Hit the road, hack

Lochby get a lot of attention for sewn products around here, and rightly so; when it comes to sturdy pouches, notebook covers, pen rolls and the like they take some beating. Literally. But what use would a notebook cover be without, ya know, a notebook? Refills matter just as much, if not perhaps slightly more - it's just a posh pocket that you can't write in, otherwise.

 Fortunately, Lochby's well-deserved reputation for hardy hack-proof wares extends to paper offerings too, and the pocket-sized notebooks for the Pocket Journal are no exception. 

They're even hardy enough to survive an expedition without the tough exterior strapped on, it appears, and in order to test this hypothesis one has recently been trogging around Portugal. Not actually of its own volition, you understand; Lochby's output may be well-developed but it hasn't actually grown legs. Still, it took in the cobbles of the old Moorish quarter, lines jotted in various cafes, bag-flinging and bundling on a packed train and tours of crowded wine cellars without so much as a kink in the cover showing up, and even accepted a page or two of fountain pen ink at cruising altitude without smudging. This sort of patient rule-breaking should endear the notebook to any true penthusiast.

It is not, admittedly, cheap. But it is, arguably, great value. The card outer and sewn binding keep everything held together effectively, the thicker Tomoe River paper is usable without having to wait hours for each page to dry, and, just as importantly for the minimalist traveller with maximalist expressive tendencies, there is rather a lot of it. Tour with confidence, and jot down your contemporaneous contemplations without any fear of the record self-destructing along the way. There's a lot to be said for reliable kit.