{"id":61214,"date":"2013-10-10T17:30:55","date_gmt":"2013-10-10T21:30:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=61214"},"modified":"2013-10-10T18:17:45","modified_gmt":"2013-10-10T22:17:45","slug":"the-diary-diaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/10\/10\/the-diary-diaries\/","title":{"rendered":"The Diary Diaries"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"manduka<\/a><\/p>\n

At the end of last year I returned to England after two years working in West Africa. In my bedroom at my parents\u2019 house in Cambridge I encountered my old diaries. They sat in that ancient space alongside a photograph of my intake at Sandhurst in the year I spent in the army before university, and a first edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom<\/i> that my father once gave me. I was twenty-seven and uncertain of what I wanted to do with my life; I hoped reading my written record might give some better idea.<\/p>\n

Reading the diaries in public garnered me strange looks on the London Underground. When a woman inquired I emphasized that that the handwriting was my own; I was not perusing another\u2019s journal without\u00a0permission. The process took about two months.<\/p>\n

My oldest journal is a 1992\u201393 \u201cmid-year\u201d diary manufactured by a firm called Dataday. After a four-year hiatus, a series of page-a-days produced variously by Collins, Dataday, and WH Smith begins in 1996 and runs until 2002. Next come exercise books, one sheathed in a tan leather cover inset with porcupine needles, and a tranche of Moleskines. The final shift in format begins three volumes from the end of the archive. The books become larger; eight by eleven inches. They are bound in quarter leather and the covers are marbled. The first bears in gilt script Simon Akam<\/em> and \u0633\u064a\u0645\u0648\u0646 \u0623\u0643\u0645 <\/em>, which is a rough transliteration of my name is Arabic. New York 2008<\/em> appears further down. In short, a slightly embarrassing trajectory of increasing literary pretension.<\/p>\n

I first kept a diary in the summer of 1992, when I was six years old. I imagine it was a school project, a record-of-your-holiday-please, which in our familial case was to Brittany in northern France. My writing at this stage is wholly descriptive.<\/p>\n

\n

Thursday 16 July 1992<\/p>\n

at school in the morning I did a jigsaw and in the afternoon I palys [sic] with clever sticks and after school I went canoeing with P palyed [sic]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The real, day-to-day effort starts four years later, at ten.<\/p>\n

\n

Monday 1 January 1996<\/p>\n

I still can\u2019t get to grips with the fact that \u201995 has ended, it went so fast. T.\u2009H.\u2009\u2026\u2009came round and rattled on about his Christmas presents, we showed him the end of the The spy who loved me and he piped down, probably scared stiff. In the afternoon Daddy and I fitted my bike computer, the black tape wound around the front forke [sic] to secure the wire gave the bike a mean look. We watched the worst Bond movie I\u2019ve ever seen, On her Majasty\u2019s [sic] secrat [sic] service.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I do not know why my diary began when it did, in the dead time of New Year before the Christmas decorations came down. Whatever its inception, that daily diary persists, with periods of greater and lesser enthusiasm, for seventy-eight months. It peters out entirely in the summer of 2002, when I have just turned seventeen. The last, rather embarrassing entry is scrawled as follows:<\/p>\n

\n

Friday July 26 2002<\/p>\n

Pulled [British slang for made out with] F.\u2009H. in a punt [flat-bottomed boat propelled with a pole] on the way to Grantchester. [Photogenic village outside Cambridge, once haunt of poet Rupert Brooke] <\/p>\n

End of [women] drought. Also met St. Mary\u2019s [private catholic girls school] girl on boat: fit [British slang for attractive] phone number. Don\u2019t for the life of me know her phone number.<\/p>\n

Good to get it done.<\/p>\n

Will pursue: obviously worthwhile to fancy [British slang for find attractive] anything that fancies me back will follow up. Good starting block. F. Fit.<\/p>\n

Simon<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

However, at the point of daily cessation a new format appears: the travel journal. The first dates from a school expedition to Kenya when I was seventeen. The next, outwardly bound in leather, covers a return to that same East African country two years later, in the summer between leaving the army and going to Oxford. The first Moleskines detail an expedition to the Alps and a summer spent in Nairobi in 2006 as an intern at the BBC bureau.<\/p>\n

The daily diary resumes, in Moleskine initially, in September 2007. I had finished my degree and removed myself to Egypt to learn Arabic and attempt to make myself a journalist. That resurrected effort persists to the present, six years on.<\/p>\n

As it turned out I stayed in the Middle East less than a year, when a scholarship sent me to America. However, in stationery terms, the shadow of Egypt is long. I had come to realize Moleskines were irredeemably clich\u00e9. In Cairo I discovered a bookbinders called Abdel Zaher, deep in the old city. They worked with leather and gilt and their products were beautiful. My first purchase came with me to the U.S. that summer (hence New York 2008<\/em> in tooled gold) and went on to chronicle the seventeen months I spent in that city.<\/p>\n

Another, brought by a then-girlfriend still in Cairo, served me through spells in Istanbul and Berlin and into a new job in West Africa, before filling up in the middle of last year. With some difficulty, I ordered a new diary from Abdel Zaher. The Arab Spring decimated Egypt\u2019s tourist trade and I suspect things have been hard for the boys down on al-Sheikh Mohamed Abdu Street. They do not speak much English and their ordering Web site<\/a> is erratic, but their books are beautiful and extraordinary value. I would therefore recommend all aspirant diarists to order from them. In bulk.<\/p>\n

For me, the keeping of diaries is a gendered act. Mine began as a boy\u2019s diaries and became that of a man. For little girls, it seems, diary keeping is expected at some point. The setting will probably be a volume with an ornamental padlock of doubtful robustness. While a girl\u2019s diary\u2019s contents may be sacrosanct, the fact of keeping the diary itself does not have to be. For boys, in my experience, matters are rather different. In the early stages of the private English boys\u2019 school to which I was removed at eleven, nine months after I started my daily diary, to be ousted as a diarist would have ranked in potential social disasters only marginally below the ultimate sin of exhibition as a practicing homosexual. The same broad-based pejorative statement used to clarify any behavior that went beyond rigidly policed norms would be deployed:<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s fucking gay.\u201d<\/p>\n

The early stages of my diary are in consequence full of occasions when I sign off for a few days, announcing that I will not be able to take the volume with me on the upcoming scout camp, sleepover, prep school hockey festival, etc.<\/p>\n

\n

Thursday March 25 1999<\/p>\n

Tomorrow at 4:30am I leave for Val d\u2019Isere [French ski resort where school ski trip was headed]. I\u2019m well looking forward to it\u2014it\u2019ll be cool.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re (NATO) are attacking Serbia for being out of order over Kosovo\u2014it\u2019s air strike diplomacy\u2014I reckon the late nineties will be famed for it.<\/p>\n

If you don\u2019t do what we say\u2014we send Tomahawk Cruise missiles at your country.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve gotta get up around 3:30am tomorrow and it\u2019s 9:32pm at the moment, so I\u2019ll say goodbye for the next week!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In this as other things, the reality of my teenage self does not jive with my adult perception thereof. In my year 2000 diary I am fourteen going on fifteen. In retrospect much of this volume is excruciatingly embarrassingly, thoroughly teenaged, and not all how I remember myself.\u00a0After working my way through with clenched teeth I thought of a passage in Evelyn Waugh\u2019s novel Brideshead Revisited<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Here is Waugh.<\/p>\n

\n

It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one\u2019s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one\u2019s stature on the edge of the door. I should like to think\u2014indeed I sometimes do think\u2014that I decorated those rooms with Morris stuffs and Arundel prints\u2026 But this was not the truth. On my first afternoon I proudly hung a reproduction of Van Gogh\u2019s Sunflowers<\/em> over the fire and set up a screen, painted by Roger Fry with a Provencal landscape\u2009\u2026\u2009My books were meagre and commonplace\u2026 and my earliest friends fitted well into this background.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And here is me.<\/p>\n

\n

Wednesday January 26 2000<\/p>\n

I think in future I\u2019ll have to stop mixing alcohol and C, \u2019cos I always, or at least last Saturday, start coming onto her drunkenly. Which I usually hear about in jeering tones from L, much later on, which always makes me feel shit, as I still kinda kid myself that she might just fancy me. She\u2019s with C and that\u2019s not going to change.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve gotta get over her, and I\u2019ve never been out with her, or anyone, I reckon I don\u2019t really fancy her, my subconscious is just cling<\/span> clinging on to the nearest bit of \u2026 female flesh. I fancy the image of her in my mind and I\u2019ve gotta get over her!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A true version of what the Germans called Vergangenheitsbew\u00e4ltigung<\/i>, a compound noun meaning \u201ccoming to terms with the past,\u201d begins with us looking unblinking at the inside front cover of my 2001 diary. Here I have written the final line from \u201cImogen,\u201d a poem by tub-thumping Victorian scribe Sir Henry Newbolt, in honor of a girl of that name I was futilely pursuing.<\/p>\n

\n

And there\u2019s Imogen, Imogen dancing still.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In retrospect I am rather pleased with that, though it is a slight misquotation (\u201cImogen dancing, dancing still\u201d is the original) and the meter is consequently all wrong. However, to claim that particle of the past I must acknowledge that the Newbolt line is not the only thing written on the inside front cover. Further up appears the following:<\/p>\n

\n

If I gave a fuck about a bitch I\u2019d always be broke
I\u2019d never have no motherfuckin endo to smoke.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Thirteen years on I can proffer no adequate reason for the presence of these lines\u2014drawn inaccurately from Snoop Dogg\u2019s 1993 album Doggystyle<\/i>\u2014in my diary. I can make up rationalizations; my fifteen-year-old\u2019s dissatisfaction with single-sex education or a lusting after Technicolor U.S. popular culture as an antidote to the gray provincialism of my British childhood, but they are all questionable. The important matter is simply to acknowledge that the hand that wrote those Snoop Dogg lyrics is still attached to my right arm. The book may embarrass me now, but I am glad I never threw it away.<\/p>\n

My diary is not a wholly genuine artifact. For a while, the prose is frequently corrupted\u00a0 by the conflation of personal correspondence with the day\u2019s entry. On numerous occasions my diary contains drafts of missives, in particular to lovers. The most galling example of this contamination comes from March 2009. I was living in New York, age twenty-three, and had secured an assignment to write about ski mountaineering in Idaho. While my American contemporaries at\u00a0journalism school were publicly boasting about how much work they had to do over spring break in a manner wholly alien to my entire understanding of how you should behave toward organized education\u2014louche and untroubled, with icy British sangfroid\u2014I flew west.<\/p>\n

Idaho allowed me to visit the final stomping ground of Hemingway, a writer with whom I was then fascinated. I also decided that the record of the trip\u2014transcribed of course onto high-grade paper subsequently\u2014would function as a missive to a girl I met at university. After a brief, albeit intense, dalliance she had shelved me in favor of the scion of a major Anglo-Irish industrial fortune. Even three years on I was struggling to assimilate this development.<\/p>\n

\n

Monday 18 March 2009<\/p>\n

Bench Hut, 7500\u201d, Sawtooth Mountains, Idaho, USA<\/p>\n

\u2026 someone killed in an avalanche here last week\u2014guides nervous. Off the lakeshore smothered and invisible, through forest again to timberline\u2014exhaustion, another lake, up at 8600\u201d, frozen solid. Waited out on the ice with one of our party of three\u2009\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2026 I\u2019m glad to hear from you L\u2014I am sorry if you have been feeling worried. I finish at Columbia in May, then it looks like I\u2019m going to go to Istanbul for an internship with Reuters\u2014old loathsomeness of journalism. Finished manuscript in West London [an attempt at fiction], rescue me. Interview last week\u2014London, Financial Times, horror at site [sic] of cubicles, gave unconvincing answers. Flew back from JFK no checked luggage, was going to call you for a rendez-vous and then no time space\u2014frantic 36 hours in England. Remember our drink last summer, remember walk at end of Oxford, Port Meadow, in the moonlight, seems so long ago, another world. Magdalen [college at Oxford], Deer and Pooh Sticks once.<\/p>\n

Over with J [girlfriend]. Amicable. Extensive topless photograph collection to be nobly retired rather than prepared for worldwide Internet distribution. Spluttered and died, DC, January, [Obama\u2019s] inauguration, 6 million people and a city of loneliness.<\/p>\n

Other girl here, last week, Upper East Side, rich, drink, distant\u2014mass transit\u2014on Sunday back from JFK to flat, eschewed the subway in favor of blonde driven convertible \u2026<\/p>\n

Thursday 19 March 2009<\/p>\n

Fishhook Yurt, 6800ft, Sawtooth Range, 1745 [hrs]<\/p>\n

Luncheon, New York 3, 4 weeks ago, 21st floor of Yale Club\u2014award won, mother here in rare lipstick and pride, gave speech, on the piece I wrote that won it\u2014gallivanting in the Western desert, unmarked minefields and Bedu with ruined eyes\u2014tawdry heroism to them\u2014no mention of the reality of that time\u2014awfulness, awfulness\u2014letter to you in airmail envelope to St Hilda\u2019s [college in Oxford]\u2014ill considered perhaps. Better now, thank god, even with J gone.<\/p>\n

\u2026 You, November, Columbia chill, long coat on the steps of Lowe Library, blonde in the night, dinner and room. Your<\/span> words, do you remember? Post-script to Oxford preamble? Similar last week\u2014woman from long ago, woman now, not then, 14, girl next door, seven doors down, elfin, thinking man\u2019s pin-up\u2014never kissed her. Here, to see a friend, walk in central park, light splintering off the skyscrapers\u2014post script to youth\u2014glamorous New York.<\/p>\n

\u2026 Fire still roaring, cast iron stove. Enough writing for one afternoon-night.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That, I think you will agree, is quite flash prose. Witness the careful mix of self-aggrandizement and demonstrable involvement with other women, the high-profile journalistic assignments commingled with an ostensible loathing of journalism.<\/p>\n

The project was unsuccessful. Some years later the recipient married her scion-inamorata. I wish them every happiness. But I am glad too that my diary reminds me of how I felt in a former time.<\/p>\n

Simon Akam is a British writer. His work has appeared in publications including the <\/i>New York Times Book Review, the <\/i>Times Literary Supplement, <\/i>The Economist, and <\/i>The New Republic. His Web site is www.simonakam.com<\/a> and he tweets @simonakam<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n

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