Birthday post

32 years old today!

"...with all the books and all the records of your lifetime..."

Currently doing a fair bit of sorting out, which is one of the reasons I've not being able to blog as much as I'd like to just recently. It's always interesting what you turn up when you have a proper sort out or move house. The things you'd forgotten you had. The things you don't even remember owning. The things you're relieved to see again, glad that you didn't get rid of them during the last sort out you had. One of the things I came across the other day was my old diary, which of course I do remember keeping.

Looking at the entries (I was always carefull to date every entry I made) I see that I must have kept it for a period of roughly 8 years, from shortly after I began my Undergraduate degree, through to 2005, when I think I finally stopped as I'd mostly lost interest in keeping it. The gaps between entries became longer and longer. Maybe I'd finally run out of things to say. Seeing the length of some of the entries I made I can only wonder that I had the time to write so much. And what exactly did I find it so necessary to write about at such length? Memories, daydreams, quotidian day to day stuff which I always wanted to make significant. Which I suppose it was for the person living it. I also collected quotations, and selotaped in pictures and pieces torn out of newspapers. It was something of a scrapbook. And I wrote about the books, comics, music and films that inspired me, which is what I want to try and write about in a more structured way here.

I don't think of this blog as a substitute for that diary. I know that there are people who keep personal blogs, which is something I don't fully understand. Not that I'm critical of the desire to record personal details in such a semi-public forum, it's just not one that I share. Although obviously, as the entries about one's personal taste mount up and the style of your writing becomes familiar to your readers, I'm sure that something of a sense of the person writing a blog must come through. By its very nature blogging feels slightly informal which encourages that personal feel.

Not that I imagine I have any readers at this point! I'm not even sure if I want any. In my first post I described this online space as semi-public, which is how I still tend to think of it. It's personal, but also available to anyone who comes across it. Which at least answers the question I could never quite answer when I did keep a diary, of who I was writing it for.