The Not-so Secret Diary

Just wrote a message to @squozed about my real diary that no one ever sees. Then I remembered a story someone told me last year that still amuses me.

I’ve kept a handwritten diary since I was 18. I am now on something like the 22nd volume of said diary. It is the place where I record all the things I can’t blog about or talk about with friends, and that has amounted to quite a lot of stuff over the years as I’m a secretive creature by nature. A lot of it tends to be about love affairs, naturally, but I also use it to express emotions that I don’t want to foist onto long-suffering friends and family. It’s also a space for me to find out how I feel about things, as oftentimes I don’t know how I feel until I’ve explored events through writing. In other words, it’s a safe space, and it’s safe precisely because no one else is meant to read it.

I’m normally extremely careful about my diaries. I try not to leave them lying around, and I have gone to quite extraordinary lengths to hide them. Not so long ago I was living with a friend who I just knew was likely to go nosing around in my stuff to see what he could find (this means you, Rufus). As a result, I used to hide my diary every time I went out. Either that or I’d take it out with me. When I was dating the world’s most jealous man in 2001-2002, I basically stopped keeping a diary at all, as I knew he’d find it and I knew I would pay for its existence big style. I still regret that, as I have basically no record of an entire year spent in Shanghai. On the plus side though, I still have all my fingernails.

Despite this caution, I have, at times, become a little more relaxed about my diary. If I live in a place where my housemates don’t seem overly nosey, I might leave it out on my nightstand or on my desk now and then. I guess this is what happened when I was living in London in 2005, but it still doesn’t quite account for the events that were recounted to me by a person I shall name ‘X’.

At a party last Christmas, X got rather drunk and told me a story about his brother, whom I shall name ‘Y’. Y and me were housemates in 2005, until certain rather traumatic events in Y’s life meant we both had to move out of the house. Y decided he didn’t like me much and we never saw each other again, although I stayed friends with X and continued to see him regularly over the years. The story as told to me by X was that, at some point during the turmoil surrounding me moving out of our shared house, Y found and read my diary. According to X, the contents of my diary were so offensive to Y that he (a) showed them to his father (whom I shall name ‘D’) and that (b) Y and D then burnt my diary on a small bonfire, which may or may not have also contained some components of small animals.

At this point I was looking at X with a look of absolute horror and blank incomprehension on my face (a hard look to pull off I can promise you). The idea of anyone reading my diary naturally upsets me, but as far as I was aware I’d never lost one, and more to the point, I wasn’t aware that I’d ever written much if anything about Y, as he didn’t figure a great deal in my thoughts at the time. ‘What’, I enquired of X, ‘was so shocking that Y felt compelled to burn my book?’ X looked at me shiftily. Apparently, the most offensive passage was one in which I had made a series of comparisons between X, Y and X and Y’s brother, (whom I shall naturally label ‘Z’). In this comparison, Y fared rather badly against X and Z, which may or may not have been the source of the rage. At this point I started laughing. Yes, I did have a bit of a thing with Z briefly, but I certainly couldn’t recall drawing up a comparative table. On the other hand, my memory is as leaky as a sieve, so I conceded that it might be possible that I’d written a paragraph or two on the subject.

The story, such as it was, ended there, and I was left feeling a confusing mix of emotions, including embarrassment, intrigue, irritation and amusement. When I next visited the secret countryside bunker where I lock away my old diaries, the first thing I did was to search for 2005 volumes. As I suspected, none were missing. What’s more, a thorough inspection revealed no incriminating passages about X, Y or Z (and no ripped out pages either). In fact, I was much more concerned with another character entirely at that time. I shan’t assign him a letter as this is already getting too confusing.

So now I am left wondering just what the source of that story was. As the old saying goes, there’s no smoke without fire (or perhaps no fire without scandalous words). X didn’t just make up the story, as I’ve since had it confirmed from other sources. Whatever he found wasn’t a diary, but I’m not in the habit of scribbling thoughts down anywhere else, so I’m at a bit of a loss to explain what it was Y and D read/burnt.

In a way though, it doesn’t matter, and I sort of don’t want to find out the real story. I have zero sympathy for those who go nosing around in my private affairs only to find something they don’t like. Plus, if I ever had any doubts about the incendiary quality of my diaries, those have now been throughly laid to rest.