Uses for a notebook

Our local newsagent had a sale recently, ready to move into smaller premises. They had notebooks (as in paper ones, not computers) for half price. I would have bought a whole stack if I’d known earlier. I love hard-backed notebooks. There’s something mysterious about them that makes you wonder what interesting things might be inside. Unfortunately they only had three left, so I gave one each to Eldest, Dynamo and Sausage and waited to see what they would do with them.

Eldest seems to be using it the same way he uses any exercise book. It will soon be filled with mathematical equations I have no chance of understanding. That’s what he loves to do. Maths. Strange young man. (You know I don’t mean that, don't you, M!)

Dynamo is totally ignoring the lines and using it to draw machines – real and imaginary. Each is carefully labelled and some pages even have the same machine drawn from different angles. Of course, being Dynamo, most of the machines are for the farm, but there are a few that would blow the entire world up, if only he could make them work.

Sausage is using it for writing stories. She loves writing stories. The first one in the notebook was about a magic carpet, full of imagination and phrases I didn’t even know she knew. It takes me back to the day when she told me her first story. It was her third birthday and she sat me down on her bed and said, “Now I’m three, it’s my turn to tell you a story.” The story went like this –

Today I sawed a beeaufitul snail.
It was in Grandad’s garden.
I standed on it.
It was a little bit dead.

I’m going to have it printed up and framed for her twenty-first birthday. When she’s a famous writer, it will be worth a fortune.