FORTY eight years ago this coming Saturday, my father sat down and began to write. “1973 ends with my being inveigled with starting this diary for 1974. Whether I shall keep it up remains to be seen,” he began on its opening page. At the front of the Boots Scribbling diary he bought that week, helpful information for the year to come showed that a first-class stamp costed as little as 3 pence, and that the House of Windsor would continue to be led by the soon to be 48 year old Queen Elizabeth II. The rest is dominated by my Dad’s spidery, almost indecipherable, hand-writing. For, from that first day of the new year — which was to see IRA bombings, the resignation of Richard Nixon, the three-day week and two general elections — my Dad, then a 33-year old sales manager at an obscure textile firm in the north of England, filled in every single day.
This week, as we prepare to begin another weary trudge around the annual calendar, is the moment many of us will be contemplating whether it’s finally time to do as my father did back then. The times we live in — historic, tumultuous, and too often homebound — are ideal conditions for the modern-day Pepys. To mark the turning of a new page, I’d submit that we do a lot worse commit to setting pen to paper.
What makes a good diarist? Firstly, you need constancy and discipline. A good diary focuses primarily on its core subject: the repetitive 24-hour prison in which all of us are condemned to live out our existence. Only a very few good diaries such as Piers Morgan’s The Insider, his hugely entertaining account of life as a newspaper editor are written retrospectively. That’s because great diaries aren’t summaries or highlights of the previous few days and weeks. They are written with the events of each day still fresh in the mind, still raw, disordered and unresolved. They show us life in its truest form, before the stories we invent to invest our lives with direction and meaning have been created.
A great diarist also finds the right balance between introspection and reportage. Leaving aside the remarkable Anne Frank, it’s hard to think of many teenagers who have made great diarists; indeed Sue Townsend famously sent up the moody adolescent style in her unsurpassable The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 and a half. This is because great diaries aren’t just about the brooding ruminations of the writer, they also seek to provide a generous and informed perspective on the world around them, from their families, to friends, to the world. Of course, you shouldn’t just report: it can get very boring, as Alistair Campbell’s mammoth journals attest. The right balance can be found in diaries like those written by the former Labour MP Chris Mullin, whose A View From The Foothills beautifully records both his gentle slide into obscurity and provides a deliciously indiscreet account of Tony Blair’s period as Prime Minister (in one great anecdote, Mr Mullin writes of a conversation with David Miliband, then a Government Minister. Mr Blair’s advice to him, Mr Miliband reveals, was to “go around smiling at everyone and get other people to shoot them”.)
Finally, and leading from this, a good diary should be icily and pitilessly honest. It is a crime to read anybody else’s contemporaneous diary without permission. That’s because a great diarist owes his or her first allegiance to the reader, not to loved ones, friends and colleagues, and cannot live in fear that their private and personal thoughts will be compromised.
From this follows a question: to whom is a good diary addressed? Many political diaries, of course, are written with the general public in mind; think of Sasha Swire’s recent Diary Of An MP’s Wife which delights in revealing the indiscreet (on holiday in 2011, she recorded how David Cameron asked her not to walk ahead of her “because that scent you are wearing is affecting my pheromones, and it makes me want to push you into the bushes and give you one.”). But a diary is really a place for yourself. “Writing a journal reminds you of your goals and of your learning in life. It offers a place where you can hold a deliberate, thoughtful conversation with yourself,” writes author Robin Sharma.
After a lifetime trying and largely failing to keep a diary myself, I hold to this. At its simplest, a diary entry is a simple validation of the daily quotidian grind. Every day that closes with a literal full stop is one that feels a little more complete. Then there’s the insight and perspective that comes from reading your raw unedited thoughts months and years after the event. To look back into my own diaries from ten and twenty years ago is to be reminded that the dramas of my small working world, and my fears and anxieties as I stumbled through them, have all passed and were forgotten about, not least by me. Life really is a cosmic joke, and it is a diary that helps us see it.
And, finally, diaries can provide us with a beautiful window into the past, providing us with a portrait more vivid and alive than any photograph, video or Instagram post. My Dad no longer writes his diary: over the last two grim years, dementia has gradually robbed him of his wisdom, his memory and his wit. But, in his own words, he did “keep it up”, writing every day until 2019 when finally he was no longer able to do so, honouring every day of his life by writing it down.
With the family together over Christmas, we went through some of his entries. I first pop up that winter of 1974 on Sunday January 6th on a visit to church. “E outrageous and had to be taken outside and thumped. Seemed to do the trick”. During a rained-out caravanning holiday while we were still toddlers, he speaks for all young parents. “The best thing about today was brushing my teeth,” he declares. Ten years later, just before Christmas, now middle-aged and with his career in the doldrums, he agonizes over a decision not to move jobs. “V depressed tonight…Trouble is I always have in the forefront of my mind the desire to please people and not to upset them. Stupid really.” Dad, if only I’d known. But then a few days later, the depression lifts as we celebrate a ”great” Christmas at home. “Nothing exciting except that we were together as a family with no interruptions.” His devotion and love for his family shines through the quiet disappointments and regrets of middle age and later life.
What an example to follow. He can no longer write, but he has left us with the most precious heirloom we could have wished for: a reminder of his voice. In a world where we tend to surf over experience, rather than delve into it, where we tweet rather than write, and where all around us the world is accelerating, leaving us clinging on in its slipstream, a great diary stands out as a thing of permanence, solidity and deep honest meaning. As my Dad did, give it a try and give those you love something to remember you by.
This article first appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail December 29th 2021