Sandra Harris Writes

  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...

  MY JOURNALING JOURNEY: THE STORY SO FAR. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © I started journaling in November 2020, without really knowing too much about it, because I really wanted to write words in a notebook with a pen again, after years of typing my work on my laptop. I actually had a real yearning for using a pen and paper again. So I found an unused notebook in a local second-hand bookshop that I liked the look of, and bought it for this exact purpose. I didn't realise at first that the journal was part of a series by a lady called Keri Smith, entitled WRECK THIS JOURNAL. The idea is that you find inner freedom and creativity by following the journal's prompts to do mad things to it, like rolling it down a hill, bringing it into the shower with you, poking holes in it with a pencil and even punching the pages, after first dipping your fist in something. Sweet Jesus. I knew I'd do none of these things to the poor, poor journal. I'd write things in it and carry it around ...