diaries, blogs, more diaries, commonplace. part one.

When I was eleven, the most exciting gift that I receieved for christmas (indeed, the only one I can now recall) was a little electronic box called the 'Password Journal'. The big sell of the Password Journal was essentially that it contained voice recognition equipment, so one's secrets could be kept SAFE FROM BOYS, as the hilariously gender-based marketing - it was made by a company called GirlTech and available only in, you know, purples/pinks - so desperately informed us, via a spoken password system. I wrote in it a bit over the christmas period. I had toyed with the concept of diaries before; I remember having a small 'lockable' book, with those generic little keys that opened everything in the nineties (you remember them) at the age of about eight or nine, although I can't for the life of me recall what I put in it. I think mainly I was pretty worried about having nits.

Anyway, from time to time throughout my eleventh year, I would pick up the Password Journal and update it on my terribly insipid life - but something about the habit really resonated with me. A short while before I turned twelve, I began to write something every night before falling asleep, and the pad, clearly designed only for the odd secret about the BOYS you were so busy keeping it SAFE FROM, was soon finished. I got another, of a similar size and shape, and I kept them both inside the Password Journal together. Eventually, I had finished this one too and my talking box was running out of room, so I abandoned it in favour of my bedside cabinet's top draw, which soon began to fill up with these meticulously written little notebooks, all dated and signed like a confession.

I kept a diary pretty much every day between the ages of about twelve and fifteen-almost-sixteen-ish. TWELVE AND FIFTEEN. That's years! A huge commitment of time and effort, and I am now privvy to the most intimate thoughts of my young self, thoughts which - I discovered, looking through the earliest this morning - I had for the most part forgotten, or which pertain to people I have not seen for years. How fascinating!

Except that it isn't. The diary I kept between the ages of TWELVE and, yes, people, FIFTEEN, is - like almost all teenage efforts at self-reflection - pure drivel. Although I entertained thoughts at this age of becoming a writer and even went through a spate, at about thirteen years old, of writing huge amounts of poetry (on the encouragement of my then-English teacher; one of them was published, so I still have it somewhere, and the rest I kept typed up neatly in a green folder, some even with first, second drafts covered with scribbles tucked into the back. I got rid of the whole thing when I was seventeen, to the dismay of my mother), I think that it was mainly the HABIT of diary-writing that appealed to me. I was a poor sleeper even then and routine was important to me; the careful notation of that day's events became a part of my bedtime routine, in defiance of my writing's lack of artistic merit.

Many people have the benefit of being able to look back on their younger self and imagine that they were preternaturally wise; that they were forward-thinking, interesting; that they were, perhaps, unlike their peers. I have no such luxury.

4th January 2002: "School re-opens on Tuesday - I wonder who my new English teacher will be? I hope I'll still be sitting next to <3[boy I liked]<3?"
14th January 2002: "I don't think [boy I liked] likes me as much as I like him..."
31st March 2002: "I run my own website with [then-best friend] which is about Harry Potter. [ha ha ha, I think it was a geocities page.] Me and [then-best friend] have fallen out and I hate him but on the plus side with friends I am now good friends with..."

ETC ETC ETC.

The heartbreaking thing is that I don't think I thought like this naturally. Well, no, I KNOW I didn't: I was - while not particuarly unusual or mature - at the very least something of an odd fish in those days. Looking back, I can see the way in which I modelled my writing style, if not my actal concerns, on the kind of dreary YA books that were being forced on me by my relatives. Worse still, on rereading my diaries this morning I could see my young self namecheck the odd event that I CAN remember from this period; ones which have had more of a lasting effect on me and which clearly affected me hugely at the time. But I would never go into detail about them. I didn't really own these diaries in any way that mattered, I didn't use them in any way which benefitted me and I continued to write them because, like Magnus Magnusson, I had started, so I would finish.

Perhaps, too, there was a part of me that felt I would one day find it interesting to look back on such musings; I've always been keenly aware of the passage of time and the kind of person who tries to record oh just EVERYTHING for "posterity" (the diarist's disposition) and knew myself well enough even then to imagine that one day I would be older and want to know how I felt when I was young. Well, my younger self was wrong, the things I thought then were better left mysterious and unknown, and there is some capricious and reactive part of me that wants to dispose of them now in the same way I disposed of my youthful poems. They still occupy the entire top drawer of my bedside cabinet and I - I could really do it. What's stopping me?

Nothing, I suppose, but that niggling reluctance to kick through any window to the past. Perhaps the twelve-year-old inside of me still believes that one day they will be useful; that one day, in my thirties perhaps, I will rediscover these diaries and see the wit and assurance that I now, at the tender age of nineteen, am still incapable of finding. But I don't think that's it. If I want to know what I had for lunch in August 2003, well, these diaries stand as an excellent memorial to that lunch - but they aren't good for very much else. Perhaps I am keeping them just so that one day, in my thirties perhaps, I will be able to look through them and go, "Oh. I was right. Nothing to see here."

(post one of two. second part coming soon.)

i have recently been attempting to construct a bishop.

I started this blog to be a record of my time at university, but am so absolutely dreadful at keeping it up-to-date that, whenever I think about this little patch of the internets I like to call my own, I feel a profound sense of shame. I've thought for a while that what I might be in need of is a little bit of structure, and now I know what it should be.

Firstly, I am an English student (single honours, although looking into becoming joint with history; irrelevent, but sort of worth noting) and secondly, I half-heartedly keep a commonplace book. I say 'half-hearted' because I'm absolutely as rotten at that as I am at blogging, but I have a lot of love for the whole concept of commonplace books and you will be hearing more from me on this subject at some point.

ANYWAY. For this reason, writing that is Not My Own is a very big influence on my life and my brain, so I've decided that every Monday I am going to post something here, like a poem or an extract from something, but not necessarily either of these things, that I enjoyed. I might talk about why I like it or it moved me, or I might not, but it seems like...it seems like a nice e-rendering of my headspace. A sort of cyberspace version of the beautiful commonplace book I left in Liverpool (and miss), a present from my flatmates.

I know that it's techincally Tuesday now, being 2am and all, but I care not! This week's piece of writing is These Boys Have Never Really Grown into Men by Brian Patten:

These boys have never really grown into men,
despite their disguises, despite their adult ways,
their sophistication, the camouflage of their kindly smiles.
They are still up to their old tricks,
still at the wing-plucking stage. Only now
their prey answers to women's names.
And the girls, likewise, despite their disguises,
despite their adult ways, their camouflage of need,
still twist love till its failure seems not of their making.
Something grotesque migrates hourly
between our different needs,
and is in us all like a poison.
How strange I've not understood so clearly before
how liars and misers, the cruel and the arrogant
lie down and make love like all the others,
how nothing is ever as expected, nothing is ever as stated.
Behind doors and windows nothing is ever as wanted.
The good have no monopoly on love.
All drink from it. All wear its absence like a shroud.

I decided to start with this one because the poet comes from Liverpool - he went to school on the Smithdown Road, apparently - and is, in fact, part of a movement called the Liverpool Poets. That's right. He used to pal about with people like Roger McGough, but I hadn't heard of him until I read this, AND he apparently received some kind of encouragement from Philip Larkin - one of my favourite writers.

The reason I like it, I suppose, is complex, and I don't want to deconstruct it on here (not tonight, anyway), because I don't think that would be dreadfully interesting. But it can be summed up with a quote from an Alan Bennett play:
"The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours."

Two for the price of one, this week. And now to bed.

i don't really remember, but i think it is called 'auld lang deslang.'

Note(s) to self:
- stop being awake at super unsociable hours. Half three, sober, finishing an essay? What are you doing with your life? Remember how to write in the day like normal folk do instead of only being able to crack on with anything once it's past midnight.
- finish a damn book. You like reading, remember - that's just about the only reason you picked that degree.
- oh, yeah, and er look into changing that degree while you're on it. whoops

Tomorrow I am going to get up and learn how to function like a real human person again! The festive bit of the year is over and now we have a shiny new one, and it's more than a day old, it's all properly broken in and undeniable and really here, just like such greats as, oh, 2009, 2008, 2007-- you get the picture. Anyway, the long and short of it is that I am no longer allowed to stay up until all hours talking to friends about nothing or listen to Radiohead at 5am and go mental, or any of that sort of nonsense At All. It's business time.

And then, in a couple of days, I get to go see some theatre! I am seeing this and this and this, all for free, because of this. amazing. Part of me's looking forward to going back to Liverpool and part of me is already sad about being so far away from London again, because look, look at all the lovely free plays. ;_;

One of the first things I did in 2010 (after going to bed at 5am and waking up at 10, completely unable to sleep) was some tidying and a bit of light washing up - so I'm taking it as a sign that it's going to be a year for conquering shit. Although I did go back to the mass of duvets once all my friends had woken up, and then I barely moved for the rest of the day, so it's swings and roundabouts I suppose?

(At the start of 2008, I was woken up by my friend's super-excited flatmate bouncing on the bed, then climbing in between us with his chilly limbs. 2009, I was dragged from sleep by a different friend continually getting up to vomit, coming back to bed and then getting up to vomit again. so, ah. Low-key, this year, for one thing.)