Dear diary…

I think I may have mentioned that we are having a real purge on STUFF, on items we no longer use/need/want/can’t remember why on earth we acquired them. I’ve probably mentioned (no doubt more than once) that because of the way we were brought up we took care of our things – clothes, books, toys, and for our parents that would mean household items, making and repairing clothes, using left over food to make new dishes or soup, treasuring what we had. This is a wonderful attitude of course, but we seem to now have so much actual stuff – things which might come in useful (they won’t) things we could pass on to others (no-one else wants them) items of no value except sentimental (the spoon dad always used to eat his boiled eggs, the half-finished cushion cover my mum was making) and things we randomly bought, frivolously acquired, or forgotten we’d already got one of so bought another.

So we are trying to be sensible and objective and we’ve taken bags and bags of things to the charity shop, grocery items to the food bank, actual rubbish to the recycling centre, and gradually we have got clear floor space, empty shelves and drawers, and room to put away clothes which have been washed and ironed. However things which are hard to let go, my books and files of writing, his paintings, drawings, art books. I hang onto things I have written, things I’ve started and not finished, drafts, vague ideas – mostly embarrassing nonsense!

From childhood I’ve tried to keep a diary, but it’s never really worked, I’ve never manged to keep up with it or do more than list what I’d done. Went to school. Went swimming. It rained today. Boring. Fell off my bike. It was probably in the early 2000’s I noticed a diary in the Christmas display at the local book shop. Each double page had six columns, one for each day and one for Saturday and Sunday. Across the top was an inspirational message, suggestion or quote, and there were various other little comments and ideas about what to record. It looked simple and easy, and I picked it up a couple of times wondering whether to get it. I resisted temptation – for a couple of years and then thought that yes! I would buy this diary and try to jot something down each day.

And I did, for many years. And then I stopped. I’m not sure why, maybe what I wrote was trivial, repetitive, too emotional sometimes. They were only short entries, maybe less than fifty words at the most. Maybe I began to write here, and although this isn’t really  diary, in many ways it serves the same sort of purpose. The ten or so lovely diaries sat on my bookshelf in the bedroom, and I never looked at them, never peeped in to see what I wrote.

Today, as I continued our struggle to tidy and de-clutter, I took the diaries off the shelf. They have hard covers and are spiral bound, and I pulled out the wires, separated the cardboard covers and the pages, and put them all in the recycling. I glanced at a few of the entries and they were very dull – to be honest they weren’t that different from when  I was a child except they were ‘went to work, kids were good, staff meeting dull, went to pub’. Now there’s an empty space on the shelf, so I may put a collection of favorutie books I’m never going to throw away – the ones I do reread.