On the evening of 5 February 1952, King George VI ate with his family at Sandringham, and turned in for bed at about 10.30pm. He did not wake up. “It is with the greatest sorrow that we make the following announcement,” began the BBC’s John Snagge during an 11.15am bulletin.
In Parliament, condolences from the governments of France, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, Japan and Iceland were read. Great Tom, a bell at St Paul’s cathedral, tolled every minute for two hours. Rugby and hockey fixtures were postponed. Football crowds sang “Abide With Me”.
The Labour MP Richard Crossman, however, was spectacularly unbothered. “No one I have met genuinely feels anything about this,” he wrote in his diary, “except Clem Attlee.”
Craig Brown’s new, absolutely massive biography A Voyage Around the Queen is built on these kinds of refractions. Seeing as the late Queen wasn’t one for press conferences, her life is told through the memories of the tens of thousands of people who glanced off her, and much of the peppery stuff comes from diaries.
Diaries, as Brown says in his afterword, provide “a welcome buzz” to history that court circulars generally struggle to. People write things they would never say in public: soppy things, waspish things, unintentionally funny things. I kept a diary for the calendar year of 2008, and it’s pretty much entirely in that third category.
14 January: “Bird shat in my hair. Not happy.” 3 June: “Had fun putting leaves on a stick with Lorna and Jack.” 11 December: “Ruddy hell, Lottie is fit.”
Once again, worth noting: I was 16. I’d thought it’d be a good idea to record the year I left school for posterity, but 16-year-old me was not doing his bit for posterity. When historians come to survey the noughties, 2008 will boil down to the global financial crisis and Barack Obama. That is not what I was writing about.
On Sunday 17 February, the day that Alastair Darling announced Northern Rock was being nationalised, I had my own problems. “Threw Nick’s shoe over a fence,” I recorded. “He then hit me.” On 5 November, president-elect Obama told 240,000 people in Chicago: “While we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism… we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can.” I told my diary: “I think I need to go to more parties.”
So no, I don’t think historians will be too troubled by my 2008 diary, which mostly focuses on who fancied who and who I played Mario Kart with. Then again, big things come and go even when the person writing the diary is in the middle of them. George Harrison’s diary entry for 10 January 1969 reads: “Got up went to Twickenham. Rehearsed until lunchtime. Left Beatles. Went home.” He doesn’t record how or why or what he felt, but he does note that he had chips for tea.
The real power of a diary, though, is something I’ve only discovered a long time after writing one. It’s a way of taking notice of time passing. You pick up each day at its close, turn it over in your hands, try to make a kind of sense of it. Maybe there’s no sense to be made of it, just a load of stuff that happened; bird poo in your hair, a shoe over a fence. But by taking the time to recall it all, put it in an order, and solidify it all by writing it down, it seems to last longer. It’s impossible for days to run into each other in a blur.
Despite every single entry making me want to put the thing in a blender, my 2008 diary is one of my most treasured possessions. It’s often mean and petulant, and the amount of time I spent crowing about couples breaking up is, frankly, pathetic. But it is at least true.
I fret that because we keep most little notes and thoughts on our phones and online, historians of our times won’t have that much to sift through. Vast tracts of stuff can just disappear, like when MySpace lost 50 million hours of music by 14 million artists in 2019. The nonprofit Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine try to preserve websites, but so much goes down the digital plughole.
Lately I’ve noticed weeks and months sliding together, and memories getting wobbly and vague. The me of 2008 is not someone I’d want to hang out with. But that year, and the idiot I was then, is alive and colourful in a way that the rest of my teens isn’t. The offhand, unimportant things I bothered to note down bring back that time more powerfully than anything else.
That’s why I’m going to start writing a diary again. Maybe when I’m 48, I’ll look back at my diary as a 32-year-old and be mortified all over again. But I’d rather know who I actually was, however embarrassing it is.
