Which aspects do you think makes a person unique?
Most people live unique lives.
Fewer record them.
Fewer return to them.
Fewer still attempt to assemble them into something coherent.
It is the pattern formed by what they obseve, what they retain, what they revisit and reflect upon, and what they eventually shape.
Over fifty years, I have done this intermittently but persistently—through diaries, dreams, photographs, and film.
That ongoing act—of attention, return, and shaping—is as close as I can get to an answer.
1. What We Notice—and Decide to Keep
A diary is selective, even when it feels complete.
At thirteen, I was already filtering: tennis cancelled, a trip into town, a television programme, a passing irritation. Not everything—only what still registered at bedtime.
Uniqueness begins not just with what happens, but with what we notice.
2. The Return: Memory as a Second Draft
Returning now, fifty years later, those diary entries act as triggers.
A single line opens into a scene, into a voice and into something I couldn’t articulate at that age. Fifty years on it is peculiar to step back into those same shoes and experience it all over. Writing on this project I’ve been amazed and overwhelmed by how much can be recalled from the tiniest reminder – moments that made are still there pebbledashed into our psyche.
The diary becomes less a record and more a set of coordinates—points I can revisit and expand.
Memory does not preserve the past—it rewrites it.
3. Dreams: The Unedited Counterpart
I first explored dreams seriously one Christmas (1976) in my mid-teens, prompted by my older sister—bright, curious, and entirely open to the idea that we might, somehow, be sharing dreams.
Whether we were or not hardly matters.
What stayed with me was this: there is a second stream of experience running alongside the day. This form who we are; in the background they quietly work away.
I kept dream diaries at times—detailed, disciplined—but it quickly became too much. Dreams multiply. If you make a habit of remembering one you soon have five knocking at your door of consciousness. Recording and analysing all of them turns insight into labour.
So I stopped trying to capture everything.
Now, I let dreams surface when chance presents them—colour, suggestion, occasional direction. They are not there to be harvested nightly.
We are shaped not only by what we think, but by how we relate to what we do not fully understand.
4. The Visual Record: Photographing a Life
At twelve, I was given a Kodak Instamatic. From then on, I began to photograph everything.
Not systematically. But artistically – Mum, an art teacher taught me composition before I could write my name.
Albums filled. Later, they were digitised. The habit never really stopped.
Where the diary selects, the camera accumulates. Does it show how uniqueness is inevitable!
Together, they create a double perspective – what I thought mattered and what I simply saw and kept anyway accidentally reveal different versions of ourselves.
5. From Still to Moving Image
At university, the still image became moving.
“Video Vernon” emerged—half joke, half identity—as I began filming life as an Oxford undergraduate in 1982.
Sixteen Betamax tapes survive. They were digitised in 2013. Some fragments are already online; more will be released in time.
This adds another layer: not just memory, not just reconstruction—but captured time in motion.
To record life in motion is to acknowledge that identity is not fixed, but unfolding.
6. Pattern, Over Time
With enough material—written, dreamed, photographed, filmed—patterns begin to appear.
Not dramatic revelations. Something subtler: recurring interests, familiar reactions, and people, and shifts.
The diary shows intention.
Dreams hint at undercurrents.
Images fix moments that might otherwise drift.
Uniqueness is not in any single moment, but in the pattern that emerges across them.
Conclusion
So, what makes a person unique?
Not simply what happens to them, nor the traits they can list, nor even the roles they play—but the pattern they form over time from experience, attention, and return.
Two people may live similar lives. But they will not notice the same things. They will not keep the same fragments. They will not revisit them in the same way. And they will not shape them into the same meanings.
That is where uniqueness resides.
But it is not only something constructed across decades. It is also expressed, constantly and often unconsciously, in daily life.
We reveal who we are with other people, what we contribute, what we hold back and whether we belong fully, partially, or only from time to time.
Even in the most constrained conditions, this individuality persists. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the attempt is made to standardise thought and erase difference, yet something remains—an irreducible way of seeing and remembering that resists control. Suppressive regimes suppress too much but never all of a persons uniqueness.
Most people live unique lives.
Fewer examine them.
Fewer return to them.
Fewer still attempt to assemble them into something coherent.
We are all unique by default; we become distinct by what we choose to notice, return to, and make of it.
Project Note
This entry is part of a 50-year longitudinal diary project, revisiting and expanding material from 1975 onwards, alongside parallel records in dreams, photography, and film.
50 Years On: Diaries, Dreams, and the Recorded Life
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