Journal

 

I am keeping a journal. It’s for one main reason. Our memories are getting poorer, and we often struggle to remember when some important family event occurred. Sometimes we can’t remember what we did at the weekend! So it has become really useful for jogging my memory.

There is nothing elegant about the journal. It’s not electronic, for a start. I’m parsimoniously using up old notebooks and exercise books that had lots of blank pages. I’m scribbling down the key events of each day just before going to bed. The handwriting is hurried and scrawly. There often aren’t proper sentences, just phrases. There are abbreviations all over the place.

But setting myself such a low bar means that it actually gets done. The journal’s now nearly four years old, having been begun in February 2019. Though we were already deep into (dare I say it) the political darkness of this era, I naturally had no idea when I began it that the journal would record the Covid pandemic and then a dreadful war in Europe. But more prominent of course are the activities and ordeals of ourselves, our families, and our friends. Plus some wonderful answers to prayers prayed with our relatively newly found friend on Monday mornings. She was just a name to us when I started the journal. And I had absolutely no inkling of the profound change in our Christian pilgrimage that is going to be formalized next week.

It’s very interesting to look back to the same date one, two, or three years back. One is reminded of many good things, as well as being grateful for the trials one has come through. This time in 2020, we saw some swans and the Church of England Bishops made an extraordinary statement on marriage. This time in 2021, six ACW people liked my blog, and we had SNOW! And this time last year, I made marmalade, and I noted that ‘Johnson was still evading his fate’.

This is very low-level writing. It breaks all the rules. It won’t be published, unless perhaps a historian in the twenty-second century discovers it and thinks it provides an interesting view of life back in this century! But if one’s trade is writing it’s all grist to the mill, and if one is a Christian it is a great source of self-knowledge, gratitude, and praise.