New Moleskine small diary

I’ve bought myself a small Moleskine diary for 2012. I keep a daily journal and for the last few years I have used the A5 Ciak day to page diaries, which are great (see previous post here). But, I also wanted to have a small diary to record other things. I like to keep a ‘positive things/gratitude’ record so that when The Black Dog starts to nip my heels, I can get the notebook out and read through it. I’d also like to try and keep a record of fluid intake and fruit/veg intake – none of which I especially want to record in my large diary (as I don’t carry that around with me and The Black Dog can, frankly, strike at any time). For a while, I was recording this in my filofax and maybe I should have bought the two pages to a day inserts and continued to do that, but I have been (happily) using my day-to-page diary just as a planner (not as a record) and I’m still fairly undecided as to whether I will even keep the inserts (as they are not terribly exciting and I do have a ‘proper’ record of my day in my bound journal). The likelihood is that I will bin them after about a year and I wouldn’t want to bin my positive thoughts notes.
So, I went ahead and bought a small Moleskine hardback diary. It’s 5½ inches by 3½ inches by an inch, so small enough to be carried around in any handbag (as well as my filofax) and with the hardback cover, hopefully tough enough too. In some ways the similar sized Ciak would have been nice as then there is some way of keeping a pen attached (using the horizontal elastic closure) and next year, I will probably use one of them instead, but because it was fairly cheap via Amazon, I bought myself the Moleskine.

New Moleskine small diary

It came with a load of stickers which I will probably use in my filofax rather than in this diary. It also came with a thin notebook which seems quite pointless to me (as I always have nicer notepaper in my filofax). I think the black Moleskine diaries have an address book which might have been more use if my filofax started to run out of space – I could use the mini address book from the Moleskine and just tuck it into one of the filofax pockets.
As for the rest of the diary… there’s the standard info page at the front, some personal data pages (which I will leave blank), 2012 at a view, then a series of month per pages for 2012, a list of international holidays (they never include Malawian ones in any diary!), 2013 at a view, travel planning pages, a world-time map, international dialling codes, internet codes and plate codes, measures and conversions, international clothes sizes, a page with a ruler down the side… and then the diary starts. Most of these info pages are no use to me but I will leave them in so as not to spoil the book.
Each page has the times ‘8’ to ‘20’ down the side, then a space, then right at the bottom, a space to record the weather and the temperature. As I will be using this to record positive things, I don’t need the time slots. I haven’t fountain-pen tested it yet but I know my Moleskine notebooks have been fine so I am expecting this one to be too. There is the usual pocket in the back (currently holding the silly notebook and the stickers) and elastic closure. The red is a bit orange for my taste (oh, and clashes quite hideously with both turquoise and pink baroques… bit of handbag horror) but okay. The Ciak red is nicer.

Does not lie flat!

I’ll see how it goes once the New Year starts.