The Slim Notepad and Construction Pen combination from Troika is a handy go-anywhere notebook and pen. It's good for bags, but its true home is the garage or garden shed.

But why? Well, it's robust. The faux-leather cover is tactile, with rounded corners, and has a ruler marked in centimetres and millimetres debossed into it. A sturdy elasticated loop keeps the notebook closed, and there's a useful fabric page marker. The inside back cover features an expandable pocket. It contains 128 pages of FSC-certified white paper, perforated for easy removal, with a dotgrid layout so it doesn't matter if you want to write something, sketch something or draw a diagram. And A5 is big enough for all these things, while not being too big to take with you or chuck in a drawer.

Also for the Construction Pen, it's a handy hexagonal twist-action ballpoint pen, using standard D1 'multipen' refills, with ruler markings on the sides in cm and inches.

Black notebook, with a choice of pen colours to go with it - keep it stealthy, or stand out.