Diaries

I saw that documentary last night on BBC 4 about diaries. Richard E Grant squinting into a camcorder and cudgelling his brains about What it All Means when people can only Be Themselves on the page, privately. And then what it means when they decide to make their diaries public.

He talked about some diarists whose work I knew - and some I didn't (I'm very intrigued by the recently published diaries of Joss Ackland's wife, Rosemary.) The whole show was fascinating - though I could have done with more illustrative examples and less cogitating by Grant. (I quite enjoyed that first volume of his own diaries. 'With Nails', was it? Specially liked the horrific entry to do with his night on the town with Madonna.)

There was no mention of one of my favourite diarists, Denton Welch. Here's another life-writer with an untimely death. He didn't actually do much. The excitement is in the writing itself. He rides about on his bike, he shops for nice objets in antique shops with boyfriend Eric. They mooch about the countryside, watching airmen bathing nude in pools.

I've kept diaries of my own all my life. The earliest volumes have gone missing, of course. The earliest I've got comes from when I'm twelve. I used to use Letts Page-a-Day diaries, which I would buy in Boots just before New Year - £2.25 they generally cost. My diary-keeping over the years has been sporadic, I suppose I would call it. The headiest phase was mid-nineties, when I wrote in exercise books, almost one a week, scribbling down almost everything that happened to me, wherever and whenever it happened to do so.

I've always preferred to write about what's going on around me rather than what you might call the inner life. Most of it is observing what's going on. A lot of time is spent excavating - not my own feelings, but memories. Trying to piece the stories together. Trying to summon up the exact feel and texture of places and times. Clicking together bits of narrative. These diaries - heaps of them, books of all shapes and sizes - are crated up and shelved and boxed away under the bed and in my study, all over the house. I can't really go through them and it feels like too much of a chore to even start. Just dipping into them I start to irritate myself... I want myself to be doing things differently, noticing different things, listening harder, writing better... reading better, making better decisions about life and career. Being kinder, sometimes. So, while I always wish that I had kept more diaries - and never, ever fewer - I have to acknowledge that dipping into them is hard.

I stopped keeping a regular diary about May last year. About the time I started keeping this blog. What does that mean? What does that tell me?

This is like sticking up postcards on a notice board. Making each entry public as a blog - that keeps me succinct and tidy, I guess - and less inclined to introspection on the page.