Dear Dr. Irving Finkel,
I read this week you’d like to save as many private diaries as you can for the Wellcome Foundation’s Identity Project. I would have passed on mine, all fifty eight years and two and a half million words of them, but they’re promised to the children. Neither racy nor revealing, more mundane and nerdish in fact, but as I point out to them they include all the details of their lives from Day One.
Practically, they’ve proved of value when catching up with expenses, and a boon with my autobiography of Fleet Street days, ‘Lost in the Reptile House,’ with dates, places, and people triggering the memory. If, after reading these extracts from the five decades they cover you really fancy them, feel free to pop round and Xerox the lot.
Regards, Clive.
January 15th, 1951, (the year the diaries start), I’m at Beckenham Grammar School, aged fourteen and worried about imminent arrest on my bike in the dark.
‘Nothing much happened except Mr. Rule put me in detention for Wednesday. So I must get a back lamp before then. I made an effort tonight to get one, I unscrewed Auntie Con’s but found the interior was smashed. I looked for my one but couldn’t find it.’
Hello, Dr. Finkel? You still there? It gets better. Well, sort of… Ten years later, on January 15th, 1961, I’m a fledgling photojournalist on the sports page of the Eagle comic shooting a British Olympic gold medallist.
‘Drove to Alperton Sports track where we met Don Thompson who we’d passed earlier who told us he had walked from his home 17 miles away. With two boys from his club he showed us the do’s and don’ts of walking and we finished four rolls of HP3 in cold wind.’
By January 15th., 1971, I’ve reached The Sun, (with diary entries growing shorter as lunches grew longer), recording Action Girl, a reporter who performed death-defying stunts dreamt up by readers.
‘I joined Tricia at Fairfield Hall where we did her on the trapeze.’
Tricia survived, moving on to a career on television; I survived, along with my liver, and moved to the Daily Mail as a photographer. By January 15th.,1981, I was seeking an office car, but as I tried to sell my first written feature, got an early warning from my accountant about the freelance writing world.
‘I found a Honda Accord 4 door available in W3 in beige but Alex didn’t like the colour. Sent Features Editor of The Times the Dunchideock Fete piece. Henry Bach sent his tax papers settling them at nil profit, but a £70 bill.’
Another decade and the entry for January 15th., 1981 could, spookily, have been written today…
‘To Bow Streeet for an MP on a rail fares fiddle charge, but he didn’t turn up. Switched to a vox pop in Regents Park mosque where they said to me yes, Saddam is a monster but you and the US made him one with your aid.
By January 15th., 1991, we finally got the Battersea flat we’d been after – and the bed.
‘We went to our solicitor and signed for No. 92, then to Lillie Road where we ordered a 5’ bed for around £300.
And today, January 15th., 2010? A New Year’s Resolution that the diaries will be less embarrassingly mundane and nerdy – and more embarrassingly racy and revealing.
