The Cooper family is proud and excited to announce the arrival of a new baby girl, Kathryn (Katie for short), who was delivered on Friday afternoon.

She is very, very red, but very, very pretty – a sister for three-year-old Lara. Mum and baby are doing well; dad’s wallet . . . not so much.

Oh, the weight? 8 07lbs.

No, not 8lbs 7oz, eight hundred and seven pounds, wet weight.

Yes, you read that right. This is not your average bundle of joy: she sleeps through the night, never cries or complains and only needs feeding every 220 miles or so.

Ladies and gentlemen, please say hello to the Triumph Rocket III Roadster, the largest-engined production motorcycle in the world . . .

Who’s a pretty girl, then?

In case you were wondering, Lara is also a Triumph – a Speed Triple 1050 in matt black, for those days when one needs a little more hooligan in one’s motorcycling.

I have been a strident advocate of real books, but Amazon’s relentless Christmas advertising campaign got to me, and convinced me that I needed a Kindle – even though I didn’t actually want one. Add that to my Christmas loot burning a hole in my pocket, and the result was inevitable.

I have to say, it’s impressed me. Beautifully engineered, it is light, readable, vastly more portable than the chunky hardbacks in my library, great for train/plane/long stay in hospital. But it will not replace the paper book in my heart.

Why? An e-reader doesn’t smell right or feel right and has no substance.  Reading an ebook is just like reading a technical pdf (and I had quite enough of them in my last job, thank you very much). It’s utilitarian. It has no soul. And I can’t take it into the bath.

Picking up the Kindle is nothing like walking into my library and seeing the rows of old friends on the shelves, each one of which instantly evokes a fragment of the story, or the holiday where I first read it, or the birthday for which it was a present. An e-reader to me is a tool, and as unromantic as a screwdriver.

We all need screwdrivers sometimes, but we don’t keep them on display like the best china. We bring them out when we need them, then put them away again. And so it will be with my Kindle, I think.

I’ve just finished reading my first ebook, and if the author wasn’t a friend I would feel no compunction whatsoever about deleting it from the device. Yet every paper book I’ve ever bought remains on the shelves in the library – even the ones I didn’t really enjoy that much – and anyone who tries to get me to part with any of them is liable to get hurt.

Oh, come on. Which of these two would you rather pick up?

I love notebooks. Proper hard-backed ones, Moleskines, gorgeous Italian suede covered journals, even supermarket cheapies as long as they’re pretty. Blank ones, ruled ones, refillable ones, it doesn’t matter.

People know this, and buy me things like that one up there as presents. They’re gorgeous to look at and lovely to handle, and I imagine myself under a cherry tree on a sunny summer’s day, writing in them (with a fountain pen, naturally – I have eight or nine to choose from, including a Parker 51 that’s older than me), and what I write will be beautiful. It can’t be otherwise: on those pages, anything but sheer poetry would be an offence against nature.

And then, after I’ve oohed and aahed over them, I put them back in their fabulous presentation boxes and put them carefully on the shelf in my office and never open them again, except once in a while to admire the printed endpapers or stroke the butter-soft leather.

Why? Because they are so beautiful I can’t bear to sully their pages with something so crude and permanent as ink. I just can’t.

My husband’s bought me several Cartesios, two Rossis, and the most unspeakably gorgeous InTempo, shipped all the way from Florence (click on that picture on the left, I dare you. Go on, click on it – you will not leave the site without spending money). He’s also responsible for a large part of my fountain pen collection.

And when I try to explain to him how much I love the journals he’s bought me, and that’s why I can’t bring myself to write in them, he doesn’t understand, and looks vaguely hurt, and I want to cry.

“But you’re a writer. Writers need notebooks, don’t they?”

“Yes, but–”

“But what? They’re just paper; they’re meant to be written in!”

“I know, but I can’t!”

“You’re a freak, do you know that?”

And I nod miserably, and go back into my office, take out my fountain pen, and don’t write in them again.