'Learning life lessons from my most prized possession - my journals'

When I was 33 I was preparing to do something I'd never done before. I was about to share a home with someone, a lover, and it felt strange and alarming and confusing. Perhaps I shouldn't have been anxious about it - this is something couples do all the time, sometimes even younger than 33 - but I was, so I did something very uncharacteristic: I started writing a journal.

I happened to be reading the diaries of Nol Coward and was inspired by his approach: he wrote in them when he had something to say, or something he wanted to think through or a day he especially wanted to remember, or sometimes just to record the texture of his life. If he skipped a day or a week or four months or a year he didn't care: his diary wasn't a performance or an obligation; it was just a way of attaching a sea-anchor to time, of not letting it slip by so swiftly and unconsidered.

I found a beautiful blank book at a store in Sandton City, across from my flat on Oxford Road. It was made of handcrafted leather in quire binding: bundles of four sheets of paper folded to form eight leaves, 22 of them sewn together to make 176 lined pages. It was very expensive but I didn't think I'd need more than one. It was for a long time the most lovely and pleasing object I possessed. It felt good in my hand, a good weight, the leather smooth and rough.

It was made by L Barker CC, and their place of manufactory was a street address in Selby. It was so beautiful and strong and so obviously made to last forever that it forced me to consider seriously the words I wrote in it.

It took a year to fill the first one, and after a year the relationship had ended and I was moving out. It took three months to finish the second one.

Every December in the week before New Year I reread journals to remind myself what I thought about the year while it was happening. Sometimes I go back and read journals from previous years or long ago and startle myself with things I'd forgotten: how much I could drink without dying when I was 33, for instance, or how often I have exactly the same thought and think I'm having it for the first time.

Sometimes I'm embarrassed for myself and sometimes I'm proud; it's like a geologic record of small tectonic shifts and sudden cataclysmic lurches, a real-time account of a fool learning lessons, feeling them on the skin, having to learn them and forget them again but gradually growing. The pages are a trail of breadcrumbs leading through a dark forest to now.

I've never lost one but once after an impromptu swim I left Journal 8 beside the sea in Elba (I know it was J8 without even skimming the pages because there are still grains of fine Elba beach sand in the binding) and a stranger found it and tracked me down that evening on my ship just before it sailed. When he saw me he looked surprised and I realised he must have read it and I was not what he was expecting. I still don't know if that's a good or bad thing.

When I moved to Cape Town I bought 25 blank journals and stacked them on a glass shelf in my study. I reckoned 20 would be enough. As I move onto each new book I number it in ink on the spine and carry it around till it's full, then it takes its place on the shelf in numerical sequence and I take down the next one.

The used journals are scuffed and stained from daily life, their spines a little crumpled, the pages worn. I like to look at them and think what's in them. I'm quietly proud of them. If there were a fire, they are what I would grab.

The unused ones on the right are fresh and their spines are clean and straight. The pages inside are blank and crisp; anything at all can still be written there. When I look at them I feel a real tingle of excitement and something like wonder.

There's a clear tidal line between the battered dirty journals and the clean ones to their right. Each year the line moves further along. I'm on Journal 13 now. There are 12 to go.