h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's a very curious thing, keeping a journal. Essentially you are talking to yourself, or presenting the version of yourself that you would like others to see. But which others? Before you can start writing, you have to visualise the person you are addressing: your muse.
When he was in his seventies, one of my brothers persuaded my father to write his memoirs. He resisted for a while, but at last gave in, and wrote a hundred and six short chapters about his life. It was a surprise to him how much he came to enjoy his daily writing, and we could all see a new brightness in him as he did it.
He called the book 'Memoirs of a Peripatetic' and addressed it to his grandchildren. He had sixty copies printed, and gave it to his family and a few friends for Christmas in 1990.
It is wonderful to have that book, if only to check up on details when retelling some of his stories. Not all the details are reliable, and several of his childhood and adolescent stories were severely corrected by his elder sister; a pencilled alternative account has gone into the margin. My father foresaw as much in his preface.
History is a story, a rationalising after the event, without which the event would only survive in the behaviour it affected. It would be traumatic. Stories are digestible versions of how we got this way.
In its small way, this journal, along with all the others here, is a bit of an autoblography.

I kept a diary during my younger years (mid 20's) which my wife found and read. My advice would be write down nothing you are not prepared to share - ever or lock it up.

We found a diary of our daughter's in her early teens, but did not read it. I wondered then, and still wonder now, whether to some extent she wished it to be read, like letters to Santa Claus.

Fortunately, I can ask her.

Strangely, I haven't asked her and don't imagine I ever will. I fear a response of horror at the thought that I could have even contemplated reading it.

My word! I have just this second referred to your Berkeley Entry. (Arguments for God thread in Ask)

I've kept a diary for 28 years. I intend to leave the volumes to my niece, so I suppose I write for her. However she doesn't know my intention, so it's always in the back of my mind that I could burn them sometime before I die (easier than afterwards). And when I write about her on those pages, I'm definitely not pandering to her. Which means that if she ever bothers to read them she might have a few surprises

People who read other people's diaries... I have no words to describe the complete disbelief which I felt on the two occasions I've found somebody reading mine. It's tantamount to theft.

Fb (none sold yet, Recumbentman)