Noticing the large gap between my previous post and the one before that, I suddenly remembered the diaries I used to regularly receive from Santa as a kid. They were as much a fixture of the Christmas present list as those other stalwarts, the Dandy Annual and the Cadbury’s Selection Pack, shaped like a big sock made of net.

Every Christmas I’d get one of those diaries and determine to write in it every day. Of course, it was easy at the start; the first few days following Christmas could be filled with exciting reports on the usage and abusage of the various pressies received from Santa and the rellies. But then after a few weeks I’d inevitably run out of steam. On a good year I fancy I’d maybe make it as far as the end of January or maybe partway into February, before the inevitable "Nothing much happened today" entries started to appear with increasing frequency before, eventually, even they petered out and another diary was abandoned for another year.

Of course, all those diaries are long vanished. I never remember consciously throwing one out. They just kind of faded out of existence, as I grew older. It saddens me slightly to think of my childhood self [albeit sporadically] sitting in deep concentration, dutifully writing in his diary, with some vague notion in his head that he was recording the events of his life 'for Posterity' - and yet nothing thereof remains.

Mind you, I wonder if I could magically summon those diaries back into existence again, whether there’d be anything worth reading in them? In all honesty I doubt it. The things which excited me and seemed noteworthy as a kid; the procurement of a new comic or toy, or the discovery of a new type of sweet or flavour of lemonade are hardly the stuff of "unputdownability" in adult life. Yet the things which I would find interesting now; my impressions of family and friends at the time, my accounts of domestic life, reported contemporary conversations and my thoughts on myself and those around me, would likewise have seemed yawningly unworthy of comment to my childhood self.

The sad truth is that the "Nothing much happened today" entries would doubtless be the only ones where "Me Now" and "Me Then" both spoke the same language.