Monday, January 02, 2012
To look at them, side by side, you wouldn’t think they were the same species.
One is slim, shiny, black, impressive in its promise.
The other is fat from cuttings stuck in at random, scuffed, held together with duct tape and generally disreputable. This year’s diary. Last year’s diary.
A4-sized Letts page-a-day specials, both of them. The red satin page marker in the new one is pristine. The ribbon in the old one looks like I spent all of last year sucking it.
Today’s the day for filling in the personal information sections in the shiny new one, which I would do if I could find a good reason to write down my credit card hotline or the number of my optician. Who, these days, has a personal optician? Or feels the need to have their number written down in case of emergencies? But then, why would you need to put the number of your bike frame in your diary? The new one offers me the thrilling possibility of doing just that. I presume, if the bike I don’t own were stolen, I could impress the garda to whom I reported the loss by knowing this bit of data, but would it expedite the return of the bike? I seriously doubt it. It’s a bit like the blood group heading in its obsessive pointlessness.
Think about it. Having recovered your bike because you had the birth cert of its frame in your diary, you then fall off it and end up in A&E. The chances of your A4 diary accompanying you there are, I beg to suggest, on the slim side. I mean, what do you clutch, assuming you’re conscious enough to clutch anything as the paramedics strap you to a stretcher? I’d tend to start with my husband, my mobile phone or wallet, rather than my diary. But even if you landed into A&E with your big book diary, you think they’re going to take its word for your blood group before they hook you up to an IV? The category is always there, though. It’s an eternal verity, unchanging with the times. Diaries 30 years ago wanted to know your telex number; they’ve got over that. But the passing of time hasn’t diminished their curiosity about which kind of blood courses through your veins.
The first diary I ever owned, back when I was 13, wanted to know my blood group. It also, for some weird reason, wanted to know my sock size, which I faithfully filled in. I was a nine, may still be, for all I know. It’s never really come up, in the management of day-to-day living, my sock size, despite recording it neatly when I was 13, alongside my height, date of birth and address. The only gap I left was under ‘weight’. Honesty goes only so far. And anyway, weight, in my experience, is a moving target rather than a firm fact.
That first volume was a tiny one that could be easily covered by one hand: the Enid Blyton diary. The following year, I received it as a freebie, my name appearing on page 8 as one of the prize winners of an essay competition, sandwiched between a winner from Great Yarmouth and one from Kuala Lumpur and coming just ahead of instructions for turning an empty baked bean can into a candle-propelled steamer that would propel a bucket across the water in the bath. The instructions suggested you get your dad to help you with this project. When I did so, he asked me if I seriously thought my mother would want buckets travelling across our bath. I didn’t need to ask her. The phrase "not a snowball’s chance in hell" applied.
However, having gone back over the instructions half a century later, the longing is on me all over again. I’m seriously thinking of having a go at making the steamer this year. Now that baked beans have made a triumphant culinary comeback in these straitened times, I figure this is my chance to, as the diary promises, "understand a very simple form of jet propulsion at work".
That old diary has accounts of early TV programmes on which I appeared, drawings of what I wore and comments of the famous people I met, such as Joe Lynch saying no acting school was as good as the SHK: the School of Hard Knocks. It’s pure reportage. None of the control-freakery of the over-anxious hack who must explain the significance of every fact and bully the reader into having the right response to it. In addition, every mortifying moment, every personal failure is recounted with the teenage certainty that each is permanently wounding. But it fades, man, it fades. That’s the great consolation.
I have every diary I ever owned, not because any of them contain anything important, but because of a vague belief that at some stage I’m going to need one of the phone numbers carefully inputted each year or to refer back to the list of books read that year. As time went on, my diaries stopped being an account of life as it happened and turned into a constantly failing attempt to control the future, with lists of tasks to be done, meetings to be held, phone calls made.
The diaries got progressively bigger, becoming the notebook where everything every client said was recorded. Everything from the diseases likely to afflict farmed salmon to the reason so many of the veterans who first contracted Legionnaire’s Disease died of it. (They were elderly smokers.)
As a consequence, each diary reads like a cross between an Ikea instruction leaflet and a Trivial Pursuit crambook. I once asked my sister to let me read her diary for comparison purposes and walked into a wall of personal outrage. Reading someone else’s diary, according to Hilary, was several notches worse than murder, rape and pillage, and to even suggest it removed me temporarily from the human race. I figured her diary (which, significantly, had its own inbuilt lock and key; the latter, like your credit card PIN number, to be kept strictly separate from the diary) must contain details of a secret life a whole lot more scandalously impelling than the one I was living and recording.
Of course, because my sister is a genius, she probably wrote her diary in code, anyway, like Samuel Pepys, although I don’t see her, even as a lively teenager, having the good reasons he had for encrypting his. He (and that other compulsive record-keeper, Boswell) had a sex life so energetically and promiscuously opportunistic, it’s amazing a) that he stayed married, although we know Pepys’s wife now and then gave him hell over his flagrant infidelities; b) that he survived to relative old age and didn’t die earlier from STDs; and c) that he ever had the energy to do any writing at all, never mind encrypt the thing.
Every year, the crisp new diary delivers the illusion that the year ahead will be orderly, productive and memorable for the right reasons.
Hope springs eternal.
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