Diary notes can pay dividends... if only I had made the effort
I AM without doubt the world’s worst at keeping diaries and systematic files and my only excuse is that my mind is always too busy looking to the next thing of interest, whether it be animals, painting, music – or drink and food for that matter – and, of course, I am very easily distracted.
In some ways diarykeeping has never really been important to me as I have always been lucky enough to have weekly columns in newspapers to keep me going. This one, for example, has been running for 33 years and my first piece in the Glossop Chronicle was well and truly in blackand-white days circa 1978.
But it has to be said that it is a discipline which can really pay dividends and I should get to grips with it.
My partner Joanie has tried her best to sort me out and one retired reader has actually offered to come and file all my pics and correspondence, so there is hope.
Reader John Gray of Gatley, in a letter from a few years ago, had got the write (sic) idea.
“Hello Sean, I very much enjoyed your article tonight. Here’s some interesting things I’ve spotted locally over the last week:
“April 6: A pair of buzzards just floating around for ages over the Concorde Park area at Manchester Airport and a stoat right by my feet as I was watching them.
“April 7: Three dippers and a tree-creeper on Lady Brook between Ladybridge Road viaduct and Bramhall Park Road and a kingfisher in Bramhall Park.
“April 8: The first bumble bees of the year.
“April 9: Had a fox in my garden for two hours between 8.30-10.30am. It was one of those very cold sunny days and so I was able to get lots of pictures of it. At first it was just curled up asleep in the sunshine at the base of a tree. Then it went over the fence but returned within half-an-hour and, after a brief wander around my garden, settled down in a different sunny sheltered spot for another hour of sleep. I’m sure that it was aware of me as I was taking pictures but it stayed put all the same. Wonderful. We don’t have to go miles away to enjoy wildlife; there’s plenty on our doorstep if we look out for it.
“April 10: I watched a sparrowhawk at Bruntwood Park.”
I replied immediately to John to say how impressed I was with his diary. His diary notes reminded me very much of the famed Rev Gilbert White, whose ‘Natural History of Selbourne’ is a seminal diary on wildlife and the environment from the 18th century and still in print today.
While writing this article I found a few of my own, just little asides and aide memoirs. I certainly should have done more, what tales they would tell.
May 1, 2002: Walking off last night’s Guinness on Galway Bay, two otters playing in the kelp, eight herons stalking the shallows in some kind of reptilian dance.
April 1, 1980: Reports of a fire and a black magic ceremony at Crowden turned out to be Iranian students celebrating the first anniversary of the revolution.
December 24: Ermine near youth hostel. You little beauty, so close I could see the steam off his breath. September 16, 1981: Woodhead Reservoir very low and grass beginning to grow on the usually submerged silt. (This picture taken the other day, nearly 40 years later, shows the same scene).
And to conclude this little gem, possibly my first ever notelet to myself about something my mate Oaf, who appeared so many times in this column (RIP), had said or more likely done.
March 16, 1984. Oaf fell head first into the bog and said ‘Woody, it’s wet in there!’