I think my Dad would have been a blogger

I spent the weekend at my mother's and during the course of conversation and reminiscences about my father who died nearly 11 years ago she gave me some of his notebooks.

My Dad was a great one for notebooks; I remember he always had a 'Commonplace book' on the go which he would fill with all manner of information and trivia. He was a very keen cross stitcher and was always on the look out for pithy sayings and  aphorisms to use in the samplers he made.

He had a love of words, their derivations and meanings and enjoyed puns, and had a wicked sense of humour enjoying those that might have slightly risque connotations. But he also collected a huge variety of bits and pieces, be it tombstone epitaphs, names of plants, small ads which hadn't been properly proof read,  reminders about a piece of music he had heard on the radio, recipes, dates of friend's birthdays (these he would have transferred into his 'Birthday book' which he would later then use to amaze said friends when they had a birthday - 'but how did you know that?' they would say, little knowing that they had let slip in a previous conversation of when their birthday was and that he had squirrelled away for later use!

There is a mine of information there, each page giving some idea of my father's rather idiosyncratic nature as he flitted about from one thing to another. He was a great one for starting stuff. Often he had lots of pieces of cross stitch not quite finished as in his enthusiasm he had seen another project to start. Similarly with his arts projects, my long suffering mother coped with a lot of clearing up from his forays into decorating blown hens's eggs for Easter or with his experiments with clay. Somehow he always managed to create a lovely end product but with huge amounts of mess in the creation which he wasn't quite so enthusiastic about clearing up!

I am sure he would have taken on the challenge of the computer and created his commonplace blog, filling the posts with the plethora of information that caught his fancy.

The other books I came back with were little sketch books. He invariably carried one in his pocket which he would take out and draw in at any opportunity.