50YON: Tuesday, 30th March 1976
Five-Year Diary: Tuesday, 30th March 1976
I slept in — heavy, slow to get going. Breakfast, bath, the usual routine.
Tennis at the Northumberland Tennis Club.
Half an hour on swings and serves. The coach was older than Dad but still athletic. He didn’t waste words. Just small adjustments: turn your shoulders, meet it earlier, don’t rush.
The serve was the problem—toss, reach, hit at full stretch. Mine went everywhereHe’d’d watch, give a slight nod, and say,” Again.”
Now and then, one landed properly—clean, effortless—and you could feel it straight away. That was the point of it.
He moved on to another lesson and left me to practise. It was with a girl my age on the far court. She was different—slim, almost too slim. There was something gazelle-like about the way she moved. When she walked to pick up a ball or to wipe her racket, her feet turned out, knees soft, everything controlled. Like a ballet dancer. Not showy, just exact. I watched her more than I practised.
When I got home, I sat down to write. Writing means typing. I don’t know if it improves the output. Time will only tell.
I put on—Bowie, always Bowie.
Lunch, then Pebble Mill at One.
As close as I got to a daily fix. It pegs the middle of my day. Light entertainment for me. Not news.
Out into the garden.
I had Dad’s Reader’s Digest Gardeners Calendar open on the garden bench. He’d used it before he left. Now it was mine. He left a lot of his things: just walked out. Left it behind. Moved on. I followed the instructions, but you only really learn once your hands are in the soil.
I did some more writing.
A science-fiction love story. When Adam met Evie.
An interstellar spaceship travelling for millennia towards a new Earth. A group of young people was sent outside in spacesuits on a kind of rite-of-passage trip. Something goes wrong. Everyone inside dies. Two of them—Adam and a girl (the one from the tennis court) —survive and make it back into a silent ship. It carries them on regardless. Adam has a voice in his head—Arthur—like a guide, always there, except when outside the ship. They crash into this new habitable planet. They bear the burden of humanity’s future on their shoulders. It then goes a bit Blue Lagoon, but I don’t know how to write it.
Synchronicity.
The phone rang—a girl. I won’t tell you my name. She knows. My girlfriend, I think I could call her that. At least, she is a girl and a friend, which feels like something. We arranged to meet the next day.
More writing. I’m in story mode. Editing will follow, and my destructive pen will kill the flow and my will to go on.
City of Newcastle Swimming Club
Supper at 6.30, then the swimming club—hard work. Relentless. I guess we’ll meet from 7:00pm to 9:00pm. Club Swimming. Out at 9.15, tired again. Mum picked me up.
When we got back, she wanted me to watch “Play for Today — Early Struggles
21:25, BBC One
Directed by Stephen Frears
Written by Peter Prince
A man abandoned by his wife is left caring for a baby—sleep deprivation, domestic chaos, and his identity under pressure.
Mum said it would be good for me. I sat on the sofa in the playroom with a mug of soup. It was serious, slow—grown-up problems. Mum fell asleep within minutes of it starting. A man left with a baby, everything strained. I watched, but my mind kept slipping back to training, to lengths, to my young bride on a new earth and the mechanics of making a baby, let alone raising one. Directed by Stephen Frears.
Once in bed, I planned swimming training. I wouldn’t be able to fit in much.
Dairy
I wrote my Diary. This is when I do it.
Fifty years on, I can see what was happening. I was beginning to notice the empty days, the ones that didn’t amount to more than “got up, bath, watched T.” So I made sure I did stuff: tennis, swimming, writing, gardening—things I could at least list. The Five-Year Diary didn’t allow for more than that: just a few blunt lines, no space for anything else. But I liked the continuity—this year, then the next.
I kept at it. Two five-year diaries, back-to-back, from 1975 to 1983. Then A4 hardback notebooks—one page a day, no gaps. That carried me through to 1990, more or less.
If you want to know what happened on this day in 1975, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, and 1987, I can tell you. The early 90s. And the early 2000s, by which time blogging was. Today is the day 50 years on. No, I don’t have the same day, fifty stepping stones through my teens to young adulthood, relationships, marriage, children raising them, empty nesters and retirement.
I stopped the Diary when my fiancé and I moved in together. The last thing you do, it turns out, is write a Diary as you turn in at night.
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