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When was the last time you wrote in a diary or journal?

I'm not talking about blogging here but a real written record of your day. I don't know about you but I did on-and-off for many years to the point that I pretty good idea what I was up to for more than a decade. Well, for the first couple of months of each year or so anyway.

I always started with good intentions but then I would miss the odd day and then try and catch up the next night but before I knew it was a week behind. It would then to be too much of a chore and then I would give up. That was a shame but at least I had a go. I am actually rather thrilled that there are books of varying sizes plus lever arch files with detailed diary entries stored in the garage. I can look and be reminded of memorable events more clearly but more importantly it is a family record that can be passed on down the generations.

Blogging is all very well but it does rather take the charm out of things. When your thoughts can be instantly edited and annotated with web links and photographs it's
justwellbusiness like. Almost clinical. Part of the joy of keeping a diary is seeing the mistakes and misspellings, the scribbling outs and the scraps of paper or photos tucked between the pages. There's also no guarantee that your work will survive indefinitely in an electronic world. Some of my prized writings have been lost because I didn't back them up properly including my entry to BBC scriptwriting competition which I was long-listed for. I posted my words on a forum but in a restructure of the site the forum I used was deleted.

No-one backs up a handwritten diary of course but I think people take better care of them for that very reason. The Internet has made us very lazy and when we do get caught by a hardware failure, software developments or plain negligence, there's often actually very little we can do about it.

I do have a prime example here: I wrote five months of entries in 1999 around the time our eldest child was born. It included details on visits to antenatal classes, buying baby clothes, decorating the nursery and of course the maternity hospital and the birth itself. I have all this on CD-R as I didn't have a home PC at that time and it was all written on my work machine. This content was subsequently compressed to get more data on the disk using DiskDoubler but now I
don't have access to Quark Xpress 3.2 or DiskDoubler so I now can't
open them. The worst bit is that I don't have a printed copy either. Will I ever get

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