Most mornings I open a knackered green Moleskine notebook and attempt to transcribe my scrawls about whisky. I’m grateful for the ribbon that marks my page but I struggle to find the correct bit on that page amidst the scribbles and angrily crossed out misspellings. It’s mostly written in biro, though the odd felt tip makes an appearance.

I’ve never written anything so long in longhand before. It was an experiment. I enjoyed it, in parts, but don’t know if I’ll do it again.

I appreciate the battered pages, that unique dent a fine point pen makes, creating texture that is at once familiar and mysterious to the touch. I can close my eyes and run my fingers along the sheets and know there are words there, even if I don’t recall what they say.

Typing out these thoughts and stories and ravings has become a journey in itself. Remembering not just the stories, but writing those stories for the first time. Sometimes it’s so clear. I might remember where I was when I jotted down a tale about the midges on Loch Indaal in August 2013, bathed in the golden light of the waning sun and drinking Bunnahabhain with a champagne chaser (I was in an airport bar on my way to France to make wine for the 2020 harvest). Or sitting on a chair in a garden on the Thames and trying to describe hosting my first whisky tasting, illegally, in a dorm room at high school when I was 16. Or just sitting at my desk trying to in vain to properly explain how important a whisky Ardbeg 17yo has been in my life.

Sometimes both the writing and the words feel like they are the work of someone else. Someone kind of like me, but not me. I see my handwriting and know the story but it’s not how I would have told it and yet it’s there, in black or blue ink, and I apparently told it like that when I knew only myself would be the reader. There’s no rhyme or reason to these discrepancies of memory. Some stories that feel they should have been vivid when I wrote them seem distant. Others I can smell not only the drams from the time, but also the one I sipped when I wrote it down.

I sipped quite a few drams while writing it down.

I transcribe a few pages every morning before coffee or running or work. Originally, I was going to edit and rewrite as I transcribed, but I feel getting everything digital first is for the best, especially as I’m trying to do it before coffee or running and I can’t really trust any decisions made before those things. Perhaps before one or the other, but not both.

It’s taken me some time to realise that transcribing is not scratching the writing itch. I will tick the box that I’ve worked on the book, so that’s a manner of writing task, but it’s not writing. It’s copying. With a bit of palaeography thrown in (my handwriting isn’t terrible, but it isn’t great either). So coming back here and blathering on about it has been good. But I’ve also started writing notes again, proper notes in a notebook. Though you’d think I was a bit over the whole notebook thing by now, I’m just over the whole handwriting the WHOLE BOOK thing now. I think taking notes for books in longhand is great and would actually be perfect if I could remember which notebook I took the notes in.

Next to my desk is a stack of eight completed notebooks. Some are tasting notes, some are journals, some are a mixture of the two. They cover fiction, non-fiction, thoughts, poetry… they all go back to 2005. There are more elsewhere. These are just the ones I put next to my desk because I thought they were the most urgent. They don’t include the whisky book manuscript. That’s another one. There are a couple of Smythsons (super posh), several Moleskines, and in-between a Field Notes or two. For every notebook that’s full I have three or four untouched kicking about. Perhaps more.

I love buying notebooks.

Imagining all the writing I’m going to do is so much easier than writing it.