Almost without fail, I bash out a daily diary entry on a loose sheet of A4 then shove it in an old ringbinder. Glued on the inside cover of this ringbinder is a yellowing newspaper clipping. It’s a column by the late Nigel Nicolson, written around the time of the New Year, offering Sunday Telegraph readers some useful rules, from a lifelong diarist, about how one should go about keeping a diary.
Write first thing in the morning when the mind is fresh, he says. Be truthful, he says. Don’t feel obliged to write daily: write only when you feel that you have something to say. Write your diary in code or hide it. And never, ever, mention train times, minor illnesses or the weather. As an example of how uninteresting an entry about the weather can be, he quotes an entry from the diary of King George V: ‘It rained today, harder than yesterday.
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