ON KEEPING A DIARY... BY SANDRA HARRIS.
ON KEEPING A DIARY. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © People have been keeping diaries since the dawn of time, every since the first caveman chiselled a likeness of the first woolly mammoth onto a nice blank chunk of cave wall. It’s human nature to want to record things, to want to say I was here and yes, I mattered, I had an effect on things, I was somehow important. I’ve taken to reading other people’s diaries a lot lately, by which I mean people’s published diaries. No, I haven’t been rootling through the coats and bags of friends and family and reading their secrets, haha, interesting as that might be. I read published diaries out of curiosity, to see what folks’ lives were like back in the day, what people thought about, what mattered to them and whether the same things matter to us now, whether we liked or disliked the same things and so on. Diaries are often the main or even the only way we have of finding out what a particular period in history was really like. Take all the diar...