“Hhello! I told myself today if I do five handstands and turn around it will be a great year and I have!” So, unceremoniously, begins the 41-volume (and counting) story of my life. It was 1984 and I was 14, fumbling through adolescence in a scarlet beret. My likes, according to a list on the front page, included jacket potatoes and cemeteries. My New Year’s resolution was to “see how long I can go without cake” and “improve my character.”
I haven’t missed a day of entry since that January 1st. My past stuffs two bookshelves in rows of page-a-day journals. It’s surprising how short four decades seem when represented by slender, stacked spines.
I have little idea of the stories they tell. Most of the entries have lain unread since I wrote them. Yet every morning I hunt for my fountain pen (life must be recorded in a pen that takes itself seriously!) and write down the previous day. If I should ever miss one, it seems like it never happened; if my diaries were to be lost, I would feel that my foundations had bowed. Journaling is a chore and a panacea, and yet I still can’t fathom why I do it.
There are many reasons, according to Fiona Couragedirector of the Mass Observation Archive which collects personal records of everyday life in the United Kingdom. “Some people want to leave something of themselves to posterity,” she says. “Some find it therapeutic. Virginia Woolf’s diaries were a way to practice her writing.” Courage says the habit skyrocketed during the Covid lockdowns as people realized they were living through history. “Diaries give you the ability to distill your experiences and make sense of them,” she says. “For historians they are invaluable as they record social trends, layers and details that would not make it into the history books. They plug a gap in the everyday.”
I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I recorded that first New Year’s Day. My mother, a local historian, pestered me for years to keep a diary so future generations could learn what a 20th century teenager did for fun and ate for dinner. It was more of an urge to write that motivated me to start. I did not, I sadly discovered, have a novel in me. There was a point, I like to think, when it dawned on me that life is its own story. A series of chapters, an evolving cast of characters, a thickening plot and an unpredictable ending.
Those future generations will have a very misleading idea of the 20th century teenager. Doris Day provided the soundtrack of my youth. My recreation was tree climbing. While classmates danced at discos, I was in bed with Anne of Green Gables. Adolescent passion completely passed me by. My heart was broken by the deaths of pre-war movie stars, announced in fiery felt tip in the page margins, rather than boys.
Over the years, the entries evolved from a record of school lessons and household routines to confessional writing and reporting. And I can chart my terrified aging: “I am far too young to be so old so soon.” I marveled at my 21st birthday.
At 30: “My face is lumpy, my body old and my hair like tinned sardines. Feel every inch of 30.”
When 40 arrived: “My hemorrhoids are growing and my brain is shrinking. However, I am quite content to be 40, even if it is a little in awe of my old age. I’ve always known that middle age would suit me and now feel capable of marching around with big hats rooting out evildoers.”
Now, when I look back on it, those volumes do read like a story. A chronicled life looks more like a plot with a sense of direction than a puzzle of random events. The darkest times – the night my mother was run over and the long years of her recovery; two unexpected excesses – are, read back, no longer isolated intrusions, but part of an evolving narrative. I can read the chapters with a God-like omniscience. I’ll know, if I follow that misfit teenager through four years of school, how things turned out. What hope came good, what friendships lasted; how, now and then, enemies have become benefactors.
I could trace how a chain of events began that seven years later led to my husband becoming a university sacristan at 20 to please a scarce chaplain. Or, further back, how a crush on my new German teacher at 14 inspired me to study German at university where I encountered that diminutive chaplain. I know that the self who celebrated the arrival of 1996 as a pitiful singleton (“While the others waltzed, J and I washed out and mournfully reflected on our unloved state. It’s a state we have the worst bedroom behind the Wellington -landed bootpot No one brings us tea in bed and no one dances with us to the Pogues”) would meet, before the year was out, the man. I would marry: “I found myself paired with a priest. I was instructed to ‘grab his left side’ and do a Doozy Doo. He kept coming back for more, so together we successfully ‘stripped the willow’ and later I found myself considering the pros and cons of marrying a curator.” And I can confirm that five handstands and a spin ensured that 1984 “wasn’t bad at all, despite Orwell’s dire predictions.”
You pay more attention to the world when you know you’re going to write it down. I write character sketches of strangers I meet – a ponytailed sheet metal worker from Avonmouth who revered Prokofiev, the substantial matron in a waiting room, “who described her knicker situation to me”. I want to do justice until the dullest day, because life is a privilege and today’s everyday will be tomorrow’s history.
In 1985, I recorded my first sighting of a cell phone, used from a pulpit as a spiritual aid: “’Can someone tell me what this is?’ asked father R, holding up something that looked like a bending gray banana.” In July 1996, I sent my first email “all on my own”: “This,” I marveled, “could become an addictive device. [My colleague] and I’ve been pondering nice messages across the desk in the morning like toddlers with toy phones to each other, but they take up to an hour to arrive so I’d still prefer faxes.”
In the privacy of a diary, ego can take precedence over world events. Wars raged, governments came and went while I focused on domestic news. “Today I threw out the old Boden catalog,” began on January 20, 2009. “Barack Obama was also inaugurated as president, so one had a vague sense of historicity as you flossed and sipped, but the previous event seemed more meaningful to me!”
It’s never too late to start a journal and life is never too boring to record. As the years pass and memory fades, I find it comforting to know that I can dip into childhood or child rearing at will and that milestones are preserved. Imagining my future self in a care home, faculties slipping, reliving my first property purchase: “I explored my feelings about being a condo owner, but it didn’t seem real. I have to buy some hyacinths and cats.”
My first date: “I wish I hadn’t said my beer tasted like pus; he must now think I suck!”
My first born: “Ewe was suddenly holding a big, pink, awake baby of a size that was quite unfeasible given the way of going out. It didn’t seem quite real as if it was mine.”
I feel that if I were to read from the first entry to the last, I might find an answer to a question I cannot articulate. But time travel can get unhealthy so I do it sparingly. The past still lives on in those pages and I can feel it closing in on me as I linger there.
In lockdown I read about my university years every day. It was like reading a novel about someone else. I read in tension of predicaments I no longer remember and of dramas whose endings I have forgotten. Unforgettable grief was dissolved; dormant grievances flared up again. Long lost friends cheered Abba in my student room and long dead voices spoke again. As I closed the bundles, I winked into another age, another home, and another family, and marveled at the chain of successive days that had brought me here.
But some things are constant. It is both reassuring and discouraging that I remain recognizably the same as I was 40 years ago. I continue to transcribe my preferences in the front of each diary and jacket potatoes and cemeteries reliably top the list. I stay true to Doris Day and still wear a red beret.
It’s a weighty business recording a life, but it’s taught me not to take myself too seriously. When painful moments are written down, I can let them go more easily. Seeing life as a story with an unknown number of chapters left to write is exciting and scary. My kids are already worried about the space my life will take up on their shelves when it’s over, but I plan to chronicle the days until I can no longer hold a pen. The only part of the story I will never get around to writing is the ending.
