In praise of keeping a diary – even if you can’t read your own handwriting
I source mine from The Monocle Shop in London’s Chiltern Street: bright-yellow A6 Leuchtturm1917 pocketbooks; hardcover, dot-grid paper. And I suggest that you do the same – or find your own paper-and-pen solution. Because while I am not one for pet causes (unless it’s actual pets, then I am all in), I am a firm believer in keeping a diary.
My discipline is simple. Every morning, without fail, I find a few minutes to write down what happened in the previous 24 hours (this would have stumbled as a pastime if I had attempted a bedtime routine). Sometimes when I am on a plane, away on holiday or just in the mood, I will write several pages; other times we are in the land of the haiku.
But something is always committed to page – blue ink, nib nipping across the paper. Sometimes the news or events edge into what’s written; other times it’s just about work, the banalities of daily life, friends. Why the commitment? That’s hard to say. The diaries are not written to be read by anyone else (please feel free to put them in the recycling after I am gone). Indeed, you would need a code breaker à la Bletchley Park to crack my handwriting (even when I try to decipher some pages, I struggle to unravel the scrawl). But that doesn’t matter because it’s not like I spend my evenings reliving the delights of 2011 or wondering what I was doing on this day in 2015. Instead, once a diary is fat with recollections, thoughts and, may I say, the occasional amusing aside, I close its elasticated strap and put the yellow notebook on a shelf along with all the others.
So why, then, the recommendation to take up the habit? Because it orders your thoughts, makes you focus on what’s important, lets you see how various narratives weave not only across the pages but through your life too. And, one day, when your memory might need jogging, it will be there – an off-stage prompter.
You could keep a digital diary, sitting there on your desktop along with your household accounts, but give paper a go and start today. We are only three days in, so let’s make this a year that you hold onto – in ink. And, no, your partner cannot read them.
To read more columns by Andrew Tuck, click here.
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