Mae West famously said, “Keep a diary and one day it’ll keep you”. I’ve never kept one. At work we have to sign for a diary, only record work related things in it and give it back at the end of the year. So I make do with a calendar about squirrels, on which Mrs Dave writes Manchester City home fixtures and the like. I’ve enjoyed reading other peoples – Kenneth Williams, Alan Clark and Joe Orton’s to name but three very bitchy examples.
Of course all photography is a kind of visual diary and I suppose tweets, blogs and FaceBook postings will become primary source material for whoever gets the job of writing Stephen Fry’s biography.
Anyroadup, I won’t be starting a diary and I don’t tweet, but George Orwell will be taking up a lot of my time and a bit of my money over the next year and a bit. So why not see what Mr. O was up to on this day online at The Orwell Diaries?
70 years ago he was commenting, “That bastard Chiappe is cold meat. Everyone delighted, as when Balbo died. This war is at any rate killing off a few Fascists”.
Diaries of course feature in Nineteen Eighty-Four:
“The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws, but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at the very least by twenty-five years in a forced labour camp”.
Like Winston Smith I’ve been collecting from the past for a booklet about the cover art of Nineteen Eighty-Four, so today’s illustration is from a 1956 French edition which will help you remember that sometimes two and two really can equal five, or whatever the Party wants it to equal.
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