The Passage Of My Life Is Measured Out In Shirts

The turn of year has seen a rash of annual reviews; the decade, more so. You know – all those memes, all the pages of newsprint taken up with tracking the days, months and years. I don’t really go into such introspection: I feel at a fundamental level that anniversaries are a human conceit; why is a ten year period more important than a nine or eleven year gap? Why is 365 days more important to us than 200 or 265 or…

But of course I am not wholly immune: I celebrated New Year, I celebrated Christmas; and, since I am comfortable as a liminal creature between on- and offline worlds, I have my own end of the old, start of the new year ritual.

I am wedded to my paper diary.

I have diaries going back to 1982, every year. They track what I was doing, who I was hanging out with, where I lived; I can track the comings and goings of my friends as their addresses change.

So every year, I copy out the addresses of my friends from the old diary to the new, and I flick through the old diary to see what else needs to be transferred – lists of books I want to read, music I want to buy, notes I want to keep. In these days of mobile phones, email and cloud data storage, this isn’t so important I guess, but I do like to keep a paper back up. Just in case, you understand.

And, of course, all those dates and appointments that I made last year for this – things I want to go to, gigs I want to see…

It won’t surprise you to know that I am very, very particular about my diary. For the last twenty odd years, I have had to have a week to a view with a page of notes, so I can scribble things down – which I do a lot.

So here I am – writing this to avoid finishing off my annual ritual…