January ~ the perfect journal

It's February. In an attempt to prevent time from flying by, I've been an avid diarist my whole life. There's something immensely satisfying about reducing your days to bearable memories, beautiful photos, and lists of accomplished tasks. So the fact that it's February didn't come as a surprise to me, because for the past 31 January days, I've diligently reported on my life in the privacy of my pink Filofax – my portable safe place – where my life is almost always rosy, and if not, then at least romantic, in the broadest sense of the word.

I had been searching for a good diary for a long time. Before this, I used Talens' A5 notebooks. I also used them as sketchbooks. The paper is not-quite-white, which in a strange way makes it less intimidating, and it's also nicely thick (but not too thick!) and handles wetness very well. (I like to use watercolor, and paper usually prefers that you don't.)

Unfortunately, these notebooks can't withstand my collecting habit. Where I used to have different notebooks for everything (drawings, shopping lists, ideas, to-do lists, nice quotes, photos of a beautiful sunrise, photos of my dog, dentist appointments, workout schedules), sometime in the past few years, I started keeping everything in one place: in my diary. Which meant they all looked like this pretty quickly:

This, for example, is the damage after two wonderful weeks on Vlieland, with another week to go. The notebook no longer closes and gets more damaged with every trip in my bag. (You understand it's dragged everywhere.) For this specific notebook, I then made a cover myself, but it's not ideal.

The best solution – I thought – would be a loose-leaf system, where I could archive the past days and add new pages for the upcoming time. My days still look like the ones above, but with six holes in the margin. I'll never reach the end of a notebook again, but on the other hand, it can now actually close.

I started the new year with a bingo card. I'd seen it somewhere (unfortunately, I don't remember where): a bingo card with everything you hope to have achieved by New Year's Eve. A kind of New Year's resolutions, but without the daily pressure right from the start: you can always arrange things later, or not, but then it hurts less. Below is mine for 2025, with some things censored, as you'll hopefully understand.

What's also so handy is that you can always insert extra pages! Because sometimes you just have a little more to tell yourself, or you've taken a lot of beautiful photos, or you've eaten three different protein bars whose wrappers you want to keep or whatever: the sky is suddenly the limit!

I currently assume two pages per day, facing each other. The pages I prepare for the near future always contain the date and a post-it with a to-do list. Furthermore, I fill them with whatever I want: photos, sometimes just text, sometimes just notes from a meeting, but also: candy wrappers, receipts, dog stickers, novel ideas, newspaper clippings, and dried flowers.

Saying goodbye to the lovely Talens paper was difficult. At first, I bought new Talens notebooks, took them apart, and punched holes myself, until Ruben tipped me off about Biotop: a somewhat rough paper type that is also not quite white. I bought the paper thicker than Talens': 160 g/m2 instead of 140 g/m2.

And now my diary is perfect. Everything goes in it, nothing is ever lost again. I'm just a little worried about what to do with that ever-growing archive. My father always says, 'at least you don't have to heat that space anymore,' and that's just true.

(Incidentally, all this can also be done on old envelopes and paper grocery bags, with a glue stick and a rusty ballpoint pen in hand. All these things appear just as well in my diary.)

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