THE DOCUMENTED LIFE
THE DOCUMENTED LIFE
thoughts and deepest insights, it is also a handy place to plan a training regime for a marathon, plot your weekly tennis match, or track your progress in the pool. In this spirit, a host of our diaries contain listings for the year’s key sporting events as well as the start and end dates of the British field sports seasons, to ensure that anyone who wants to prepare, participate or simply spectate will not miss a thing. But for those who want to go one step further in the Hemingway direction, we also offer a dedicated Sporting diary. In this slim tome’s listings you will find a map of sporting venues in England, Scotland and Wales, meaning that wherever you find yourself on your travels, you’ll know exactly where to go to break a sweat. Alongside this information, the Sporting diary pays tribute to one of the great secondary pleasures of sport — talking about it — by providing an exhaustive sporting reference that collects details of future fixtures, past results and title holders. Whip it out in the post-game pub session and be sure to clear up any arguments as soon as possible — what could be more sportsmanlike?
No. 1 Indulge in the finer things
Eating, drinking and carousing: some of life’s most pure and uncomplicated delights, surely? If you dare express this opinion to a wine expert they will assure you of precisely the opposite. In fact, the difference between a good bottle of wine and a somewhat disappointing one is down to a multitude of interlocking factors, from the nature of the soil in the region from which it hails, to the process by which it’s made. Luckily though, there is one factor that affects most wines equally: the vintage. If you’re the kind of person who has their own cellar stocked with prize bottles, you’ll already know this, of course. But knowing which vintages had the best weather, and so produced the best wines, is something that’s just as useful to a casual wine drinker as it will help you decide which wines to order, open, and when. We say ‘knowing’ but we mean ‘looking up’, because at the front of select Smythson diaries sits a handy vintage wine chart, which surveys a wide range of vintages from the world’s key producing regions, alongside notes on quality and whether to keep, consider drinking, or polish off as soon as possible.
No. 1: Choose your next bottle wisely with Smythson’s handy guide to wine vintages.
Our indispensable listings on blue Featherweight pages of a Panama diary from 1908.
No. 3 Travel effortlessly
LISTINGS FOR LIVING In the front pages of your Smythson diary you’ll find detailed listings containing a wealth of knowledge and inspiration. Here are eight ways to make the most of these decidedly life-improving insights.
Thanks to the rise of online roundups and Instagram hotspots, 21st-century travel can often become an exercise in box-ticking: a new restaurant here, a photogenic view there, and onto the next, and onto the next, until you collapse, exhausted into your seat on the flight back home. Though such excessive pre-planning often tends to ruin the real experience of a place, it’s also nice to hit the ground running, especially in destinations where the pace of life is, well, pacy. That’s why the listings in select Smythson diaries include, among other things, guides to some of the
No. 2 Keep active
The pugnacious 20th-century writer Ernest Hemingway saw a robust physical life as an essential counterpart to the intellectual one. Though his own biography is not one that should necessarily be imitated in every respect, we certainly agree with him on this count, because while a diary can be an excellent outlet for your most profound
In today’s digitised world, an infinitude of useful information is always at our fingertips. But in practice, infinity can be a rather exhausting thing — as anyone who’s ever tried to get a truly straight answer from the internet can attest. That’s why, in the front of every Smythson diary, you will find a series of concise listings that collect all the information we consider
‘need-to-know’ for the coming year and, indeed, for existence in general. It’s our belief that, equipped with this considered range of facts, figures and insights, Smythson diary owners can enjoy a life that’s not only well organised but effortlessly filled with rich experiences. How is it done? It’s actually rather simple — just bear the following points in mind.
No. 2: With our sports listings, it’s easy to make plans to raise your pulse.
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