From telegraph.co.uk
By Laura Freeman
My diary is no dazzler, but it is a relief valve, a place to siphon off and spit out and seethe and soothe and settle scores
Over Christmas I unwrapped a new diary and a 2021 calendar. A different Dutch flower painting for every month of the year. Presents, kindly meant, but feeling just now like a rotten joke. So far I’ve put in a friend’s wedding, postponed from September – and that’s as much as I can muster.
This time of year is usually lovely and longed-for. Hunker down and cuddle up. After a December of office parties, carol concerts, nativity plays and all the family gang together, it’s a blessing, really, in the shortest, darkest days of the year, to nest, read and potter.
Instead, I’m crawling the walls. Almost all year we’ve stayed at home. We did it because it was necessary, and at first we did it gladly. Now, I cannot be the only one who wants out. Out out, party out, new-outfit-in the-Boxing-Day-sales out. While I’m a stickler for rules and will do what I’m (Tier 4) told, I’ve had enough of this cowering, mouse-hole existence.
Watching Bridgerton on Netflix, I swoon and sigh. Not at Regé-Jean Page as the Duke of Hastings, smoulderingly dismounting his horse, but at balls, levees, operas, nights at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. And I hate parties. It’s a standing family tease that I sat mutinous and miserable in a corner at my own third birthday while everyone else had cake and games.
In any normal year, I’d dread the sequinned New Year’s Eve invitation. But at the tail end of 2020, the thought of Auld Lang Syne on the sofa feels as flat as week-old champagne. We are promised a return to the Roaring Twenties as soon as we’ve all had our vaccines. Truly, we’re ready to roar.
As for New Year’s resolutions, I make the same one every year. Keep a diary, keep it up. I mean a diary-diary, a Dear Diary, a Secret-Diary-of-Adrian-Mole diary. Not a dry record of appointments, holidays and haircuts – if you can get one – but a means of taking one’s pen and mind for a walk.
“I sometimes wonder,” wrote Sir Henry “Chips” Channon on November 20 1936, “why I keep a diary at all. Is it to relieve my feelings? Console my old age? Or to dazzle my descendants?” My diary is no dazzler, but it is a relief valve, a place to siphon off and spit out and seethe and soothe and settle scores.
During the spring lockdown, when all days in our small flat seemed to seep into one, it was a way of staying sane. Writing gave order to numberless days. I didn’t once do Joe Wicks or Yoga with Adriene, but keeping a diary was a daily exercise in spirit stretching and mental keep-fit.
Reading those entries now, each day comes back bright and distinct. I remember being mostly morose, but, here, opened at random, is the night we watched The Blues Brothers and danced around the laptop. “Good to boogie,” I wrote. It was.
Don’t, however, do a Bridget Jones. No calorie counts, no units of booze, no January self-flagellation. Better the Parson Woodforde approach – eat, drink and be sherry merry – especially if we have another lockdown.
“The trouble with all momentous periods of my life,” wrote Vera Brittain on December 11 1936, putting her finger on the diarist’s curse, “whether due to public or private events or to a mixture of the two – is that I never have time while they are going on either to take things in properly, or adequately record them.”
It’s a strange thing, but there has never been a better time to get into the diary habit than now, when all diaries are empty.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/12/29/nothing-diary-nows-time-start-keeping-daily-one/
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