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.
Having such a complete record isn’t always a good thing as old journals can stir up memories of stress or unhappiness, but I’m still glad to have them. They may not interest anyone but me, but they’re a way to record things that might otherwise be forgotten or misremembered.
I switched from writing to typing my journals in late 2000. In the past, I experimented with dictating them to speech recognition software, but the results were slow and disappointing. Many years ago I did type up some of the smaller shorter journals but it was even more tedious. Until recently, I never thought I’d have the patience to convert all my handwritten journals to digital text. Thanks to ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini transcribing hundreds of photos of the pages over the last week, I now have a pretty accurate digital version of everything I wrote. I’ve even printed and bound copies in a legible, consistent format.
The journals don’t really serve any practical purpose beyond satisfying the occasional curiosity about what I was doing “x” number of years ago. I sometimes wonder if the person tasked with clearing out my house after I’m gone will even glance at them, or if they’ll all end up in a skip. Honestly, that’s probably for the best.
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.
