When I was in secondary school, I used to carry around folded A4 pieces of paper in my pocket and would whip them out in class, ready to put scribbles all over them as quietly as possible. I did this every day for six years, and those sheets would be filled with bits of dialogue, song lyrics, diary entries, top five/ten lists, doodles, rants, plans, designs, pen blotches that I can never make out these days, crush notes (I fancied a LOT of girls), ambitions… Sometimes those ideas would cohere into something down the line – I remember that my old band pulled lyrics from one of these crumpled, messy, dirty defiled pieces of white paper, stained with blue (never black ink) – but really, a lot of them have entered the box of my tiny teenage rambles and memories. I could go through them for ideas but really, all I’ll get reminded of is my awful use of words (I wanted to be Glassjaw’s Daryl Palumbo growing up so my lyrics had a lot of big words chucked in for the sake of it) and some odd doodles.

But one of those doodles became an idea that I’m still chasing now when I carry around two or three notepads, as I choose a specific track on my iPod to get me in the proper space for writing what I’m going to write, and I’m STILL jotting down ideas hamphazardly and erratically, upside down, sideways, diagonally, in code, totally linear, arcane, polysyllabic, blue ink (rarely black) notes that will one day lead somewhere even though they make my work look like the Mentaculus. I’m still reaching as to where that doodle is heading but I think it counts that I’m just making progress, messily, on my own terms and in total brainbursts.

PS. I put stuff down on mobile phones now as well. Does anyone else do that? It’s all well and good until your phone dies a quick and sudden death – I’ll never get that list of black metal bands to listen to back now!