On Keeping A Diary
I started keeping a diary when I was 15 years and 14 days old. I know this because I wrote it on the first page. Bearing a pink cover dotted with shiny butterfly stickers, it’s a snapshot of what it was like to be in your mid-teens on the cusp of the new millennium. I wrote about the hours spent hanging out at skate ramps; the fallouts with friends and how we made up; all the people I snogged, and what I thought about them. The contents include bad poetry, tattoo designs, a catalogue of potential band names. A list of things I couldn’t live without: eyeliner, the sky, Kirby grips, coffee.
My diary habit has been sporadic over the intervening years. There have been periods of my life that I’ve documented meticulously, then months passed by when I didn’t write anything at all. That’s ok, I think: a diary should be a solace, not a chore. It’s not that in those times there wasn’t much going on in my life, rather that I had less need of the particular comfort a diary offers.
What is the point of a diary? Only in my more outlandish moments do I imagine it will end up in an archive somewhere, pored over by future academics. Realistically the only person likely to have any interest in the contents of my diary is me. In fact, in a time when our thoughts so often seem predestined to end up on Twitter or Facebook, served up in bite-sized pieces, it’s precisely the privacy of a diary that is so refreshing. A diary brings focus and clarity to a mind battered off course by too much world. I relish the old-fashioned technology of putting ink on a blank page, of following the line of a thought from beginning to end. You can’t look at your phone at the same time as writing in a diary. That’s what’s so brilliant about them.
In the tumult of 2020, I’ve found myself turning to my diary more regularly once more. I come to it first thing in the morning, before – as Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way and committed advocate of daily journaling, put it – the “ego's defences are in place”. My current notebook of choice is slender, with a red paper cover, and halfway between A4 and A5, which I’ve found is just the right size: big enough for my ideas to spread but not too big for my handbag. I write in it with the latest in a long lineage of Lamy fountain pens that stretches back to my school days. I am always, inevitably, left with a blue-stained forefinger.
My current diary isn’t nearly as exciting as the one I kept when I was 15. The times we live in now are strange, for me at least, in that everything is happening and nothing seems to be happening all at once. Chronicling my life over the last few months, there has rarely been anything more remarkable to note than my trip to the corner shop to get a pint of milk for a self-isolating neighbour, or my morning run through the park, the way I swerve around those I pass in two-metre-mandated loops like I’m trapped in a really rubbish video game.
But I have been thinking of the words of a man I met while travelling in Sarajevo a couple of years ago. He had lived through the siege of 1992-1996: that terrible time when the entire population of the Bosnian city was trapped with little food and water, facing constant bombardment from Serbian troops in the surrounding hills. His diary from those days, he told me, is full of statistics, military positions, global news reports – information he’d recorded as he desperately tried to make sense of how his reality was splintering.
What he had never written down, though, was what it was like to have to walk several miles to fetch water each day. The weird meals he put together with any food he could get his hands on. How it felt to smoke a cigarette, after weeks without tobacco. Now, he said, he regretted it. Because he had realised that this is what it means to live in extraordinary times. Not only the decisions made on our behalf by those in power. But how they impact upon the everyday, bend it out of shape.
It might be that a diary – the story we tell ourselves about ourselves - not only records a life but defines it. We cannot elide the darkness of what we’re living through in 2020. I am fortunate that I don’t have worse stories to tell, and yet coronavirus has found its own particular and previously unimaginable ways to mess with my life. But alongside the pain and the heartbreak, my diary is helping me to hold on to other things too. The small acts of kindness that have sustained me. The way, this strange quarantined spring, the trees seemed to blossom sweeter and brighter than ever.
Welcome to my new mailing list, where I’m going to share short essays and writing about living a creative life. Great to have you on board. Please add me to your primary email tab to ensure you don’t miss anything. You can learn how to do that here.
This mailing list has evolved from Homework, which shared creative nonfiction writing prompts in lockdown. Often it will be about writing, but it will also look at the place of arts and creativity in our lives more broadly. I hope you’ll stay with me, but I also won’t take it amiss if you decide to unsubscribe!
For my creative nonfiction crew, you can find a free Introduction to Memoir Writing workshop that I recorded for Arthouse Jersey a few weeks ago here.