Read my review of the night.
Only once in my life have I ever written a daily diary every single day for a year. Most times they degenerated into scrawl and desuetude within 8 days of the new year. Notably, the diary I completed ran from 22nd December 02 to 18th May 04 and ended rather enigmatically:
You act a certain way all you life - what if you suddenly wake up one morning and it all feels false?
I have been looking at the diary this week after hearing about OMG Glasgow, a night where ordinary people read out their teenage poetry and diary entries. It is organized by the lovely Fergus and Devin to encourage people to laugh and wince at the things we used to believe.
The trouble — and the reason I won’t be reading — is that I don’t find what I wrote particularly embarrassing. The only embarrassing thing is that I haven’t changed much in the last five years. My attitude, since childhood, has been to try and obliterate all traces of the useless past, to lighten the load whenever I can. Possibly I will regret this in the future, when I am old and useless myself, but that’s you’re own fault for not living in the present old Neil!
Fortunately, the digital age makes it very easy to hide old documents on a dusty hard-drive so all of my poetry, articles and short stories will be preserved for as long as civilization. I just had a look for them and found them in a few seconds. I expected to be mortified by the contents but now feel like Jonathan Swift who couldn’t believe that he wrote A Tale of a Tub: “Oh, what a genius I was then!” said Swift on reading it. Whilst I wouldn’t go that far, I may well unearth something someday.
I think the longest I’ve kept up to date in my diary is 6 days!
Pathetic!