Nothing to write home about

When I was a child my uncle gave me a diary for my birthday. Though I lost it somewhere down the years, it started a habit that has carried me through my life. I kept a diary in my teenage years, through falling in love (more than once), adventures in Ireland, India, France, and more.

Time and again I let the habit slip; when the flush of first love wore off I became self conscious, embarrassed by those poured out feelings. I often gave up just into a new relationship, when we’d had a row it felt disloyal to write it down.

Sometimes I stopped because I ran out time, at other times it was motivation I lacked. I gave up once because didn’t want to put my experiences down on paper for fear of breaking the spell. And over the past few years I’ve tried to reignite the flame but I only succeeded in sporadic bursts.

But even when I wasn’t keeping a diary I was always writing down scraps of prose, ideas for stories, observations, or just describing how I felt that day. So in a way I never really stopped.

In recent years my diary keeping has been reduced to a holiday affair, descriptions of trips abroad, walks and climbs, things that one day I would want to look back on in the future.

But Wednesday evening I caught Giles Brandreth on tv, advising people on how to keep a diary. He interviewed Tony Benn, a prolific diarist; Benn wrote his diaries even during the second world war when it was illegal to keep one.

When I look back on my old diaries I squirm with embarrassment at the litany of boys I fancied, petty arguments with friends, and the smug, self-important style. In the earliest diary still in my possession, from 1975, I had gone back and analysed events, adding comments in green pen - “he’s avoiding you girl” is one of the more profound. In those days I was always “getting the hump” or someone was “giving me dirty looks”.

Much of my diaries have concerned my feelings. I told my diary about the hurt I felt in my first serious relationship,”I believe him because I want to and I just hope he is telling the truth.” I talked about the confusion of meeting my father again after 24 years. “I wanted to shout at him and tell him how much he’d hurt me.”

I wrote about the inadequacy of my own diary keeping “I tried to read Testament of Youth and got depressed because Vera Brittain’s diary was very lyrical” (and mine wasn’t).

I wrote about moving to France, the minutiae of a new culture “Everyone else seem to have rubbish bins and we don’t…”

The little things have always been important to me, but they are the pieces that add up to a real life.

I have a stack of diaries that represent fragments of my life for over 30 years. They’re not the whole picture, not by any means - most of the 80s is missing and what’s there merely shows how I felt at the time, what I chose to notice and record. But for all their faults, they reveal a lot about what is was to be alive then as well as what it meant to be me.

Actually, more than half of the fun of keeping diaries is being able to read them in years to come; looking back at the person you used to be, the life you used to lead, the mistakes you made and the lessons you’ve learnt.

That’s why I’ve gone back to keeping a diary, and it’s why I’m so indebted to my uncle, not so much for giving me the diary, but for writing a dedication in it ending with, ‘This is YOUR diary, now it’s over to you.’

He started a process that led to a stack of books that will never make me any money, but that remind me of who I am and where I came from.

I owe it to myself, and to him, to carry on.