I wonder what I was doing eight years ago today. Alas we will never know. But once this entry is completed I will have a record of something that happened on every day of the last eight years of my life. Which is a freaky thought. Then another 731 entries and I'll have done a decade. Frankly ludicrous. But due to lack of foresight and starting one day too late it will be difficult, if not impossible to find out what I did on the 24th November 2002. Probably thought a bit about starting doing the blog, without actually starting.
But tomorrow is the birthday, so let's hold off the celebrations and presents and awards until then. Is there another blog out there which has had an entry every day for so long? I mean I know it's more about quality than quantity, but just interested to find out if I am the only person in the world obsessive and daft enough to have done something like this.
I went out this morning to record an interview for BBC Radio 7 with my lovely ex-Edinburgh flatmate, Lucy Porter (I believe it will be going out on the 14th December). Lucy has recently had a baby and I was delighted to meet her for the first time. The infant viewed me with suspicion, which is the correct response, but at least I didn't make her cry. Lucy's mum was on hand to do baby sitting duties so the baby wasn't part of the interview process, though had they chosen to I could have been quizzed by three generations of Porter women. Maybe they should pitch that as a show.
It's always cool to meet one of the new humans and witness their attempts to try and make sense of this confusing world which even after two or three months can make no sense at all to them. I want to say to them, "You have no idea what's going on, do you? I mean you're making a reasonable stab at bluffing your way through it, but you're not fooling anyone. It doesn't get much easier to be honest. You just get a little bit better at the bluffing." But there's no point they can't understand you.
If I could give a baby any advice about what's coming up I would tell them that their best bet was to maintain the lack of self-consciousness and the sense of fun they were going to naturally have for the next five or six years and not give a fuck about what anyone else thinks. But somehow we manage to kick that out of each other and have to wait decades before we can get anywhere near it. If I have a kid I am going to lock it up in a room so it doesn't ever have to interact with other people so it won't have its happiness beaten out of it. I think that will make me the best father of all time. It is perhaps lucky that I have so far failed to spawn.
I spent the rest of the day sitting in cafes, reading and thinking and trying to build up the energy to go to the gym. I read more of Anne Frank's diary and thought how weird it would be for her if she could have imagined that millions of people from all over the world would visit the tiny prison that her and her family were in. Their hiding place becomes a tourist attraction.
She wrote about her fears of discovery and of being dragged from beneath her bed and taken away, which, of course, is made unbearably sad because her visions came true. I wonder about the men who came for her and how they justified what they were doing to themselves. How did they feel dragging a child away to her death? Did they go home that night with a feeling of a job well done? Sometimes it's hard not to hate humanity.
Meanwhile my charmed and lucky life carried on, the minutes ticking by, with me achieving little and failing to go to the gym. The freedom to go anywhere and still my diary not as interesting as someone trapped in an attic.
This might never be as good as Anne Frank's diary, but I'll tell you something, it's longer.
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