One for dreams, one for writing down things you might otherwise forget, one for composing drafts and organising your thoughts: in the end, they all get mixed up, but that’s half the fun of keeping notebooks. You could use your phone, but it isn’t the same. Unlike JMW Turner’s sketchbooks or his palette, you can’t stick an iPhone in a vitrine in some Tate archive show – should you end up there. It might ring. Nor would you pass it on as an heirloom. That would be mad, although I do still have an old answerphone cassette where I could, if I dared, listen to decades-old chivvyings from former editors and messages from the dead. This is a question less of technology and more of feeling haunted.

If you are going to the bother of using a notebook, why not a real book? A book will almost always help the time pass more quickly on your travels, even if it takes you back to the 18th century or even further, say to the early northern Renaissance. There’s always a lot of catching up to be done. A book quells anxiety, even if it is one that dwells on the anxiety of others. You can’t open a book without finding something troubling, in my experience.

If you don’t have a notebook, you can always write in the margins or the insides of the covers. It would teach brevity. Art catalogues often have wide margins, which gives one a bit more leeway. And isn’t every book a rewriting of someone else’s? And every picture too, come to that. Literature is, after all, meant to be improving. And some people think they can always improve on what someone else has written or painted or drawn. They’re forever looking to pick holes or find mistakes. There are even some critics who think it is their job to swan about the place correcting mistakes and eliminating errors. But the damage has already been done.

Going about my researches, I have often taken out library books only to find them spoiled with invasive scribblings, often intended, it seems to me, with the next borrower in mind. Passages of the original work underlined and adumbrated with exclamation marks and double or even treble question marks; phrases scored out and notes running down the margin at right angles to the printed text. We are not just talking about novels here, however elevated they might be, but also works of philosophy, psychology, history and literary criticism, art history and art criticism, including those that are filled with theories and have hardly any pictures in them. Even no pictures at all, but pages of footnotes and a copious index.

Whenever I come to sell or donate the art catalogues that pile up during the course of my work, I have to check that I haven’t left any of my own notes scattered within the pages, or defaced the sumptuous coloured images with felt-tipped obscenities and curses, cigarette burns, scribbled-on moustaches or dicks or other impetuous graffiti, somewhat in the manner of Antonin Artaud, which sometimes happens when the urge is upon me.

I must admit I can never entirely believe the things I write in notebooks. The handwriting makes me suspicious. What if you were to find yourself in some intellectual hangout, a cafe with a literary reputation? You’d hardly want to be seen writing in the Café de Flore in Paris, would you, no matter how high-flown your topic. Only tourists go there now, and probably get a little thrill writing things while they sip their coffee, just to get an inkling of what it must feel like to be writing in the Café de Flore. Once it would have been postcards, but now they post their little selfies on Instagram, with notes that say: “I am writing this in Café de Flore, can you believe it?”All too easily, unfortunately.

Rubbing their knees together in delight under the tabletop, and squeezing their eyes shut until they feel the blood roaring in their ears, they overflow with glee, and with the urge to communicate their excitement, achieved by grinning inanely to the stranger at the next table, hoping they’ll get one back. It might be a famous writer they’re grinning at, although it seems unlikely. Artists and thinkers rarely go there now, nor to the nearby Les Deux Magots. Hans-Ulrich Obrist hasn’t swung by to interview anyone there for months. With one hand curled about the pen, pressed on to the first page of a brand-new Moleskine notebook bought specially for the occasion, our writer extends the other arm, and takes a photo of themselves with their mobile telephone, as if to say: Hard at it, Writer at Work, Café de Flore! I wrote something in a cafe, maybe several cafes, a long time ago. I drank too much coffee and it was complete gibberish.

Those notebooks, popularised by Bruce Chatwin, who always got them from some shop in the Marais, as he insisted on telling us, always make me feel self-conscious, tainting anything I write in them before I’ve even started. As used by Vincent van Gogh, the advertising for the notebook also tells us. Perhaps the notebooks played a part in the reasons Van Gogh shot himself, when he could no longer bear people seeing him, sitting in a bar and composing his begging letters to his brother in his little Moleskine. Nowadays he’d have a begging-letter template set up on his laptop, and we would be spared a great deal of his misery. He could just as easily send a text message, saying: “Get me out of here, that Dr Gachet is completely unbearable, we were having a chat in his office and I had to go and calm down in a cafe, but the people in there were terrible, it was full of foreign tourists, you’ve no idea what Arles is like these days, so I went for a walk in this cornfield and now there’s no coverage, I can’t get a signal to call you, and there’s nowhere else I can go and no one I can turn to. I might as well be adrift in a boat on the open sea.” That’s when he shot himself, I believe, in that sea of corn.

Someone stole my notebook once, in Leicester Square station. They picked my pocket. I was returning home from visiting my aunt, who was in a coma in hospital. I didn’t have a book with me that day and so whiled away the hours drawing her, on what turned out to be her deathbed. She just lay there, breathing heavily. What I really mean is snoring, at a volume quite out of proportion to her still and tiny body. The nurses had left the window open beside her, it was early autumn, and I think they hoped she would catch pneumonia and die. Not that she’d have noticed. They probably needed the bed. Anyhow, I had made several drawings of the unmoving figure of my aunt, and some bastard in the station stole my notebook, probably thinking it was a wallet. Much good may it have done them. As soon as they realised what a worthless object they had in their hands, they probably tossed it in the nearest bin without even glancing at the drawings, much less my notes. And I doubt they spent any time correcting whatever infelicities of my pen they found among my scribbled pages. Perhaps they looked at the drawings and thought the perspective was a bit off. Mine certainly was, that day.