Warning: This is an addictive and catching activity.

Journalling should come with its own health warning. Not only is it addictive, it is also catching.

I spent time with a good friend yesterday. She used to call herself a non journaller. This differentiation is important in my friendships. If you are a journaller I will talk about journalling with you for absolute hours. If you aren't a journaller, and you don't want to expire from boredom, it is best to tell me you don't journal.

"I don't really keep a journal", I remember her saying to me more than once in our friendship.

I accept that in a friend. They don't have to journal.

Then a year or so ago she wrote a great book, it included an exercise using a notebook to write certain things in. I smiled. That's journalling you see? Call it what you like. It's the same thing.

Still, she said to me: "I don't really journal". But when I visit her at her office, she has notebooks she calls different things. She covers them, she categorises them, she uses them to record things in. I smile.

I gave her a present at the beginning of the year. It was a blank book. The second one I have given her. She uses both for very particular purposes. But she still doesn't really journal, she tells me. I smile.

This morning she rang me, after some serious conceptualisng work we did yesterday. In the telephone conversation she said: "I might start journalling that".

I got excited. Another convert. She may have always written in a notebook, in a style that was or wasn't a journal to a purist. She now was using the language of a journaller.

I told you it's catching. However you look at it, it's catching.

So do you journal - but call it something else? What names do you have for the activity that might just be journalling?