Dear Diary, please selfdestruct before publication…

Good news for admirers of the novelist Margaret Forster. Her teenage diaries are to be published by Chatto & Windus this Christmas, under the title of An Ordinary Schoolgirl. Forster was fascinated by the diary form, which she used so successfully in one of her most popular novels, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, that readers mistook it for the real thing. Her husband, Hunter Davies, was apparently unaware of the extent of her own diary-keeping – “the million words I never knew existed” – until he discovered her journals after her death last year.

What would she have felt about the publication of her private writings, he wondered in a recent newspaper article, concluding that all diarists have posterity “at the back of their mind, whatever they say out loud”.

Can that be true? “Why did he keep it at all,” speculated the editor of the published version of Evelyn Waugh’s notoriously disobliging diaries, eventually concluding that Waugh had been “laying down a store of experience”. Which is, I suppose, the force that drives all acts of personal record-keeping, from Pepys’s diaries to the current plethora of blogs and artfully filtered Instagram moments.

But experience, like wine, is not always worth laying down. Margaret Forster’s teenage diaries – “current events, mixed up with snippets about school friends, swimming galas and her reading” – are evidently a fine vintage. Having taken a swift, appalled glance at my own teenage diaries, I’m off to shred the lot – just in case.

One way and another, I suppose most of us are named after celebrities, whether pop stars or saints. So I am intrigued by the court case brought by a mother who no longer likes her child’s middle name.

Last week, an appeal court judge agreed that the name, although “not eccentric or in itself offensive”, is so tainted by its association with “a notorious public figure” that it should be removed by deed poll.

The fact that the name cannot be revealed has turned it into the nominal equivalent of an earworm. In every idle moment I find myself wondering, not just which boringly named but infamous celebrity could have lent his or her name to this unlucky child, but how much time has to pass before a tainted name regains its lost innocence and little Vlad or Adolf can frolic unmocked in the school playground.

Readers across the country have written to the Telegraph to boast of their bumper hauls of early blackberries (always in pounds and ounces – so much weightier, somehow, than kilograms). But we must have an unfavourable micro-climate in my local blackberrying territory of High Halden in Kent, for the blackberries there are still sour little adolescents.

In general, my efforts this summer to establish a sustainable domestic food economy have been disappointing: the mulberry trees in Greenwich Park stripped of fruit before I could plunder them; the rampaging courgette plant that remains barren despite my pollinating efforts. Most frustrating of all are a couple of cherry plums in a nearby car park, with fruitladen branches too high to reach. Only the fear of a tricky conversation with the local police prevents me from nipping down there one night with a ladder and some carrier bags.

READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion