It’s that time of year again. It’s September, there’s a faint hint of autumn in the morning air, children are going back to school, students coming back to campus, and it’s nearly my birthday. (40 this year. How did that come around so quickly?) That can only mean one thing – time for a new diary.
This, as you can see, is last year’s photo. For 2013 I bought a Llewellyn Witches’ Datebook and a Spell A Day Almanac… both of which have remained almost entirely unopened, and definitely unwritten. A lot of the information was the same across the two books, so I could have easily picked just one. Next year I’m quite tempted by the Herbal Almanac, but whether I’ll actually use it or not is another matter.
This year I have been mostly using my phone as a calendar, but I have to confess that it hasn’t been going that well. I don’t synchronise my phone with my computer very often, and I add appointments into both, so when I do eventually get around to making the phone and the computer try to speak to one another, the poor things end up very confused. (As do I, of course.) This has resulted in family members not receiving birthday cards, my work rota being on my phone twice over, and lots of bits of paper with appointments scribbled on them, which is what I was trying to avoid by keeping everything on the phone in the first place!
We’ve got the birthday thing sorted out now – or at least we will have when we move house. There’s a handy space on the side of the new fridge, so I’m going to print out one giant list of everybody’s birthdays, and pop them inside a picture frame. With the aid of a whiteboard pen, we can then write on the glass and tick off each birthday as we buy a gift or send a card. Perfect.
Despite years of rigorous searching, I still haven’t managed to find the diary that works exactly as I need it to. One day I’ll get around to designing my own, but neither Blurb nor Lulu offer the format and size that I really want, which is spiral bound A6, or thereabouts.
Photobox, on the other hand, now offer this:
It’s a standard photo diary, roughly 6×4″, which is spiral bound. It doesn’t squash the two weekend days into one space, which is a pet peeve of mine given that I work on some weekends and need a bit of room to write down what I’m up to. I like that it has appointments, and that you can start it on any month you prefer. You don’t seem to be able to change the layout for the smallest size, and I don’t know that I actually want a photo for every single week… but I could very easily drop in some jpgs of pretty frames or speech bubbles, which would give me a space for writing notes.
I’m balking slightly at the cost… £11.99 plus another £3.99 for shipping seems like quite a lot of money for a very little diary. But then if you consider the cost of all the diaries I’ve bought and simply never used, £16 suddenly seems not too bad. Perhaps I’ll give it a go.
And then, of course, there’s the other kind of diary. I’ve been reading The New Diary by Tristine Rainer (albeit an out-dated edition) as part of Susannah Conway‘s Unravelling course, which has a lot of writing exercises and prompts for different ways of using your diary as a resource for creativity as well as personal clarity. Although I’ve been keeping an online journal since 2002 and a public blog since about 2006, I haven’t kept a paper diary just for myself since I was a teenager. (I stopped being a teenager in 1993. Ouch.) My favourite Barbara Sher book, What Do I Do When I Want To Do Everything?, recommends keeping some kind of planner which you can use to write down everything except for daily appointments. Thoughts, feelings, plans for the future, that brilliant idea that’s bound to be an overnight success… all the stuff I usually keep on bits of paper and discarded envelopes that later turn up all over the house. Now that we’re moving I think I have at least managed to corral them all into one box, but what I’ll do with them next, who knows.
Image © British Library
I don’t think I can quite aspire to the levels of creativity displayed in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks (which is what many diary-writing aficionados will recommend as inspiration), but I can certainly aim for variety in subject matter. Scattered across various folders and envelopes I currently have ideas for aromatherapy products, herbalism studies, the conservation of Natural History collections in museums, dyeing textiles with plant material, making shoes… sewing plans of many different kinds… the list seems endless. However, I have now bought a simple spiral bound A4 sketchpad, that I can write and draw in with a nice ink pen. Perhaps if I have one central place for writing down ALL THE THINGS, it’ll be easier to make sense of it all as I go along. Chances of me actually writing in it on any kind of regular basis? Who knows. I haven’t even finished the writing exercises for Unravelling yet, and the course ended yesterday! I’m full of good intentions at the moment though, as I always am at the beginning of the academic year. So many possibilities, so much to learn! We’ll see how long it lasts…
