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 diaries and journals published since the end of World War Two.

We’ve probably all read Anne Frank’s famous diary, the one she kept while hiding from the Nazis in the annexe in the house in Amsterdam. Anne and all but one of the people she was in hiding with- her father Otto- perished in the death camps and, when Otto returned home alone from the war, he found the diary, a future bestseller, and had it published.

Nearly everyone involved in the war in some way has published a diary or a memoir of some kind. (I WAS HITLER’S MANICURIST; GOEBBELS WAS MY SECRET FATHER AND A TOP BLOKE; IRRIGATING THE FUHRER’S COLON: CONFESSIONS OF AN ASSHOLE and BLONDI’S GREATEST HITS: I WAS HITLER’S FAVOURITE BOW-WOW would be some of the lesser-known ones, and all published anonymously, as well.)

There are diaries written about life before the Nazis came to power, life in the ghettoes, the concentration camps and the displaced persons’ camps, and that’s before you even mention the soldiers and their journals and their letters home, another form of diary-keeping. (Even marking appointments on a calendar is a form of diary-keeping.) The Nazis themselves put pen to paper frequently.

Rudolf Hoess wrote an entire autobiography and a history of his life as Camp Commandant of Auschwitz while imprisoned after the war awaiting trial and, while an autobiography is not a diary as such, it’s still one of the most important documents to come out of the Second World War on the Axis side, you might say.

Samuel Pepys, naval administrator, was a bit of a scribbler himself, penning Britain’s most celebrated diary of more than a million words. He kept it between 1660 and 1669- it would have included the Great Fire of London in 1666- and it is the most important record in existence of the English Restoration period, or the Frilly Years, as I’ve dubbed them.

Pepys was a horny devil and wrote about various extra-marital liaisons in his diary. He even writes about purchasing and reading a filthy French book of erotica known in English as THE SCHOOL OF VENUS, and his mention of this book in his diary is the first acknowledged English reference to pornography, isn’t that wild? The dirty devil…!

I recently discovered possibly the most kick-ass diarist of them all, an American minister and high school English teacher called Robert Shields (1918-2007). From 1972 until 1997, when a stroke prevented him from writing further, he penned thirty-seven and a half million words, which comes in as the longest diary of all time.

But what did he write about? Well, himself, mostly. His body temperature, blood pressure and pulse, his bowel movements and urine samples, any medications, his dreams (as in his sleeping ones; he woke every two hours to describe them to his diary!), as well as his meals, his comings and goings and other activities.

The diaries fill ninety-one cartons and would boggle your mind as to the mundaneness of their contents, but I like the idea he had of capturing the small with the big, the mundane with the great. The only thing I’d be worried about is that his obsession with recording his every word, thought and activity must not have left him too much time for actual living, but maybe Robert wanted it this way, who knows?

I myself keep a diary; not as detailed on the personal medical stuff, of course, as I genuinely don’t see the point of future generations knowing how many times I pass urine in any twenty-four-hour period, but I include a run-down of my day, what I ate, where I went, with whom I spoke, what I spent and what I watched on Netflix, among a million other things.

The diary started life nearly twenty years ago as a record of my baby son’s vaccinations and baby clinic appointments, and it just went on from there. I always feel better after writing in it, as if I have neatly boxed up the events of yesterday for future perusal if I wish, but for now I can totally forget about it if I want, because it’s out of my head and onto the page. If I didn’t write this stuff down every day, my head would be melted, trying to remember and retain all of it.

One thing I do wonder about is what will happen to these twenty-odd hardback books when I die. Pass away. Kick the bucket. Shuffle off my mortal coil. I’d love them to be exhibited in a glass case in a library or museum somewhere but my (adult) kids have mentioned the words ‘skip’ and ‘bonfire’ in connection with my oeuvres on my demise and, sadly, I don’t suppose I’ll have a say in what happens when I’m not here.

(My kids are cheeky pups; if I catch one of them reading my diary over my shoulder and gently remonstrate with them about my need for privacy, they smirk and snigger and say they don’t give a shit what I ate for breakfast on the ninth of May, 1992… They will also say things like, Are you writing about your feelings again, Mom, when they see me absorbed in my daily recording of life chez moi.)

While I’m alive, however, I’ll continue to document my day-to-day activities in the hope that there’s some actual point to it all. At the very least, these diaries say Sandra was here, Sandra did all this stuff and, look, some of it actually even mattered. You too can do what I do. Grab a notebook and pen and get scribbling.