The Godfather: Peter Corris on address books
I use two (non-electronic) telephone and address books, both old and battered, one slightly smaller than the other. One is alphabetised, one isn’t. Why I have two is a mystery to me. Did I lose one, start another, find the original and continue using both? Maybe.
The one with the right-hand edge showing the letters of the alphabet and allotting a certain number of pages to each letter is not neater than the other. Both are nightmares of scrawls, crossings-out and indecipherable jottings. The supposedly orderly book has entries that should be in the L section in the K or M pages and vice-versa.
My handwriting, once so good with pen and ink that it earned elephant stamps at school, has degenerated – through university note-taking and decades of keyboard use – into a scribble so gnarled that I often can’t read it myself, even if I’ve resorted to block capitals. When signing books after public events I have to apologise for it. Some of the entries, many more than 30 years old, names and numbers, are completely beyond recognition.
Perhaps the most frustrating are addresses and phone numbers that carry no name. Presumably when I entered them I felt confident that I knew who they represented, but I no longer do.
As I imagine is true for most people, there are multiple entries over time for my three children, who all have moved around a bit. They range from Sydney, south to Canberra and Melbourne, north to Brunswick Heads and across the ditch to Christchurch. None have moved as often, though, as Jean and I. My sister has told me she only enters my phone number and address in pencil because she knows how ephemeral it will be.
The books also harbour an untidy mass of names and addresses jotted on the leaves of notebooks, cards and train tickets by others, which I have glued, Sellotaped and paper-clipped to the pages. The writing on these is notably clearer than mine.
Some of my earliest entries appear to have been written with a fountain pen. I can’t remember when I last had one. Most are written with ballpoint pens in a variety of colours and thicknesses. Mercifully, very few are written in pencil, which fades over time like faxes.
Leafing through the books I feel like an archaeologist digging through the stratigraphy – friends and the now not-so-friendly; collaborators past and present; agents, editors and publishers and lovers won and lost.
As the books register more than 30 years of personal contact, it’s natural that a good many of the names entered are for people now dead, some of them my contemporaries. I don’t like to count the number; my mortality is clear enough to me as it is. Nor do I blank them out, especially those for dear friends – one death is enough.
An oddity is the multiple entries with precisely the same information for the same person a few pages apart; it occurs in both books. There seems to be no pattern to this, that person being neither more nor less important than any other.
Strangest of all are the entries for names I cannot attach any history to. For example, who in the name of Richard Dawkins was ‘Walter Johnson’ with an unidentifiable phone number? I can’t recall ever, from childhood until now, having any dealings with anyone named Walter. If he reads this perhaps he’d like to get in touch … again.
