School is a problem for me and my real life is totally separate from my school life.
I think I should never have gone to school. I have two reasons for saying this. The first reason is that I was always perfectly happy going around the world with my mother and father and seeing all those places and hearing different languages. I presume that my parents must have decided that when I was five they would have to obey the law and send me to school, because all children from a certain age have to go to school, but in those days I didn’t know anything about the law. And the fact is that I learned so much from travelling: so much geography and geology and history, and I got to listen to and sometimes even understand so many languages.
A wonderful thing I learned while on travels with my dad was about archaeology. My dad is sometimes asked to accompany a dig so that they can consult with him about geological issues like different rock and soil types, to help them decide on a date for something they have found, and we often went with my dad to see the dig and to watch them discover new finds. Maybe that is what started me off on my interest in digging and searching and discovering things that have been lost.
These are things that you would probably never learn at school.
The other reason I think school was of no use to me is that everyone says that children have to go to school to learn to read, but I already knew how to read before I started school. I learned to read when we were still travelling with my dad to all those faraway countries and deserts. Every morning, while my dad was at work, my mom and I would find a place to go and sit and have tea or a cold drink and she would read to me and point to each word as she read. I think I must have been about four when she bought me the first of my Moleskine black notebooks and started teaching me the letters and sounds and how they join together to make words.
So I could read even before I started school, and I didn’t need to go to school to learn to read. And now, I can find any information I need online and I don’t need a teacher to tell me what is already in a text book or what is out there on the Net. I know how to do research; my parents are scientists.
Some children are home-educated, and I wish I could have been one of those children. Now that I have been at school for nine years, I don’t actually hate it; I am used to it, but I wouldn’t call it fun, and I definitely learn more from travelling with my family than I learn at school.
I haven’t told you about my special notebooks. They are not school exercise books, and they are not ordinary notebooks, and nobody at school will ever know about them or see them.
Moleskine notebooks are not made of moles and not made of skin. It is simply a weird name which was given to the books by the manufacturer, who got the idea from a travel writer, Bruce Chatwin. Because my family travel so much, we have lots of books written by people who travel as a job, as a career, and Bruce Chatwin’s books are in this collection. I love his book Songlines because he describes how he is searching for something that can’t really be seen: the historical tracks where aboriginal Australians travelled. The tracks are invisible to strangers, but those people in that culture know where they are and they can see something which the rest of us can’t see. They sing the songs in the correct order at the right time and that guides them where to go, where to find water and the important places they need to visit. Their songs are the signs that help them track and find things. And they have been doing this for hundreds of years, so what they see is something from the past which means a lot to them in the present.
When I read Bruce Chatwin’s book I thought that what he describes is something like my search for fossils: you know something must be there, and you know more or less where to look, but it is unseen, and if you are not careful, it can be lost forever.
Anyway, in one of his books he describes using a specific kind of notebook on his travels, which he would buy from a shop in France, before the shop closed down and the notebooks were no longer available. He tells the story about searching for this special kind of book, which had been popular in France and which had been used by famous artists, like Picasso and Matisse. Bruce Chatwin tells how at some stage, someone in France says to him, ‘there are no more Moleskine books.’ Some people think he just made that name up, and it seems that the present manufacturer of these notebooks had the idea of creating some unusual notebooks and calling them by the name which Chatwin used.
You can buy three notebooks shrink-wrapped into a small parcel. These days you can get the covers in lots of different colours, which I don’t like; originally they were available in black, or in un-dyed cardboard, which are lovely if you want to do drawings or doodles on the cover. But I prefer the black ones.
The notebooks have rounded corners and soft cardboard covers. Some of them have an elastic band to hold it closed, and they all have a spine which is sewn, using quite small stitches, and this lets the book lie flat when it is open. And they have a wonderful extra detail: a little expanding pocket inside the back cover where you can keep receipts or tickets or other small paper things you pick up while you are travelling, and that way you can look after the bits and pieces you collect on the way.
So I first saw a Moleskine notebook before I started school, when we were travelling with my dad on his work trips, and my mom bought one when she wanted to teach me to read. I still have those original books of hers, with their letters and beginner reading words in her big neat handwriting. Later, once I knew the letters, she would use the notebooks to write little stories for me, and I would read the stories to my dad in the evening when he had finished his work. My mom is really good at making up stories and I am hoping one day she will find an artist to draw pictures for her stories and she will print them and make them into real books that people can buy and read. But for now, she says, they are her personal family stories and she doesn’t want the whole world to read them, just my dad and me and my brother Jasper.
I still use the same kind of notebook for writing at home. You can get different sizes: I buy the ones that are small and can fit in your pocket, so that even if you are travelling you can take your books with you and add your notes whenever you find something important to write down. I have thirty eight of them now, all of them numbered, and each one has a title. I keep them in a chest of drawers in my room and I never leave them lying around; I always put them back in the drawer if I am finished writing. That way I keep them safe and they don’t get lost, and nobody gets to see them. Not even my irritating brother Jasper who is always trying to find the combination to the lock I have used, so he can look at my books. Those books have got everything I know written in them.
The titles of the books are the things I am interested in. One is called ‘Fossils I have Found’ (number 23) and another one, number 31, is ‘Hidden in the Landscape.’ This Landscape book is for writing down the different signs which archaeologists use to decide where to dig a trench; sometimes it is marks in a field which they see from above, in a plane or helicopter, but sometimes it is a mound in a field which doesn’t make sense in the flat land all around it. So the landscape gives you a little hint, and you have to be aware of it and look for the clues; you have to get your eye in, otherwise you would never know to go and look deeper there. This is the kind of detective work archaeologists do. Another notebook is for writing down the titles of all the detective stories I have read.
I also use my notebooks as diaries where I write my new ideas, with the date on which I first thought about that idea. One of the notebooks is for future stuff: specific fossils I still want to find once I become a palaeontologist, or places I want to go to which have special fossil sites, like the West Coast Fossil Park outside Cape Town, in South Africa, or Liaoning in China, which is called the Pompeii of the Mesozoic age, because of the huge number of dinosaur, mammal and plant fossils found buried there in volcanic ash.
I also have a few notebooks, usually the bigger size, where I stick pictures of things I want to look at and to remember. Some of my favourite pictures are of sand dunes in Namibia, because each one is different, and they are always on the move, although not in a time span that you can see in one day or one week; but if you go back to a particular place later it will look different. I also have printouts of things which I have photographed with my USB digital microscope: pictures of granite magnified sixty times, and magnified pictures of sand grains from different places in the world which we have visited.
I only ever use Moleskine notebooks. I never use exercise books with spiral binding, and I don’t like stapled books either, because you can never be sure if a page is missing or not and if you pull out a page it is lost forever. When a book is sewn, losing a page is unlikely. At the back of the notebooks, some of the pages have perforated edges, so you can in fact remove a page without damaging the book, and what I like about that is that the counterfoil always stays in the book, like in a cheque book, so you always know if a page has been removed.
I don’t like my pages to get lost, because that means something important that I wrote is gone. And I don’t like it if someone says, ‘Can you just pull out a blank page for me, I need some paper.’ My notebooks are not for that.
The books I like cost quite a lot, they are much more expensive than the ordinary exercise books you can buy in any high street shop, but that is what pocket money is for.