Pam Alison Knits

Having decided to buy a Personal-sized Filofax Holborn to use as my diary/notebook for next year, the main hurdle to clear was deciding what type of diary format would work for me. Historically, I’ve found that week-to-view spreads need to be A5 size and when I’ve had week-to-view in Personal size, it’s been less successful. I have used 2 days to a page in the past which is better, but I was already thinking along the lines of a day to page layout when the Fates sent the Holborn my way. My ideal diary would be a lined page with just the day and date so I’d have complete freedom over the layout each day. There would be room for appointments, tasks, jotted notes, but all within a clearly formatted structure. Dr Who may think that time is wibbly-wobbly, but I like it to run in a nice straight line with everything pegged in its proper place.

Not long after the Holborn entered my life, an e-mail plopped into my inbox informing me that Filofax were now offering a “personalised” diary format. Not only that, but the first 100 people ordering could have 10% off their order. Those Fates were taking a hand once more. I took a look and there was a lot of personalisation you could do such as adding your own calendar items and choosing from a plethora of layout options, but I was drawn to quite a simple route. I just wanted Personal size, day to page, with lines, and without any times printed. Oh, and I wanted Filofax’s Cotton Cream paper which is 90gsm compared to the 80gsm of their white offering. Although this is not a wildly unusual format, it isn’t part of Filofax’s standard offering.

The order took a couple of weeks to arrive and I was eager to see whether I would like it. I do, with one small caveat. If we were living in a perfect world, Saturday and Sunday would be given full space in all diaries, and I am confident that there are plenty of alternative universes where this is the case. However, I have encountered many reasons to believe that the universe which the current version of me inhabits isn’t the optimum one, and so I’m being content with Saturday and Sunday sharing a page. Other than that, though, the diary is just as I hoped it would be.

Of course, the hardest thing to tell in advance is whether or not the Cotton Cream paper is fussy about my fountain pen inks. This could have been a spectacularly silly gamble. However, so far, I’m greatly impressed. I’m trying out a variety of my pens and inks on the odd couple of spare pages provided with surprisingly positive results considering the number of people who will tell you that Filofax paper sucks. Luckily, a lot of my pen and ink combinations are rock-solid on most papers. My Kaweco Collection Iguana Blue pen with its extra-fine nib filled with Montblanc Amethyst Purple displays such impeccable behaviour it didn’t even bleed through on the Leuchtturm cahier paper when I tried out my September inks. Others, though, are less forgiving. Take, for example, that wet-writing Waterman Exception with its medium gold nib. The Filofax diary paper wasn’t phased by the amount of ink this nib lays down; there’s an acceptable amount of show-through (i.e. very little) and no bleeding, no feathering, no worries. Now, I wouldn’t dream of using that pen and ink combination in the diary because it’s not suited to smaller writing, but if the paper can cope with that it can cope with pretty much anything.

The task of setting up the diary with birthdays, celebrations, and my horoscope icons, is not one that thrills me, so I’m glad I have a good long stretch of time to complete it. I usually go back through old diaries to capture those regular events, and that makes the job even more time-consuming as I fall into reverie about the good old days. My plan, come 2024, is to keep a rolling 3 months of daily pages in the Filofax, leaving enough room for plenty of note paper as well. This is a system I’ve used in the past and has worked well. I generally don’t do any serious planning a long way ahead so I’m pretty relaxed about not carrying a full year with me. I’d rather have room to write more about the present than to carry a full year and only be able to make constricted plans. That said, I haven’t dismissed the idea of adding a fold-out year planner to keep an overview.