Sunday 1 June 2014

Looking Back at Past Karl

Now that I’ve exhausted all of the video game related posts I could do for this blog, I was thinking about what to do next. One thought I had was to go through my old diaries, and share a few select entries with you.

I’ve never been a great diarist. I first started making diary entries back in 1991, when I was 10 years old. We’d just covered Samuel Pepys in our history classes at school, so I thought I’d start my own diary so that the historians of the future could use it to examine life in the 20th Century. (Somehow, I don’t think they’ll be making much use of my diaries...)

I’ve never been hugely consistent with my diary entries. When I was a kid I might make entries for a few days in a row, and then there’d be a huge gap until the next entry. During my uni years I kept up a diary for about 18 months or so, and I did so again in my adult life between 2008-11.

Recently, I had a quick through what I had written in my diaries, and came to the conclusion that sharing them on this blog would be a Bad Idea. Like I said, I am not a great diarist. Most of my entries are quite dull and boring. And the entries that aren’t dull and boring are too personal to share publically.

But that doesn’t mean that these diaries are worthless. They’re still of value to me, and they can give an insight to the sort of person I was back when I wrote them, the sort of insights that Past Karl would have been blind to.

I’m sure most of us, if we could, would want to tell our past selves a few things about their future, and about potential mistakes that they may be making, and I’m no exception. If only Past Karl knew what I know now...

One day I may compile these diary entries, together with various other sources of information (mainly e-mails), into an Official History of the Karl, but if I ever do that it will be a long way off. Until then, I’m sorry, but there’re remaining for my eyes only.

But there will be one thing I can share with you next week, where we’ll be going back in time, to the real 1984...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've kept a diary since I was 14 and I still have them all, most entries are personal and I wouldn't even share them with my husband - even though he could just pick them up and read them if he so desired... but like you, I really only posted if there was something big going on - so there are gaps of days and months, but it's funny - each time I went back to my diary I always wrote a catch up entry... sometimes pages long... I have to ask, since I know everyone is different, do you just write the events as they happen or do you tell your diary about them? I talk to mine in the way I write and am wondering if I am strange x and I have to say even if I could tell my past self things I now know, I wouldn't because I have learnt the end isn't as important as the journey xxxxx

Karl S. Green said...

My diary entries happen at random times, rather just when something big is happening! When I do make entries I tend to just write about events as they happened. But, certainly in my adult years, I tend to think about who might end up reading the entries, and think about what I'd want them to read. However, for the most part, my later entries tended to just be factual records of what I did that day...

Nudul said...

LOL, I have never once thought about who would ever want to read my diaries, they would find themselves rather confused by some of them - that's for sure. I have at times written in my own short hand so they wouldn't have a clue. As I say, I wouldn't even expect hubby to read them, let alone other people in the future when I'm gone which is funny as I love reading letters between family members who are no longer with us and wondering what their lives were like x