Okay, so I’ve stolen that catchy title from the Radio Four series My Teenage Diary, a hilarious listen and which made me wish I’d hung onto my own teenage diaries. When I got married back in 1985, I left a box of old diaries (mostly A4 size) in the bottom of a wardrobe at my parents’ house. Three or four years later, my mother was clearing out and decided it was time to get rid of all my ‘junk’. It didn’t seem a big deal at the time. I spent an afternoon sitting in my childhood bedroom reminiscing about a life that felt a million years ago – by then I had two small daughters. Then I went downstairs and agreed my mother should throw them all out. All these decades later, I’m a little shocked I didn’t care more about these handwritten records of my teenage years, but somehow it didn’t feel right to take them into my marital home.
There was no alternative than to part with them and I so wish I hadn’t because diaries can offer an intriguing glimpse into our past selves. Though I no longer have that 1978 journal, I can recall writing pages of what was probably emotional drivel when my grandad Sid died just before Christmas and ten days before my grandparents’ golden wedding anniversary. As a romantic seventeen-year-old, madly in love with my first serious boyfriend, the timing of his sudden death felt unbearably cruel.
Regrettedly, I haven’t kept a proper journal like that one since adulthood, however I would be lost without a paper diary for jotting things down.
It was because I wanted to check the date something happened in 2021 that I found myself pulling up a chair and rummaging through a pile of shoeboxes on a wardrobe shelf on New Year’s Day.
It came as a surprise to discover I now have seven A5 diaries stashed away in the aforementioned shoebox. I can’t bring myself to part with them. Please understand, my diaries are nothing like the tomes kept by eminent politicians – those who have their eye on that lucrative end-of-career autobiography from their earliest days – or even prolific literary types.
No, these days my own diaries have no more than a functional role in my life, with each A5 page listing what I want to get done that day, a ticklist if you will. I add birthdays, social events and updates for my annual hiking challenge but that’s about it, apart from the odd cryptic comment. The beauty of this simple listing system is that anything not accomplished on a certain day can easily be bounced over to the next page … and the next. My tendency for prevarication means some items show up for a week or more before I eventually get round to doing them – or not in some cases.
I haven’t so much glanced at most of these tomes since I stashed each away at the end of those years, so I thought it would be fun to revisit history and see what I was getting up to over the past seven or eight years.
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
