By and large I disapprove of diaries or, to be more precise, I disapprove of the effort required to keep diaries. I have tried on a number of signal occasions during my life to record the great (or mostly ephemeral) flux of events as they washed over me day by day, and I have failed. On the third or perhaps the eighth or, best ever, on the 29th day, I have given up. The encrypting pen has fallen from my nerveless fingers, stupefied by the banal run of recorded events that scarcely merited being allowed to happen let alone being written down.
For extremely busy and prominent people, like, say, John Howard or Alexander Downer, the diary might be a luxury they cannot afford the time for. But addicted diarists, of whom, for all I know, Howard and Downer may be two, will always write something down, which is another one of the many things wrong with this form of self-expression. Imagine the swiftly scrawled entries in John Howard’s diary over the latter days of February and in early March—swiftly scrawled but still influenced by the inveterate diarist’s need to give the impression of development and evolution, and to deny, correspondingly, that one day may—and usually does—turn out to be depressingly like those before it.
24th Feb: ‘Saddam Hussein is running out of time.’
25th Feb: ‘For Saddam Hussein, time is running out.’ 26th Feb: ‘Time is what is running out for Saddam Hussein.’ 27th Feb: ‘Running out for Saddam Hussein is—TIME!’ 28th Feb: ‘Check with George to see if time still running out for SH.’ 1st March: ‘Pinch and a punch first day of the month and no returns.’
Or Alexander Downer’s equivalent quotidian notes.
24th Feb: ‘War starts in five days.’ 25th Feb: ‘War starts in four days.’ 26th Feb: ‘War starts in two days.’
7th Feb: ‘Pinch and a punch first day of the month and no returns.’ 28th Feb: ‘Shit!’
I think one of the reasons I so deeply loathe those newspaper feature pieces that purport to be a typical week in the life of some luminary, celebrity or other significant nubile or virile, is that such effusions are actually disguised diaries. But diaries of the worst kind—diaries in which life is just so packed, exciting, lovely, promising and fulfilling that it is almost impossible to contemplate it without inducing dangerous rapture.
‘Monday: Excellent jog round the Tan. Later, met Fifi