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?
I could never get myself to keep a journal or diary until just over a year ago. I do wish I had some of those to look back through. It would be interesting to me now to see what a much younger me was thinking. I remember reading through my grandmother's diaries after she passed. They were very factual. On the day I was born (first grandkid and I was born with a collapsed lung so I was in the NICU for a while), the entry said, "Got peas. Karen was born." That's it. And that right there told me so much about my grandmother, especially the grandmother that my mother knew as a young woman.
My other grandmother didn't keep diaries but she did keep letter correspondence. After she died, I read a lot of letters. Letters she wrote back and forth with her mother when her mother was dying of breast cancer. Letters my grandfather wrote to her when they were secretly married but she was in nursing school and they lived apart (and no one could find out or she would be kicked out). Those were kind of explicit and embarrassing! It was weird to think of my grandfather as a lusty young man, lol. But again, they told me so much about them as people.
A few weeks ago an older many (in his 80s) I met in the park said he has this stack of journals and diaries and was thinking of throwing them all away. I thought if I was your child or grandchild, I might want to read through some of those. And yes, we write so many things we might not really want read - but then all of it conveys something about who we are that really no one knows, even the people that think they know us well. So who knows?
Oh, and it makes me think of Terry Tempest Williams book, "When Women Were Birds". Here's an article about it: https://www.oprah.com/relationships/terry-tempest-williams-when-women-were-birds