Address Books

I have kept an address book ever since I was a teenager. I'm fairly sure that I still have every address book I've ever had including the latest in written format in the form of a Filofax. They live in my bureau:

Over the past five or perhaps more years my address book has been on the computer. This is great for some things and it's easily updated and with people having so many moves that's quite important. People also have email addresses and many phone numbers nowadays. I've had my principal UK mobile phone (cellphone) number for about 18 years (updated as the prefixes altered to allow more numbers to be used) but that is the exception rather than the norm. And, in fact I have more mobile numbers (2 in New Zealand and a French one which may now be defunct) two UK and one N Z landline numbers and a Skype number. The list is endless. The point is that keeping tabs on a computerised system is fairly easy and very easy to back up. One tends to run out of space in a conventional written address book.

But for all that there is something comfortable about a handwritten address book. So I decided to get myself a new one whilst I was in Glasgow. Now a nice roomy but fairly compact index book had to be easy to find. Er. Hadn't it? Not so easy as I thought. Address books are available by the thousand with pages all set out for names address etc. But they are useless in the context of modern life with its multitude of bits of information I've mentioned above. Eventually I found the perfect book. I wonder why they could not just have had ordinary plain white pages. Oh well. It'll be different to the others in my collection: