Advice for other diary writers - Tony Cunnane's Life and Times

If you are a youngster reading this and thinking of starting a diary, let me first of all give you encouragement. Well-written personal diaries can provide endless hours of entertainment decades later, especially if your writings are truly honest. There is, however, no point in writing half truths, or missing out the embarrassing bits, or exaggerating mundane events. So, let me give you a few words of advice to avoid frustration when you, or your heirs and successors, read your diaries in old age.

• Avoid the use of abbreviations, even very common ones, unless you explain them on first use, otherwise when you read the diary in later life you will have forgotten what they meant.
  

• When you write about people by name, make sure you include not just their surname, which was how we schoolboys always referred to each other, but their first name and any nicknames otherwise you will probably forget who you were writing about.
  

• Do not make entries such as ‘the usual sort of trouble today’ because decades later you will have no idea what the usual sort of trouble was. Nor is there any point in comments such as, ‘nothing much to write about today’. If there really is nothing much to write about don’t bother writing it.
  

• Try to imagine what your entries will read like in times to come and make sure you flesh out details that you are likely to forget.
  

• If you are going to write really personal things, and they can be the best part of a diary, do make sure you have been truly honest with yourself. If you are economical with the truth, or if you include downright untruths or exaggerations, in years to come you will not be able to remember what was true and what was made up.
  

• Finally, and perhaps most important of all, do keep your diaries safe from prying eyes! Parents are not supposed to read their children’s diaries, and most will not unless invited, but do you want to take the risk? In my first few diaries I made an entry every single day and I made every one of the mistakes I mentioned in the previous paragraphs at least once. I usually wrote my diary in bed where I assumed I had privacy and I used to hide it underneath my pillow - which was not the smartest place although I have no reason to suppose my parents ever read what I had written. Many of my earliest entries are now quite embarrassing, for their naïveté not for any other reason. Many are only of interest to me - and some are not even that interesting.
  

As the years passed and I became more experienced in writing, my diary jottings became longer and more adventurous. In one period I wrote what were probably the most interesting entries in a secret code.

Sadly, I am no longer able to decode those entries. In the interests of adolescent confidentiality, and to frustrate possible parental snooping, I annotated many of the dates in my early teens with strange hieroglyphics, which were no doubt very meaningful at the time but which mean absolutely nothing to me now, 60 years later. However, I can guess what the five stars alongside a date in late 1949, when I was barely 14 years old, mean. I still have all my diaries. For some years there are long entries every single day, other years there are gaps for several weeks. There are even longer gaps during the years when I was engaged on Intelligence duties in the RAF.

When I was a junior RAF officer I often used to say, ‘There’s no fun in having secrets if you can’t tell them to someone who isn’t supposed to know them’ and ‘national secrets by and large are pretty boring.’ In fact, when I served as an RAF Personnel Officer in the mid-1960s, I discovered that the blue-backed Staff-in-Confidence files, which contained choice personal details of individuals, were far more interesting on the whole than the dark-red Top Secret files.

Unlike some well-known diary-writers selling their efforts in 2008, I never recorded any classified material in my diaries. Sad but true.