The trials and tribulations of diary-keeping

January's a popular time to decide you're going to start keeping a diary.  If you've decided that you're going to start a new phase of your life, as so many people decide they're going to do at the start of a new year, what better way to begin than by opening up a crisp new diary, getting a nice new pen (that you will PROMISE yourself you'll use all year, or at least in just this diary, as faithfully as you will promise yourself that you'll ALWAYS use your very neatest writing) and spewing your new year optimism - or pessimism, if you prefer - all over that first, crisp new page?   

I start every year like this, though I've learned over the years not to buy 'proper' diaries with date pages, but journals instead, whereby I have to hand-date each entry I make.  That way I don't end up feeling guilty when faced with a blinding sheaf of empty pages if I haven't written for a few days; though in my old 'proper' diaries I'd combat said blankness by doodling or scrawling a stray random thought across them, or referring to a book I'd just read or a piece of music I liked (it's surprising how, when I read these diaries back, those little things are the most potent reminders of what was going on in my head at the time).  Diaries are wonderful reminders of who you were; what thoughts you had and who you liked, loved and hated.  Things you thought you'd never forget and then duly did, come quivering back to life in an instant.

Unfortunately, diaries are also a powerful reminder of all the things you hated about yourself; you can't escape how precocious and self-obsessed a teenager you were.  Or that God-awful poetry you wrote in one particular diary in an attempt to get over a futile crush (or was that just me?!)  Or the diary I wrote almost exclusively in French, aged seventeen and studying the language at A-Level.  I wrote the entries in French partially as practice, and partially because I had two nosy sisters snooping around.  The downside of all that, of course, is now I haven't studied French since...well, since then actually, the entries are a mystery to me as well.  

If you're a regular diary-keeper like me; if diaries have become a sort of lifeline, you accumulate them at an alarming rate.  I'm always having to find new hiding-places for them and I live in constant fear of somebody discovering and reading them.  Yet at the same time, I can't bring myself to get rid of any of them.  And no, I absolutely don't believe they'll one day be romantically discovered and published after my death.  They really are full of utter rubbish; mostly angsty rubbish that only makes sense to me.  They probably would be better off burnt.  Maybe I'll get up the courage to do that once I've passed the hundred-year mark...and of course by then there'll be enough bonfire-fodder to keep an old lady warm all winter through, too.  If I can't invest in my old age by saving money, at least I can save kindling.

Recently I picked up the very first diary I ever kept; a blue '1985' diary with a picture of a feather-pen and a bottle of ink on the front, and looked at my very first diary entry.  It read something along the lines of "if I was a ghost I'd only haunt horrible people so I could try to make them good.  I wouldn't just scare people even though that would be funny".  

And there began a terrifying new habit.