Diary of a bore

Almost without fail, I bash out a daily diary entry on a loose sheet of A4 then shove it in an old ringbinder. Glued on the inside cover of this ringbinder is a yellowing newspaper clipping. It’s a column by the late Nigel Nicolson, written around the time of the New Year, offering Sunday Telegraph readers some useful rules, from a lifelong diarist, about how one should go about keeping a diary.

Write first thing in the morning when the mind is fresh, he says. Be truthful, he says. Don’t feel obliged to write daily: write only when you feel that you have something to say. Write your diary in code or hide it. And never, ever, mention train times, minor illnesses or the weather. As an example of how uninteresting an entry about the weather can be, he quotes an entry from the diary of King George V: ‘It rained today, harder than yesterday. I hope it will not rain tomorrow.’ (‘This,’ admonishes Mr Nicolson, ‘is not what diaries are for.’) His rules are based on the assumption that most diaries are written to be read by other people. ‘However much the diarist may deny it, he is writing for someone other than himself,’ he says. ‘Unconsciously, all diarists write for posterity.’ Therefore, Mr Nicolson seems to be saying, it is the duty of the diarist to bear in mind posterity’s threshold of boredom.

But when I sat down to read my diary after banging away at it for a year, I realised what a colossal bore I am. There was no escaping it. Though conscientiously written with the idea of keeping a few of my descendants entertained, when read retrospectively in one sitting like a novel the diary was a pathetic litany of childish complaint laced with trite observation enlivened only by platitude.