I can fit you in between...

I never buy a diary in December – unless it’s for someone else. I rarely buy a diary in January either. My urge to buy a diary usually comes mid-February, when no shops stock them any longer and you have to once again suckle to the teat of amazon.co.uk…

I haven’t written anything in a while, you may have noticed, you may not.  Writing a blog is like keeping a diary. Months of unenthusiastic missed entries can float by without notice, until one day you realise that four months of your life have passed you by without any written record of them in existence.

I have a very busy life, full of appointments that people (such as my part-time employers) require me to attend. If my life was a carefree crusade with time to play with and nothing much to do but have fun, I would bin my efforts at personal management until the next life.

I know this is true for most people. This is why we all want to win the lottery.

Diaries are more hassle than they are worth for unorganised people. Organised people love diaries like they love lists and pencil’s that accessories with post it notes. Giving an unorganised person a diary is not going to make them more organised: it’s going to make them more aware of their disorganisation.

Diaries need more attention then a Tamagotchi.  We need to feed them with our schedules, constantly amending the circumstances. We need to consult them, rely on them, they become the safe keeper of our futures and nothing short of our reputation relies on them.

I have a friend that cannot make a decision without her oracle. And she does actually refer to her diary as an oracle, as if it was somehow writing her future out for her – ready for her to follow. It just goes to show how powerful this book is in some people’s lives.

Mae West said: “Keep a diary and someday it will keep you.” Truer words cannot be found. A Diary is a book of prophecy to those who believe they are a human doing, not a human being.

I know all of this. Yet somewhere in the deep recesses of my subconscious mind, the word diary is entirely associated with the word handy.  As if it is important that I persist to write down dates in a book that I will stop looking at, and probably lose within a month. As if it is important that I have a book that is there to aid my memory, when my memory is so bad that I rarely remember to take it out with me.

 I also have an aversion to committing myself to disappointing someone: if you are written in some peoples diaries you might as well just been carved out as the eleventh commandment: thou shalt not be late.  For some people, ten fifteen really does mean ten fifteen.

Diaries diminish our appreciation of time, in the same way that mobile phones diminish our abilities to have a conversation with the person sitting next to us in the pub. The busier you are, the less time you have to be open to your present circumstances.

Is it diary keeping that provoked such utterly nonsensical sayings such as “there just aren’t enough hours in the day?” How many hours do you need?  Would you like to put forward the proposal on how we can somehow slow down the sun to suit your agenda?

Do Diaries, and the thinking and language they encourage, help the evolution of the species, or diminish its chances of survival utterly?  Is this a topic of debate that should be fit in somewhere between lunch and three, or can it wait until Monday?