At various points in my life I decided it might be nice to keep a diary, but this never lasted very long. I never really liked the idea of recording every moment of teenage angst, and I'm far too lazy to spend time on a regular basis recording the dull minutiae of everyday life. Besides which I can't imagine that, in years to come either I or anyone else would be interested in reading that stuff. My mum has a diary that was kept by her grandfather while he was working as a "firewatcher" during the 2nd World War. As a child I remember being thrilled when I discovered the existence of this wonderful historical document, and then deeply disappointed to find that it contained mostly entries of the sort "Wet again. Spam and sprouts for dinner".
For a while I kept what I suppose could be called a commonplace book, in which I noted down things I came across that appealed to me, or anything else I happened to want to remember. But goodness knows what happened to that - I haven't seen it in about 30 years.
These days I have even less time and energy for diary-keeping than ever before, but in many ways this blog now serves the same purpose. Although it is gratifying if anyone reads it, at least in part I write it so that I have some sort of record of the things that happen to us. It is a cliché, but the kids are growing up very fast, and I think it'll be nice for us to have a few reminders in the future of how life was when they were little (though possibly they won't agree).
And in the same way my "commonplace book" has effectively become Facebook. Recently someone asked me if I was keeping a record for posterity of things I post there, since they mostly consist of amusing things the boys have done or said which it might be fun to look back on in future, and it occurred to me that it might be an idea to include "selected highlights" in the blog, so as to keep everything together. So I've created another tab for this purpose. We'll see how it works.
