15 of 50

In some ways this newsletter is a little bit of a journal and diary. It is afterall reflections from the past 50 years. I’ve kept a “diary” in one form or another since I was quite young. I started it after reading the The Ghost of Thomas Kempe by Penelope Lively. The “hero” of the story is James Harrison who as well as unwittingly releasing the poltergeist of the title also keeps a “personal notebook”. In it he records such things as ‘financial situation’, ‘weather’, ‘food’, and ‘future plans’. My young brain at the time obviously thought that keeping a similar record would be a good idea, and well it stuck for over 40 years.

Now many of the early volumes of mine are thankfully lost, just as well I suspect. I don’t remember what I’d written but I suspect it probably wasn’t the sort of thing that I’d want to read again or for anyone else to for that matter. The emotional outpourings of a teenager are probably never great and maybe just better confined to a silent log.

I do have most of the more recent ones though. The really recent ones are to hand and others are in a box in the loft.

They come in a variety of shapes and sizes.

I generally, but not always, write in fountain pen these days but don’t always stick to that. I’ll use whatever notebook I fancy or have to hand when I’m starting the next new one. I generally fill each one before moving on to a new one, unless they get damaged in some way. One or two have succumbed to coffee or ink spillages over the years and have been retired from service early as a result. I write something most days even if it’s just a log and other days I’ll write quite a bit more. I might use a specific book for a particular period, like a holiday rather than risk losing a more comprehensive volume while travelling (there aren’t any recent volumes of those mind you).

I rarely seem to go back and look through them though. I did recently review those notes from the period of the first covid lockdown in 2020. A year on I got those notebooks out to a weird sense of deja-vu as if things hadn’t really changed all that much. (I’m thinking of doing the same thing again this year and looking back over the past two years).

So far I haven’t used them as source material for any of these posts and I’m not sure whether I will. I have quite a list of things that I could write newsletters about even before going to look at other material. Then again, maybe there are some good things in them that I have forgotten – who knows?

In some ways they are old friends, or places where I’ve done some thinking about something that was troubling me or I needed to work out my thoughts on a particular topic. Some tend to be more work related and others more personal. For this reason I generally have more than one volume on the go at any one time.

They are a record of my life but not one that I ever expect anyone to ever read, and although I’ve never thought about what I’d want to happen to them when I’m gone, I don’t imagine anyone doing anything more than consigning them to the recycling. That said, I do enjoy reading other people’s diaries, at least those that are published as such to be read, although I suspect some were similarly never intended to be read in that way. Did Thomas Merton or John Muir think that someone would posthumously take their diaries and publish them for the world to read? I’m glad they did, but I doubt that perhaps was ever their intention when committing pen to paper.

These words here are those that I choose to share, but there are many pages in my diaries even to this day that I probably wouldn’t. Then when I’m gone what do I care?