Pip: Welcome to J F Vernon Blog — where one man’s teenage diary entries, dream journals, and ancestral obituaries somehow constitute a coherent life project. Respect.
Mara: Jonathan Vernon is the author behind all of it — and this episode covers a week of boarding school life in the 1976 heatwave, questions of identity and memory, the inner world of books and dreams, and a family archive stretching back to Victorian Newcastle.
Pip: Let’s start with Sedbergh School, June 1976.
Boarding School Days In 1976
Mara: A sequence of diary entries reconstructs daily life at Sedbergh School during the first week of June 1976 — the rhythms of lessons, sport, letters that never arrive, and small rebellions against institutional routine.
Pip: The entry for Tuesday the eighth captures it in compressed shorthand: “Break: still no letters! Meat off, so chuck it. Coffee and rock buns.”
Mara: That’s the whole texture of the place in one line — the waiting, the small refusals, the consolations. The Friday entry goes deeper, noting that letters “indicate that there is life, that it remembers me, and that I will be here forever.”
Pip: Forever is a fourteen-year-old’s word for a very long time.
Mara: The Corps Day entry records a boy who missed most of the map-reading checkpoints and came away wanting to be an astronaut instead of a soldier. The Sunday entry shifts register entirely — a day out with his father, a stepmother already gone, and a glimpse of adult grief that doesn’t fit the timetable.
Pip: Then, on Wednesday the ninth, the whole school dissolves into the river. The heatwave entry is the most expansive of the week — lessons in a furnace, a Tyndale digression in Divinity, river swimming with half the town, and a squash win to close the day.
Mara: The Monday and Saturday entries fill in the quieter edges: flute lessons, a cassette rack taking shape in the Project Centre, and the ongoing negotiation with a German matron over laundry.
Pip: From the heatwave and the river, the writing turns inward — which is where the next stretch lives.
Memory, Identity, and Self-Reflection
Mara: Several posts here sit with the same underlying question: what does a name, a habit, a diary project, or a tagline actually carry about who you are?
Pip: The name post is the most expansive. Asked what he would call himself if he had to change his name, the answer becomes a genealogical map: “A surname is never just a label; it’s a map of where people have come from and what survives through them.”
Mara: That quote earns its weight. The Vernon line runs back through Northumberland to Norman England. The alternative — Pelczynski — opens eastward to Poland, to Kyiv, to Malta, carrying migration, wartime upheaval, and resilience through three generations of his wife’s family.
Pip: He almost became Peregrine. Which would have been a lot to carry at a northern boarding school in the 1970s.
Mara: He acknowledges exactly that — “a difficult thing to carry as a child, especially at boarding school” — and concludes that Jonathan is the name he grew into, while Peregrine “feels more like the name someone else imagined for me before I had any say in the matter.”
Mara: The post on shared life is quieter but pointed: thirty-six years with the same person, both working from home, routines that look scheduled but aren’t.
Pip: And the tagline post distils the whole self-portrait to one line: “Powered by coffee, curiosity, and existential inquiry.” Accurate, probably.
Mara: The most searching post in this group is the one on why he hesitates to share the diaries at all. The project began as a revisiting of school diaries and has become, in his words, “a vast, long-term autobiographical archive project spanning more than half a century of recorded life.”
Pip: Publishing in real time, fifty years after the original dates — meaning June 1977 appears in June 2027, and the project runs into the 2040s if he makes it.
Mara: The ethical tension he names is real: even altered names may not protect people, because “small clues accumulate” and modern image tools can recover text from handwriting once considered illegible. His aim, he writes, is “the careful reconstruction of memory, atmosphere, social history, and personal development across time.”
Pip: The archive and the dream journal turn out to draw from the same well, which is exactly where the next segment goes.
Books, Dreams, and Inner Worlds
Mara: Two posts here map the interior landscape — one through books that shaped him over a lifetime, the other through a Jungian analysis of two recent dreams.
Pip: The dream post is the denser of the two. The method he describes uses AI to generate layered prompts rather than fixed symbol-reading: “The dream is more personal than that. As it comes from my unconscious, the question is ‘Why has my unconscious chosen this image for me, now?’”
Mara: What that process surfaces, across two vivid dreams, is a pattern connecting creativity, anger, and the fear of losing control — the same energy feeding both the writing and the outbursts.
Pip: The book’s post ranges from Brewer’s Dictionary and Jung’s Man and His Symbols through Henry Miller and Macbeth, and the childhood reading post traces the earlier layer — Narnia, H. G. Wells, Watership Down, and encyclopaedias borrowed from Gosforth Library.
Mara: Both posts circle around the same appetite: not to escape into one world, but to understand how all worlds work.
Pip: Family history turns out to run on the same instinct, which is where we land next.
Family History And Personal Archives
Mara: Two posts here work at different scales. One is a 1936 newspaper obituary for William Ferguson, founder of a Newcastle building merchants firm, recovered from his late father’s papers — and the man’s own voice survives on his business card: “Our business was established in 1874. We have been pleasing and displeasing people ever since.”
Pip: Ninety years on, and that reads like a mission statement most companies would kill for.
Mara: The other post is quieter in register — a description of a daily ritual built around Green and Black’s ginger chocolate, Doves Farm digestives, and properly ground coffee. Small, specific, and entirely personal.
Pip: The archive and the biscuit tin. Both are ways of preserving what matters before it disappears.
Mara: A week of diary entries, a lifetime of books, two unsettling dreams, and a Victorian great-great-grandfather who found life “a funny thing” — it all points in the same direction.
Pip: Fifty years later, in real time. Back next episode for whatever June 1976 still has left to say.
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