In response to Matt’s excellent idea, here are a few snapshots of my journals.
Travel/Dissertation 
Personal/Philosophical
It is important that the journals are aesthetically pleasing. These have lovely smooth pages – warm and creamy – with faint lines and a spine that looks hand-bound. Paperblanks is the way to go. I find that good paper makes for better writing. It’s all about the quality.
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A poem fragment inspired by reading Shelley. I’m meant to be note-taking for my dissertation…
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Train times! 
Poetic doodles!
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When parents ceased to write Easter Egg Treasure Hunts for us, Laura and I began writing our own. This is my series of riddles for 2006.
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This is weird, but not for me. One day I looked at ‘fn’on my laptop and had no idea what it meant. And then I had this waking dream about a tyrant who made these men line up and – one by one – try to pronounce it. When they couldn’t, he killed them. The one to get it right would be his deputy. There’s more, but I won’t bore you.
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A typical entry: half poetry, half prose.
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A poem I started writing for my dad, but never finished…don’t tell him?
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A poem I wrote on the train when it stopped at Wraysbury sometime last year.
Is a tidy notebook evidence of a tidy mind? I always feel like if I take the time to write neatly in lines and structured paragraphs, I’ll forget the idea by the time I finish. Plus I think I have a stereotype in my head of messy notes seeming more ‘creative’ (which of course you’ve stomped all over, and quite rightly too).
Solitary train journeys are probably the best times for creativity, I think. It’s just dead time otherwise, and often staring out of a moving train window is just the thing for the imagination.
That is very true: only one thought gets consciously entertained in a given moment, and if you’re wincing at the scrawliness, you can lose that all important idea. I admit it’s happened. I’m not always neat, but 95% of the time I am – it’s my perfectionist side coming thru. And that journal is so pretty, it is a travesty to write messily and ESPECIALLY not in biro! (one time I found myself sans precious gel pen and with an urgent need to record this idea. To my lasting shame, I turned to the biro. Still, better in biro than in nothing at all).
Actually Matt, I rather like yours – it’s scrawly in a neat, writerly way, if you get my drift.
i think it’s pretty too.
I went to Harrods today and treated myself to one of these:
http://www.paperblanks.com/images/4483.jpg
Unfortunately the ink from my beautiful new fountain pen penetrates the paper ever so slightly. How ironic. Ah well. Perhaps marrying elegant pen with superior notebook would cause a local surfeit of class sufficient to destabilise the universal class balance…
Your stationery-sense needs much work. Can you not tell a paper’s thickness by a glance?
Hang thy head in shame.