The Secret Stead is the pen name of a UK-based writer and
Turning a new page in a new year for many of us means making resolutions, but for some it will also mean opening a new page in a new diary. In 2004, I made a resolution to keep a diary for a whole year. The process made me admire people who keep a daily record of their lives year in year out.The diary is as vast and accessible a form of writing as there is, and virgin copies are with us for the New Year. And as the year turns and we make new resolutions to be tidier, more punctual, more generous, less bad tempered, keeping a diary is another resolve we can make. It isn't as easy as it sounds. Some will give the diary a go only for the entries to taper off somewhere in the first month of the year, while others have been writing for years, graduating from school exercise books to personal computers and the blogosphere. I never kept a diary after 2004, but I still write. I soak up everything I see into what I write. I try to write for over an hour each day.
It's like a journey. I open my sails and see where the wind takes me. There's a great deal of childish excitement involved in the adventure, as I clock up a few thousand words. It's the excitement that keeps me fresh; it enables me to keep on wanting to see things in a new light. It pushes me to ask questions, to sort out the account of my desires to some sort of satisfaction in the time that remains.
I guess it's the same for those that keep diaries for the most part. Diarists write for themselves. It's personal research into private history, it's an opportunity to look frankly at what has influenced us in our lives, our real personality, and how our minds work and our ideas form. It's a time-tested style that can help us make sense of our experiences.
Diaries can become a telling historical record of what life was like at a certain moment in time for future generations. The mundane is the treasure trove of historians, offering insightful details of a bygone era. Everything has a story to tell, even the most smallest objects; a lock of hair placed between the pages of a diary has a history of a life once lived. The bones of human history is fleshed out by the ordinary; and diaries (in text and video) help to sniff out the flavour of an era.
In Britain in the late 1930s, Mass Observation, a social research organisation begun to record what they called "the voice of the people". It started the nation writing about their everyday lives. It's in this way time travel is possible in our times; and although it's tempting to dismiss the ordinary as dull, a diary of the everyday can be as vivid as any novel, and it's authentic. Even the diaries of people in public life (such as politicians), if they are observant and honest, can be far more enlightening than self-serving memoirs written later. History drawn from the unreliable memories of politicians usually tells you only about the egos of the victors.
All diaries reveal the prevailing attitudes of the times in which they were written, and it's not only what is written, but what the words are written on that tell a story. From the customised leather bound books of old to the choice of the masses, Twitter and Facebook, it says something particular about the age lived in. What we select as a record of choice says something about us, just as much as our words do.
Diaries have evolved into a myriad of forms from being a private confidant to a showcase of public display; as casual or formal as you choose, where you can reveal your most deepest secrets, let loose at noisy neighbours and unfaithful lovers, pie chart your job's merry-go-round, where you can commemorate special moments in words, video and music. From the private pages of a hidden book, to public screens across the world, our lives are now out there for anyone who cares to know about our everyday.
Trawl online: some parts of the blogosphere are townships of ghost blogs now, people who opened a blog, wrote a few posts and then disappeared, leaving you wondering what ever became of them. Some have become web celebrities, with millions following their daily posts. But as a format, blogs and blogging have undergone so many different transformations and iterations that the terms themselves have become banal and meaningless. It's evidence, if we needed it, that electronic communication has not simply changed the way we communicate, but it's a medium that changes itself quite radically.
As diaries throughout time have recorded, change sometimes happens for the better and sometimes for the worse. For example, the art of letter writing might have taken a hit from e-mails and laptops, but it doesn't look like diaries will go the same way.
And what should an ideal diary be? Although diaries and the reasons for them will be as individual as the individuals themselves, English author Virginia Woolf, who was a diarist herself, summed it up as a hold-all of odds and ends that cement together when read back with hindsight. It could be a place to try out a poem you don't want anyone else to read, or experiment with ideas about which you aren't yet sure. Or it could be a link to remember someone that has passed away.
There is help to forge those links. In the UK, people can archive their family history via Lives On Record - set up by BBC journalist Lucy Greenwell - where family members record their elderly relatives talking about old times, so as to have a piece of living history to pass on to another generation. Bel Mooney, in an article for the Daily Mail, talked about this, when she took the opportunity to record her father's memories in his own words, in what she describes as the "most moving story" she had ever heard.
The importance of those memories lies at the heart of [this] venture in which ordinary families can arrange to make a professional-standard recording of a loved one talking about their journey through life. After all, if we don’t preserve them for posterity, they may be lost for ever. Every one of us is a repository of stories, and the longer you live the more you have. This isn’t about being a ‘celebrity’. The most humble, retiring person in the land is a precious individual with a unique tale to tell.
It might be introspective egotism, but it matters, because, as every person is a story waiting to be told, that story could also be the prequel to another's story, too.
A girl I spoke to recently told me that she had gone in search of her late grandmother's diaries, in the hope of finding out more about her grandmother's life after she had died. Searching her grandmother's house for her diaries without success, she fears they might have got junked without thought. She described it as losing her grandmother a second time, when she realised the missed opportunity of talking with her grandmother about her past. She was left wondering how much she really knew about her grandmother, and of course, by association, how much she could have learned about herself.
So, maybe the main point is to be remembered. After all there is no diary in some family archive that doesn't repay reading, as that girl discovered, even if it doesn't get beyond the end of January.
Published 11 January, 2011
