Sometimes friends buy me calendars about witchcraft or spiritual inspiration, and I keep those long after the years have passed because the illustrations are so beautiful. (I got rid of all my books on witchcraft a few years ago, although I see them occasionally in Oxfam and toy with the idea of buying them back again.)

I followed The Artist’s Way for a while but couldn’t keep up with the Morning Pages, despite buying a special book in which to write them. A relative bought me a lovely Wellness Journal, but the categories don’t quite fit the things my doctors want me to track. I bought a lovely hardback notebook to write down my tarot readings, but I’ve managed to get out of the habit of making time for readings at all. I’m hoping that this new book will help me to keep track of all these things in one space. It has dedicated pages for tarot readings, monthly and weekly calendars, places to write down goals and plans (which is something I think about all the time), and lots of space for writing and scrapbooking and hopefully clearing out the contents of my brain a little. I don’t think of myself as a particularly spiritual person, which is why I find talking about this slightly embarrassing, but I do find that the more carefully I think about what I actually need and want (as opposed to what I think I ought to need and want, if you understand the difference), the better able I am to cope with life. And writing things down has always helped me with that.

I also have a sort of a theory that once I’ve discovered the mythical perfect diary, my life will miraculously become so organised and uncomplicated that I’ll wonder how I ever managed without it. This explains why I have two beautiful leather Filofax binders (one much too big, one much too small), because I thought the ability to customise was what I needed. Apparently it wasn’t. And it’s why I buy a new diary at least every six months, because it invariably turns out that there’s something dreadfully wrong with the one that I thought was absolutely perfect at the time.

So, here are next year’s new diaries. Let’s see how long they last.