Dear diary

this was found while clearing things from my mum's house (it's mine, not my my mum's!). I went through a brief Judy Blume phase when I was around 12/13, and this diary was a place to record my life a la Judy Blume - all emotional upheaval was given a thorough airing, and it's as toe-curlingly awful as you'd imagine - mercifully, I gave up after a month or so .

I kept another diary when I was 18, which I sustained for much longer. With that one, I resolved to keep things as terse and factual as possible - the idea being that the mundane details would trigger memories of all the interesting stuff. Well, I remember some of that, but no thanks to the diary, which is a faithful record of everything I ate for dinner during four of the most exciting years of my life. Still, possibly that's for the best....