DIARBLOGS

The urge to record our lives in personal diaries is a powerful one, particularly strong at the start of a new year. It’s strange then that what is such a compelling force in the first week of January is, in most cases, pretty much spent by February.
If you are one of these failed diarists, don’t despair. The flipside is becoming a committed diarist and carrying the burden that this brings with it – not only for the writer but for their friends who know they are being maligned, and for close family who have to try very, very hard not to read these precious books.
I know what I am moaning about, having just passed my 30th anniversary as a diarist. By very rough calculation, that’s more than 3m words to date. In fact, 1978, the date when I started this sequence, wasn’t even my first attempt. In 1977, aged 10, I made it to the end of May before giving up on the Letts Disneyland Diary. (Sample entry: “Very quiet day. I spent most of it weaving.”)
But, once I’d began in earnest, my diary writing habit was unstoppable: there are entries almost every day throughout my adolescence and 20s. It was only as a dog-tired new mother that I slacked off – and even then I kept a “baby journal”, a chronicle of that startling first year when children morph from newborns into funny walking people.
Now I write, on average, a long entry every couple of weeks. I try not to write when angry or upset, in order not to distort things too much. It’s just as important to record the ephemeral good times. Why do I do it? Because a diary allows writers to impose a coherent narrative on messy, sprawling, upsetting life. At 18, as my diaries reveal, I was a bit more high-minded about all this: “OK, so most of my life is deadly boring but if I can preserve a bit of it on paper then it is a form of immortality for my past. Maybe one day these will be destroyed but that doesn’t alter the fact that I have achieved something for myself in them.”
To check what, exactly, I have achieved, I re-read the whole of the first 1978 diary. What stuck out was how dull education was back then – weekly tests in everything, with ranked positions in class: “I came top in geography test with 19 out of 20. Same as last week. Had to draw map of Italy for homework.” If nothing else, this helps me to give daily thanks for the current National Curriculum.
I also read a lot of books, and played in a lot of snow (yes, the winters really were a lot colder then). And there were some throwaway but life-defining moments. “23rd January 1978. Went to London to see a fantastic film called Star Wars. It was the best film I have ever seen. It was brilliant.” I’ve been a sci-fi nut ever since.
Inevitably, perhaps, there is something of a retro revival for old teenage diaries, with their details about ancient pop stars, miraculous Walkman personal stereos, and Space Invaders. One open performance night in London encourages mature people to stand up and read out chunks of their old diaries.
Radio presenter Rae Earl went one further last year, when she published her 1989 diary as My Fat, Mad Teenage Diary. This sounds a terrible idea but the book is a great read and I admired her honesty in putting her teenage self into print. Not least because, at 17, Earl was horribly overweight: “I’m sharing it because these days it makes me laugh,” she writes in her introduction, “and because I still see fat girls everywhere labelled as ‘bubbly with a nice personality’. And I suppose I want to tell them (and everyone else) that in the end it’s all OK. You can be fat and nuts and a virgin when you are 17 and things can still turn out OK.”
Even so, publishing is very, very far from most people’s wishes for their diaries. Privacy is key and, even though I feel very distanced from the person I was at 17, it’s still recognisably me (just an even more judgemental and priggish version of me). I don’t want that evil twin exposed. If this seems at odds with the current mania for blogging and the tell-all traits of online networking sites, that’s fine by me.
There’s another reason why diaries feel so private. They are the place where committed diarists such as me can construct their own private narratives, where we are the heroes. And, strange as it may seem, sometimes that can strain reality: on holiday in Wales in 1985, a group of school friends failed to see the joke when I stayed up all night drinking with a couple of accomplices, then “we took C and J’s clothes and hung them out of the windows, then brought mattresses and we barricaded ourselves in the bedroom ... C and J were furious and scaled the wall with a ladder. Ever since then J has been making bitchy remarks to me. I haven’t enjoyed today at all.” And quite rightly not, I shouted at my Stupid Teen Self as I reread this passage again.
Where will it all end? Rather scarily, I ponder what will happen if my extreme emotional secrecy ever sees the light of day. My diaries are stored in a big box, with the overspill on open bookshelves. My husband periodically makes noises about the problems that the revelations might cause the children – assuming they can be bothered to read them. And, anyway, he asks, what is he meant to do with the diaries should I die first? I don’t know the answers to those questions. But I do have to keep writing, so here’s to 2008, the year we may finally buy a lock for that Pandora’s box. New diarists, beware of what you wish for.