Who would have thought that anyone would be interested in my diaries?
I started keeping a diary when I was 13 and, since then, I haven’t missed a single day . This means that I’ve kept a diary for almost 58 years or 21,114 days to be precise. It is a personal diary written only for me – but this week I was visited by an historian who is interested in looking at a selected period.
David Kynaston is half way through a huge project involving the writing of six books on post-war Britain covering the period 1945-1979. He has already published the first three works: “Austerity Britain” (1945-1951), “Family Britain” (1951-1957) and “Modernity Britain” (1957-1962).
He visited me this week to discuss his next book, which will cover the period 1963-1967, and to look at my diaries for this period. He would like to use a few quotes from my diaries when he revisits me to study them in more detail.
My diaries will make only a tiny contribution to his project since I was only 15-19 at the time and my comments are understandably youthful, but it was a time of Beatles music, Bond films, the space race and Labour Governments.
March 29th, 2020 at 8:36 pm
This is amazing Roger. What a discipline. I bet not many people in the UK can compete with you.