* Please note this section is now defunct and has been superceded by my blog. *

Amongst my generally anti-climactic experiences of Christmas as a boy was the annual ritual at which I received the gift of a sturdy desk diary (usually endorsed by a pharmaceutical company) from my Father (indeed even in this day of PDAs and SD cards he still attempts to foist one on me every year in the first week of January), accompanied always by stern admonishments to make sure I wrote up the day's events in it every day before going to bed.

Of course after the first few weeks of the new year my diligence in keeping up with the nightly memoir writing was usually curtailed by the demands made on me by other distractions. In our part of the country snow was most likely to fall between January and March so the first term back after Christmas was often broken up by odd days when School was closed not for reasons of inaccessibility but because the inadequate heating system could not be relied upon to maintain a temperature at which it was legal to store children. So there was snowballing and tobogganing and sliding down hills on flat things.

I must not present my Father as miserly and should point out in all fairness that there were often other, more interesting presents in addition to the diaries and these too kept me away from my diary writing. It always seemed like a very poor relation to such diversions as BMXing, playing crude black and white games on silent, 8-bit computers and taunting younger siblings.

But out of duty I tried to at least jot down bulletpoints that might perhaps be used to remind an older me of what I was doing on particular days even though I didn't really see the point of writing up the trivial events of my rather dull pre- and teen life. These diaries went up to the loft the year after they ran out of pages and over time were gathered up protectively (since I couldn't remember what revelations or insights they contained) by an eighteen year old me on his way to University.

Of course I'm pretty much middle-aged now so when my parents had some building work on their house recently and suggested I move some of my things out of the loft I had forgotten about the diaries along with the many years' worth of 'Smash Hits', 'Melody Maker' and 'The Face' that also sat in heavily sealed bin bags in the heat and dust of the loft. If you've ever done this you'll know how fascinated I was. And I was very, very fascinated.

This section represents an attempt to archive everyday events in my life in the 21st Century - I hope you find it at least vaguely interesting.