Dear Diary... it’s time for a Last Tango through life
IBLAME Sally Wainwright. I’ve started watching for the first time her brilliant series Last Tango In Halifax and, while totally immersed in its present day drama, find the start point of an elderly couple revisiting their memories so compelling I’m tempted to do the same and write a diary in retrospect, which would, I suppose, be an autobiography.
When I was a teenager, I kept a diary. It was intended to be a reflection of life in the 1950s and 60s with the aim of leaving it for posterity.
Great diarists of the past had done so, from Samuel Pepys to Virginia Wolfe, so why not me?
Besides, everybody’s life story could make a book and if I didn’t find fame while alive, mine could bring me posthumous acclaim when discovered by a descendant or archaeologist digging through the remains of our civilisation after World War Three.
Such an important undertaking had to be done in fountain pen, of course.
But, as a callow youth more interested in girls, football and rock and roll, I gave up with the sixth notebook only partly filled.
A few years ago, my elder daughter read them and her verdict was astonishment that I could ever have been so inane. So much for posterity.
Now, Sally Wainwright, and my noticeboards, have encouraged me to start again, retrospectively.
My office wall has cork boards on which are pinned cuttings, memorabilia, a sign that says Drink Beer and Ignore Stuff and snapshots of friends now gone.
It’s them and their memories that are also urging me on. And as you get older your memories of back then become the most vivid you can recall.
After all, I thought, I’m familiar with the concept because when I started writing this column, many years ago, it was called The Diary. I recorded happenings in my life, with observations on the wider world. Mind you, the pieces were censored for a family newspaper.
And that, I have realised, is the problem with diaries. The interesting bits are the ones you leave out. Who is brave enough to be totally honest without care for the hurt feelings of others or personal embarrassment through your disclosures?
But still the urge is there. We live in turbulent times, which makes me yearn for those yesterdays of John, Paul, George and Ringo, when world peace seemed an wakened now and again by the sound of clogs on stone flags.
“He used to tell me he could hear me and my fellow pupils making a racket at dinnertime while playing out at West Slaithwaite Church of England achievable objective to the youth generation. Shame we all have to grow up and realise it isn’t and that those times were turbulent too.
So maybe the time is right for me to start that retrospective diary, warts and all and secrets shed, and leave it with a lawyer under a 30-year rule of privacy to avoid lawsuits or the anger of long-ago girlfriends.
On second thoughts, it might be safer if I buried the manuscript in a tin box in the garden for archaeologists to dig up from the debris of a future apocalypse.