Do You Copy: My Diary

The fad. There’s me saying on the 31st December every year (without fail) I’m going to keep a journal next year and write a diary entry for every day.

This started when I was about nine. For as long as I can remember I’ve had my trusty notebook; whether it be a purple hardback journal with a peacock embroidered in the bottom right corner (2016 Paperchase’s very finest) or a reduced to clear moleskin in the homesense stationary section.

They’ve come in all different shapes and sizes over the years and I’ll dip in and out of them from time to time to check in on my younger self and see how she was doing. Each one however is an unfinished project: I started strong on the 1st January, got up to my birthday on the 27th and then as soon as Feb hit my writing hours failed to fit the schedule.

A lesson I learned: writing doesn’t need to fall into the schedule. Dedicating a part of day to my diary didn’t work for me. Instead its best results are when it occurs spontaneously, like me right now under the covers in a hotel room. I planned to sleep as I have an early flight but cannot for the life of me, and now I’m spewing words like song lyrics I’ve rehearsed and rehearsed.

The results: my one year anniversary of diary writing has just passed. I have succeeded in keeping a record of my 19-going-on-20 years, 365 days of Scarlet you may call it. The way I keep this up is by not setting a time for diary writing - I usually like to catch myself up on a train or bus and the most important part is ‘catching up’ as I can go weeks without remembering to write about a day so will do one long catch up, where I use my Snapchat memories and camera roll as a log of my activity to rejig my memory of what I did.

This is the key to keeping it fresh so it doesn’t become the forced, daily mundane ‘today I did this’ type of thing.

My pocket Filofax personal organiser (black leather) will therefore not be joining all of those abandoned notebooks on my bookshelf. Instead it remains in my bag and will age in the sun and get ketchup spilt on it in its loyal service to the narration of my life in all its glory and ugly hours of course. All I need to do is get a pack of refills every new year and start from scratch, tying last year’s pages together with ribbon to create a priceless 365 day narrative to look back on. One day.