My first efforts to write a diary ceased after just a few months, but then, remembering the release it gave me, I started again – but life got in the way of writing about it. I’m not sure how the final commitment came about, but from my mid-twenties it was writing into a hardbound volume, bought especially for this purpose, that must have stuck me to my course. I have not missed a day’s entry since. I quickly realised how the very act of recording could make even the mundane important. Recording the daily temperature has become somewhat of an obsession. Once you begin to notice something like that, it is very hard to un-notice it. I can tell the temperature now before even looking at the thermometer. A morning test of my own skills, which if correct leaves me feeling quite satisfied.

Now, after so many thousands of entries, I suppose it has become as natural, and as necessary, as sleep itself. I carry a small pocketbook and a watch at all times and look forward to my ritual of writing up my notes on empty pages, recording my daily activities, from the ordinary to the remarkable and folding them inside a bound volume to immortalise my own existence. To what end, I know not. I’ve tried to understand my own obsession; I know it eases me through my thoughts, allows me to process what I have done, seen, written in letters, said and heard and felt. It is cathartic when times are dull or difficult. But there is more to it than that.

Although it is my voice which echoes onto the page, I am still never sure if it is myself I am writing it for, or some future me, or some other? Another Anne, who listens and sympathises. Or is my idea to share these words? To make some sense of my years of existence to share with others? But what would I edit out, or in? Who would wish to read it, and which parts would they care about? My daily life, my business endeavours, my politics, visiting and writing letters, my health, the daily temperature? I believe it will be something to read back over when my days of activity are done, and I am homebound or worse, bedbound, and my thirst for new knowledge is quenched and I want to remember instead what I have done before.

Do I fancy myself a writer? Could I steal from my own experiences and make a fanciful fiction, or is there enough story from truth in these volumes on my shelf which stare down at me, that little fiction will be required? How many more volumes will I fill with my days?