Dear Santa...

By Tim Holman

It's rather crumpled, but here is the note I sent to Santa Claus just before Christmas 1964.

To my joy, a Letts 1965 diary duly turned up in my sock, and I faithfully recorded my daily doings (in very few words) until the end of June '65. Ever since, my diary-keeping has been erratic to put it mildly, but I still enjoy it.

"Out of the dust, immortality"

By Tim Holman

After a 40-year delay, I recently published my student diary. Since then I've been pondering some very basic questions, such as:-

What is a diary?
What is it not?
Why bother?
Is anybody else interested?

To start at the beginning, a diary is a very private thing - or should be. It is written by someone for their private thoughts or amusement, or to log all the worries that plague them in the hope that the best form of remedial action will become clear. It certainly helps if the person has an urge to write and can't stop jotting things down.

OK, fine, but in that case why have I now published a portion of my own diary? Am I not guilty of double standards? No, not really. Unknown to anyone else, it was written in complete privacy and it's taken me 40 years to reveal its existence. I had only 2 motives when deciding to publish it:

1 To give my old college, Trinity at Oxford, something for their archive, so that in 100 or 200 years' time someone might find it and be interested in my tales of student life in the late 1970s;
2  To go to my grave as a published author! And why not?

A true diary should not be a dismal catalogue of complaints and whinges directed at particular individuals. Nor should it be written with the specific aim of being published quickly. I know that certain respectable and respected authors do precisely that, but in my opinion what they have produced isn't a diary. A better word would be journal, or possibly chronicle.

Why bother? Well, I've already mentioned an uncontrollable urge to write, but other possibilities include a wish to capture day-to-day events before they're forgotten; a passion to create something unique; a practical wish to log all of one's hobbies and interests in one place; and - perhaps - to inhabit somewhere comforting when one is alone. I'll return to that last theme in a future post.

Is anybody else interested? Answer: no idea. This is something that the diarist can't control and shouldn't really care about.

In 1984 the "Times" published an article by Sir Roy Strong which discussed some of these issues. I've attached it here. (By the way, Pepys didn't really look like that.) Sir Roy was disdainful of "diaries" that are written specifically to settle old scores, but stressed their importance as a means of recording for posterity the little details of everyday life. "...The account of clothes, places, events, food and customs become hypnotic ... (a) mirror of daily life and character, and the cycle of the seasons."

Quite so. Without really thinking about it, that's why I jotted things down 40 years ago and still do today. And note that I just used the word "jotted", which for me means writing things down on paper. Of course we can all record our thoughts and keep diaries on blogs and websites, but how long will they last? That is also an issue for me to return to soon.

Samuel Pepys, February 1667

"To the Office, and there a most furious conflict between Sir W. Pen and I, in few words, of no great moment, but very bitter, and stared on one another, and so broke off; and to our business, my heart as full of spite as it could hold, for which God forgive me and him!"

Some Quotes About Diaries

“I have kept this diary doggedly, day by day, because I believe a continuous record, no matter how full of trivialities, will always gradually reveal something of the subconscious mind behind it. I’ve never regretted keeping a diary yet. There are always a few nuggets of literary value under all that sand.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

“Billy Pilgrim had a theory about diaries.
Women were more likely than men to think that their lives had sufficient meaning to require recording on a daily basis. It was not for the most part a God-is-leading-me-on-a-wondrous-journey kind of meaning, but more an I've-gotta-be-me-but-nobody-cares sentimentalism that passed for meaning, and they usually stopped keeping a diary by the time they hit thirty, because by then they didn't want to ponder the meaning of life anymore because it scared the crap out of them.”
― Dean Koontz, The Darkest Evening of the Year

“Twenty seven years ago, during my first romantic relationship with a boy, I started keeping a diary about my thoughts and experiences. That diary formed the basis of my novel “A Dream of Two Moons,” the title of which comes from some paranormal occurrences from real life.”
― Sahara Sanders, INDIGO DIARIES: A Series of Novels

“An introspective man who doesn’t keep a diary consigns himself to a special hell”
― Tim Lucas, The Book of Renfield: A Gospel of Dracula

“By beginning a diary, I was already conceding that life would be more bearable if I looked at it as an adventure and a tale. I was telling myself the story of a life, and this transmutes into an adventure the things which can shatter you.”
― Anaïs Nin

“When I moved, I unearthed the diaries I kept for ten years. I sat and went through them and they were a worthless burden to own. People will say it's tragic I threw them out, but I know it isn't.”
― Bill Callahan, Letters to Emma Bowlcut

“If you read someone else's diary, you get what you deserve.”
― David Sedaris

“What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed