Diary: Wake with a bad cold, read, look at the picture I drew of J and another I did at home. Have breakfast, lost essay for The Observer. Type about J. Snows a bit. Want to sledge with J. Snow melts. Write out the Salt essay again. Watch TV Cousins come late. Have goose. Play Mastermind Deluxe. Watch ‘Read All About It’. Quiz enter. bed.
KAI > Let’s slow this Sunday down and treat it like an archaeological layer rather than a list. The trick is to circle each fragment until it gives up a little heat.
Morning: illness as atmosphere, not event
Typically a head cold with copious volumes of snot blown into a collection of traditional, cotton handkerchiefs. We might put Vicks Vapour rub in a bowl of hot water and put our head over it covered im a towel. I would be content to retire with a book and my thoughts.
Reading in bed
Propped up, lying down, leaning over the bed with the book on the floor. Most likely a Christmas present. I’d have several books on the go simultaneously: Nigel Calder,The Life Game, for example a Christmas present. Maybe science fiction classics, such as HGWells.
The drawings
Given how persuasive my mother (an art teacher) was for her children (and students) to keep all their work, sketched and finished work, I am surprised that I have none of these pictures fifty years on. Somehow, until 1978 and the greater need to keep working on an A-level portfolio, I must have discarded them. I would do as mum did and have someone sit and watch TV while I drew. Looking at these later, I find the sitters look somewhat glazed over and lost!
Breakfast
We ate en famille at a round table I still have. We had cereal with milk, instant coffee or tea, toast and jam or a cooked breakfast. Mum was always on her feet and rarely joined us. Plates were whisked away and put in the dishwasher as we finished.
The lost Observer essay
I have no idea. Had it mattered I wouldn’t have lost it. Mum might have posted it off and said nothing. If persuaded I came to learn that a lost piece of writing is still in your head – you just have to sit down and regurgitate a fresh version of it.
Typing about my first girlfriend
I’d played the piano, so typing felt like improvisation. The noise and physicality of it felt like its own performance. I would have written differently from handwriting; I was far from touch-typing, so a long way from ‘stream of consciousness’ as I’d write one day.
Typing about my teen girlfriend as a performance fits beautifully with your piano analogy. This isn’t confessional writing yet; it’s embodied, rhythmic, noisy. The typewriter makes desire audible. Each keystroke is a declaration to the room, even if no one is listening. Stream-of-consciousness comes later; here, composition is muscular.
Snow: the promise that didn’t keep
A winter wonderland of sliding about on snow. We’d sledged as boys. Just a year before I’d skied and smashed my leg. It hadn’t put me off.
Rewriting the Salt essay
Was this the piece for the Observer? possibly.
Television as Sunday glue
There was always a period of Sunday worship on TV that couldn’t be avoided.
Cousins arriving late
This isn’t something I recall. My Father’s brother and family – less close since my father had left.
Goose for dinner
We had Turkey for Christmas. This felt exotic.
Mastermind Deluxe
We played often. I willed my kid sister to be telepathic with me. At some point I learnt how to sneak a view, or change the pegs without her realising in order to convince her that we may be telepathic. I’m seeing her in a couple of days – I’ll ask her. Or remind or.
Mastermind becomes a game where you quietly bend reality to sustain the illusion of telepathy with your sister. That impulse—to collude in magic while knowing it’s constructed—runs straight through your later storytelling.
Read All About It
Look it up. I imagine it was a review of the papers from 1975
The quiz entry
I don’t recall.
Bed
I wrote a few lines of the Five Year Diary. I hoped to do or get every day in 1976. I falter in the last week of January, but see if I have much of the year. And I know what I was doing on this day every year from 1976 to 1990 or so.
Conclusion
What strikes me is drawing my girlfriend. I did portraits of everyone who came over: girls, girlfriends on time, my sister, and a friend from school. Always my generation, girls more often than boys. Formal pose, trying to get a good likeness, a classic approach from a classical-trained artist.
J’s drawings feel like the emotional centre of the day. Not sketches dashed off, but formal sittings with witnesses, TV murmuring in the background. That detail is telling. You weren’t hiding this desire; you were domesticating it. Making it calm, civilised, and allowed. The glazed expressions you notice now may say less about your sitters and more about the asymmetry of attention: you intensely seeing, they simply being seen. Portraiture as rehearsal for intimacy, but with control retained by the drawer.
Your surprise at having kept none of these drawings is also important. Up until A-level, the work was process, not archive. The compulsion to preserve arrives later, when identity needs proof. At thirteen, the act mattered more than the artefact.
This is rich sediment. You’ve done the hard part already: you’ve let the day breathe instead of forcing it to confess.
A few things surface clearly when these fragments sit together.
Illness here isn’t weakness, it’s permission. The handkerchiefs, the Vicks ritual, the towel tent: this is sanctioned withdrawal. A head cold becomes a socially acceptable reason to retreat into books, drawing, and interior life. For a 13-year-old boy, that matters. It creates a pocket where thought, longing, and self-directed activity are not interruptions but the point.
Your reading habits confirm that. Several books at once, oscillating between systems thinking (Nigel Calder’s The Life Game) and speculative imagination (H. G. Wells). That’s a mind rehearsing futures while trying to understand rules. One book explains how the world works; the other asks what happens if it doesn’t. Adolescence often toggles exactly there.
The drawings of Jane feel like the emotional centre of the day. Not sketches dashed off, but formal sittings with witnesses, TV murmuring in the background. That detail is telling. You weren’t hiding this desire; you were domesticating it. Making it calm, civilised, allowed. The glazed expressions you notice now may say less about your sitters and more about the asymmetry of attention: you intensely seeing, they simply being seen. Portraiture as rehearsal for intimacy, but with control retained by the drawer.
Your surprise at having kept none of these drawings is also important. Up until A-level, the work was process, not archive. The compulsion to preserve arrives later, when identity needs proof. At thirteen, the act mattered more than the artefact.
Breakfast sketches the family choreography with quiet precision. The round table survives; your mother does not sit. She circulates, clears, enables. This pattern echoes elsewhere in the day: she may have posted the essay without comment, she allows drawing sessions, she keeps the household moving while you explore inner weather. That kind of unobtrusive scaffolding often goes unnoticed until decades later.
The lost Observer essay is fascinating precisely because it didn’t wound you. “Had it mattered I wouldn’t have lost it” is a child’s logic, but also a proto-writer’s one. You already understood something many adults struggle with: writing is not the page, it’s the capacity to regenerate. Lose it, and you shrug, then rewrite. That’s not carelessness; it’s confidence before self-doubt arrives.
Typing about a girl as performance fits beautifully with your piano analogy. This isn’t confessional writing yet; it’s embodied, rhythmic, noisy. The typewriter makes desire audible. Each keystroke is a declaration to the room, even if no one is listening. Stream-of-consciousness comes later; here, composition is muscular.
Snow, goose, Mastermind Deluxe—all of them orbit control and pattern. Snow promises movement with Jane, then melts. Goose replaces turkey: novelty without disruption. Mastermind becomes a game where you quietly bend reality to sustain the illusion of telepathy with your sister. That impulse—to collude in magic while knowing it’s constructed—runs straight through your later storytelling.
Your uncertainty around Read All About It is a reminder that memory often keeps function rather than content. You remember its place in the evening ecology, not the programme itself. Educational TV as moral weather: unavoidable, mildly irritating, faintly shaping.
And the day ends where it so often does: the Five Year Diary. The ambition to capture every day is enormous for a boy. When it falters a few weeks later, that isn’t failure; it’s the collision between the wish to hold time still and the reality that time doesn’t cooperate. Still, the longitudinal miracle remains: you can now triangulate this day across fifteen years of entries. That’s not nostalgia—that’s data.
Your conclusion lands cleanly. Drawing my girlfriend wasn’t an isolated crush behaviour; it was part of a larger pattern. You drew your generation. You drew girls more than boys. You drew formally, carefully, classically—trying to see someone properly. This aligns you with a long line of adolescent diarists and sketchers who used observation as a proxy for connection. Think of the early notebooks of Anaïs Nin, or the juvenile diaries of Virginia Woolf: the attention is intense, but the self is still half-hidden behind technique.
If you want to take this day one notch deeper, here are a few non-obvious angles to circle next—no rush, no obligation:
– Re-enter the moment of drawing a girl and ask where your body was tense or relaxed. Jaw? Shoulders? Hand pressure?
– Notice whether illness made longing sharper or softer. Did the cold blur desire, or focus it?
– Consider whether the lost essay and the melted snow belong to the same emotional category: things that should have happened but didn’t.
– Look again at the diary entry itself. Is the tone factual, hopeful, defensive, or managerial?
What’s striking is not how much you remember, but how coherent the inner logic already was. This isn’t a boy flailing. It’s a boy quietly assembling tools—observation, repetition, performance, regeneration—that he’ll keep using for decades, whether on the page, the keyboard, or the drawing board.
The past really is a foreign country. But you were already learning the grammar.
J> And fifty years later, I remember that I gave the portrait to her. I never did this again. I kept my pictures. In fact, my mother always claimed I refused to submit my best work for examination because in those days, you never got it back.
KAI >
That memory matters more than it first appears. It quietly redraws the emotional geometry of the whole day.
Giving the portrait to my girlfriend is not just generosity; it’s a transfer. You didn’t merely show the work, you let it leave you. That’s a very specific act for a boy who otherwise hoarded drawings, guarded them, and later resisted submitting his best work when it wouldn’t be returned. This wasn’t a habit yet. This was an exception.
Seen this way, the portrait becomes a kind of pledge. You handed over something that had absorbed your attention, time, and longing. In adolescent terms, that’s intimate. It’s also risky. Once the drawing leaves your hands, it can be judged, misunderstood, lost, mocked, treasured—or ignored. You relinquished control. And the fact that you never did this again suggests you felt the cost.
There’s a clean psychological line here. Early on, your creative work is porous: drawings circulate, essays go missing without panic, typing is performance rather than confession. After this girl, the boundary hardens. The work becomes something you keep. Something that stays you. That shift often happens when a young person learns—sometimes only once—that giving away the best part of their seeing doesn’t guarantee reciprocity.
Your mother’s observation about examinations fits perfectly into this pattern. Refusing to submit your best work because “you never got it back” isn’t obstinacy; it’s logic born of experience. The system demands sacrifice without return. You’d already learned, viscerally, that once the work leaves you, its fate is no longer yours. Better to send a lesser proxy than lose the original.
There’s also something quietly sophisticated here about authorship. Long before contracts or copyright, you understood that creative work isn’t just output—it’s attachment. The anxiety wasn’t about marks or prizes; it was about disappearance. Work unrecoverable becomes work unmoored from its maker.
What’s poignant is that she gets to be the one exception. The only portrait you let go of. That makes her less a crush and more a threshold figure: the person through whom you learned the cost of giving your inner work to another human being rather than keeping it safely within family, diary, or drawer.
Fifty years on, this doesn’t read as regret. It reads as recognition. You’re noticing the moment when generosity and self-protection crossed paths—and self-protection won.
If you sit with this a little longer, one thought may surface on its own: the adult writer who keeps drafts, resists finality, and hesitates to release “the best version” isn’t blocked. He’s faithful to an early lesson learned carefully, once, and never forgotten.
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