Many households would descend into chaos without somewhere to jot down work commitments, after-school activities, birthdays, holidays, anniversaries … But do you run the planner, or does the planner run you?
O
ur wall planner is pinned on to a large cork board in the kitchen. Structured month by month in rows, it is parma violet, coral pink and butter yellow, and huge – a good metre long, almost the size of the table beneath it.
I bought mine online after a friend, who keeps hers Blu-Tacked by her front door, told me half-jokingly: “It’s the only thing between me and a divorce.” Ours is not quite so important. Still, as I wield my felt-tip pen, marking up school plays and holidays with our weird, inscrutable code, I do feel calmer. As if I’m scooping out my brain and smearing it all over the paper, leaving me free to track down more stuff to fill it with.
The annual wall planner is not new. Most offices have one, albeit in fiscal reds and blacks. But judging by my neighbours’ walls, these giant, brightly coloured versions are becoming something of a domestic endemic. Ryman has launched a colourful vertical version for a fiver that is presumably for the backs of doors, while Butler & Hill offers a wipe-clean “perpetual wall planner” that can be used year after year. It’s hard to know if they are more popular now than before, but on a recent trawl of Etsy, home of the cute-packaged-as-commerce, I lost track after scrolling through more than 200 versions.
