I first heard about the kildare notebook project through a colleague in a life-drawing class. I reckoned i'd give it a shot, as at worst i'd get a free moleskine notebook which i'd always fancied but managed to resist. At best the idea might kick start something else , which seems to me how the whole creative thing works. One thing leads to another.... At first i reckoned i'd fill my notebook with random i pad (new hockney inspired toy ) sketches of various exciting life moments. I kind of ran out of momentum here. Clearly life was not exciting enough... At the same time i and two friends had started a (nearly) daily practice of sea swimming and i thought it might be fun to draw about that. Fun , lets face it being a better motivator than slog. The swimming soon became an amazing addiction. We would go to seapoint or to the forty foot and each day brought its own magic. Sea swimming is a thing you kind of dread as youre getting ready but once you hit the water and get past the moment when your heart bounces and you think youre going to die, it becomes a pure, quiet kind of bliss which leaves body tingling and mind untangled for the whole day. So obviously the swim was the thing for the notebook and i began to record daily - blue swims, grey swims, warm swims, cold swims, silky high tide swims and squishy-mud-between-the-toes-low-tide-swims. The characters you meet as you disrobe, the changing colours of the seaweed - it all became fodder for the notebook until i wasn't sure was the swimming feeding the notebook or was it the other way around. I loved this project and was bereft when i filled the last page. Except of course (take this out if it sounds like i'm working for moleskin) i could always go and buy another notebook. And thats what i did. Now i use a notebook every day (ten baby moleskins) on the shelf, one always in my pocket. It has extended from swimming to drawing about living and often the notebook drawings lead to something bigger and unexpected. I'm keeping going with this. This is great.