journal – Kathleen Jowitt

Detail of a week to view engagement diary with the space for 20 December filled in with details of the day's activities

One year ago I was still at work. (Today I clocked off at lunchtime.) One year ago I was getting quite a lot done, by the look of things. (Today I got a reasonable amount done, but not that much.) Last year and this year both I suspect I was racing to get things tidied up before the Christmas break. Last year I apparently had the energy in the evening not only to do some writing of my own (Short Work was at that point the working title of the Romeo and Juliet thing) but to make cauliflower cheese.

Still, it wasn’t all unbounded energy and motivation. I see I took a nap on Sunday afternoon, and, rather than work all the way through until end of day Christmas Eve, I took a last-minute leave day on the 22nd and noted it was a good idea. Looking back through the blog, I thought I was tired then.

This is the great thing about these quick daily records. So often they correct my memory, give a little more context for actions and decisions that just become the way things happened. Assuming, of course, that I remember to look back.

spread from a week to view diary with tickets from various German transportation services and attractions stuck in

You get to see the journal. I spilt hot chocolate in my handbag a month or so back and it went all over my Filofax. Anyway, this is far more interesting.

I started keeping an agenda journal in 2017 after seeing the technique on The Soul of Hope, and it’s the only form of diary I’ve managed to keep up with any kind of regularity. I don’t make an entry every day, but to date I have been able to make an entry for every day. It serves as a repository for all the silly bits of paper that are too pretty to throw away and too silly to keep around, it serves as a record of what I’ve been up to and tells me when I last emptied the compost bin, and it’s fun. I’ve never yet got more than a week behind, and if I do find that I just can’t remember a day (or if it was just too boring to record in detail) I fill the gap with stickers.

This spread comes from the week we travelled down the Rhine – a most excellent trip, and one I’m glad to remember. This year’s journal is rather fatter than last year’s, although not so much so as I originally thought before I compared them.