Diaries and Journals
In 1984 I’d collected some tokens from boxes of Frosties and got a Tony the Tiger diary. I no longer have it, but it rarely featured entries and when it did, it was often something tedious like what meat we’d had for Sunday dinner. I also had a different plain type of diary in 1986 and it was more regularly added to, but the spaces were as small as my life was and it really consisted of nothing of worth or interest at all. I don’t think I had a journal for 1987 or 1988 but I destroyed my diary for 1989 in 1997 as I was “so appalled by its content”. Of course now, any of that might be interesting to reflect upon no matter how pathetic, dull or depressing.
Since 1990, there has been a mostly consistent record of my life. There was a significant break of several months in 2002 where I was on painkillers and doing very little at home recuperating from a significant injury (see here) but otherwise I could say what I was doing at almost any given day in my life, or certainly have a good overall picture of that time in my life. (In fact during that time, I could say that almost without doubt I was playing “Medal of Honor Underground” on the original PlayStation. As with so many things, I was terrible at it, and struggled to complete the bad looking game even on easy settings.)
Having a permanent and full record of things is not always a good thing to have though, as perusing the diaries, or journals as I would later refer to them as, can drag up times of unhappiness, stress, anguish, worry and so on. I am very glad that I have kept them, and although they’re no Churchill Memoirs, at least I can be aware of things that would otherwise have been long forgotten.
At various intervals I have set about dictating and manually transcribing my written journals to a digital format. Even with sophisticated cloud-based software that can partially decipher my terrible scrawl handwriting and speech to text software, it’s slow boring work that needs a lot of correction. Dragging up the past can also be saddening as so much of it involves me being unhappy with not being good enough in so many ways. (But mostly never being confident with women or creativity etc.)
I sometimes think it would be good to try and add some of my vast collection of photos to the digital journals to have a visual time line as well as a textual one but it would be difficult to pin down dates or even years for many photos and the file sizes would be unmanageable. It’s also quite frustrating at how few photos I have from earlier years. Although my dad did take photos, it wasn’t unusual for us to have a bunch of boring photos of things like tiny aeroplanes in the distance in our photo albums.
