I’ve kept a diary/small journal for 30 years and decided this year will be my last one. Do any other grans keep one? ?

Must be in the air! An old school friend has been sharing hers from the 1960s in which we all appear, fascinating to hear about events we’d forgotten or remember differently. Mine were always discontinued by the end of January ?

No, but so wish I had!

I have diaries from 1947, not many entries until the 1960s when I was very much involved with theWomen Institute. During our travels around Europe for twelve years I wrote in exercise books. Every thing about camp sites, weather, prices in different countries and people we met. Until my husband died. After that only appointments and details of holidays and trips to visit friends and relatives home and abroad. Now every day is alike as I am housebound so there is no point.

I have kept a diary since 1963 when I left school. I keep them in shoeboxes for each decade. Only write what I have been up to and where I've been, no inner feelings. Not much in it this last year!! Its very handy to check when something happened or when you went somewhere on holiday. It was good to look back on my early days of motherhood and compare with my daughter-so different then! Expect my kids will chuck them when I'm gone.

I kept a detailed diary describing a family holiday in France and Switzerland in 1955. I illustrated it with postcards bought at the time, and a few photos. I still love reading it - an insight into the times, my family and my 15-year-old self.

Our main library in town suggested that some people might like keeping a Covid diary, rather like the Housewife 49 / mass observation idea in WW2. I started mine last March and it’s been very enjoyable. The library said they might be collected and stored ( like a time capsule) or excerpts might be taken to show different perspectives of the pandemic from across the town. In any event, it has been cathartic and I’ll keep it- just in case it could be useful in ,say, a hundred years time. I have all of my great grandfather’s letters from Australia, written before the First World War when he was out there building the railways. They are fascinating and I used them for a project for history when at university
in the 70s.

I always keep a holiday diary with details of where we've been and what we've seen. I'm in the process of making them into books with the photographs we've taken. I actually started the diaries so that we would be able to remember what the photographs we'd taken (in the days before digital) were of!

I've got about two dozen diaries, one dating back as far as 1962.

When reading through them, on the whole, most of what I have written is pretty mundane and not particularly interesting but I am reluctant to just get rid of them. Sometimes I read things that I had forgotten so from that angle they are quite useful but I don't suppose any of my family will be interested in them.

I like creative writing and I don't understand why I didn't use the opportunity to put down my memories, thoughts and opinions on various happenings and issues. There is some mention of momentous current events but far more domestic-type waffle than even I want to read!

I have diaries going back to 1964! They have been very useful in writing my autobiography, which I started in the first lockdown and goes up to last Christmas. I have been keeping a fuller journal since 21st March last year.

I am always reminded of Dorry’s diary in What Katy Did. Dorry is Katy’s brother, a small boy, six or seven years old. The diary goes something like this:

March 12th Hav rissolved to kepe a jurnal

Then follow four days where he describes what he ate. Then:

March 25th Forgit what did

March 27th Forgit what did

March 29th Played

March 31st Forgit what did

April 1st Hav dissided not to kepe a jurnal enny more.

I have box full of travel journals. I have stopped writing these now (before Coronavirus!). Who, really is going to be interested? I’ll read them then Chuck them...

I tried many times when I was younger to keep a diary but always failed miserably.
However, I took early retirement in 2017 and, from the month before I finished work, I have been keeping one of those diaries where you just jot a few lines. To my amazement I have kept it up and I now love looking back each day to see what I was doing in the previous years.

How lovely to look back over the years - one thing I would have love to have done but having been in a bad marriage years ago I couldn’t chance my ex finding them - or had my family read it

I've kept a diary for years as did my mum. It was such a joy reading hers and all the happy memories we had as a family. Lost my mum in 2019. I was so glad that she wrote her diaries.

Since 2000 I have kept a photo year book, with explanatory notes on each page. This is a sort of visual diary that I hope the grandchildren will enjoy in years to come.

Remember 'Housewife 49' with Victoria Wood? That ordinary everyday stuff is gold dust to social anthropologists! Please don't throw away your diaries ladies! Even if you never read them again, they are worth doing. There is research evidence that keeping a diary helps to maintain and improve mental health - even if it's just 3 sentences a day. I have kept brief handwritten diaries for 30 years, but in 2017, when I was diagnosed with cancer, I started to keep a more detailed journal, because I had to record daily medication and symptoms, but also because it was uncertain how things would go. I treated myself to the paid version of Day One App for journaling. Honestly, it helped me to get through some very difficult times. Being physically unwell/depressed/anxious affects cognition, particularly memory, so recording what happens and how one feels is a boon. Now that I am well, the journal has changed emphasis somewhat. I include details of the weather, what I've done, perhaps how I feel, and a news summary, so I can tie up what's happening more widely to my daily life. This has been invaluable in the pandemic. It's so easy to forget what you thought and how you felt, even a short time ago, but I can always check in my journal. I could share what I've written, but one of the advantages is that I can be perfectly honest in it because nobody else sees it.

My first diary dates back to 1971, 50 years ago! I only noted events and happenings, not my feelings, although I did do that for just one year, 1973. I haven’t read that one, but I think it will be interesting, like Government papers, I’ll keep it secret for the full 50 years. I am enjoying looking back at my life 50 years ago, in fact I see that the anniversary of my husband and my first date is coming up in May, it took us another eight years to get round to a wedding, but I think we’ll celebrate our 50th this May. After the last year any excuse for a celebration!

I kept a diary in my teens. It was very boring.

I started to keep one again at the beginning of the pandemic, feeling that it was the sort of event that should be recorded. Unfortunately, due to lockdown and thus life not being very eventful, it too is very boring!

Like some of you have said - a 'sort of' diary could be very interesting to our grandchildren etc. in future years but I have never kept a detailed diary.
However, when the Covid hit I completed a huge photo mission! I sorted all our thousands (NOT an exaggeration honestly) of photos that were in bags, tatty albums and boxes - ranging from the late 1800s through to now!
It was a mammoth task but lockdown meant I could devote all day every day - it took me five months (with a few days off!) but I now have a lovely set of albums.
They are all interesting as they are photo memories (births, marriages, deaths, holidays etc.) rather than long scripts but since March 2020 I have typed out a brief 'diary/record' each month of what we have achieved, what we've been allowed to do under lockdown or other restrictions alongside photos from having our flower bed raised etc. - jobs done during the pandemic.
Each month is just a few paragraphs but expressing the frustration at not being able to go to the bedside of dying relatives or being able to comfort or help the family when deaths have occurred. Things that hurt but also jobs achieved like the set of albums that I will now update monthly.
Our grandchildren and their children hopefully, will find them interesting when they learn about the Covid 2020 plague in their history lessons!
WE will be history
Imagine when we were learning about the world wars etc. at school - what if we'd been able to show Grandma's diary!

'fraid I am not organised enough!! DH keeps my apointment diaries, heaven knows what for, I would chuck 'em all!!

For 5 or 6 years, I kept a diary of my dreams, to try to encourage lucid dreaming. Didn't have much success with that, btw.
At the start of last year, I had bought a new notebook then decided to just pack it in. I burned all the past notebooks in our open fire.
I'm glad I stopped, as I've often had strange dreams in the last year and I wouldn't have wanted to give them attention so I could write them down.

I'm trying to journal myself out of a depression that hit me in summer last year. I can see I'm making progress, which is very reassuring. I do tend to only write in dark times - not often a journal, but sometimes "poetry" that I really need to hunt out and burn before my kids read it!

Not since I was a teenager when my mother read it, freaked out at the content, burned it and gave me hell!??

No. It would either be very boring "Cold weather today. Did the dusting and made soup for tea" sort of pointless stuff. If I laid bare all my innermost thoughts and feelings and memories, I'd be worried that I might die suddenly and I wouldn't want my family to be reading all that. So no point really!

yep! 40 years and still going strong! I choose a beautiful book of plain creamy paper and I write when I feel like it
My nursing days are my favourite years when I was so full of hope and wonder for the future unaware of the storm clouds that were looming in the shape of a husband who turned out to be an addict! Anyway happy granny now and still writing!