Skinning Moles

Today’s been a productive day. I’ve prepared dinner, stuck it in the oven to slow-cook all afternoon, cleaned up the kitchen, sent some emails and organised my laundry. Now I’m sat here doing two things that I deeply love; watching rugby league and writing in my journal. The match is St Helens VS Wigan, one of the great derbies of the sport, and St Helens are having a new stadium constructed right now so they’re playing their home games in my home town, Widnes, and seeing it on TV again is making me homesick. Not terribly so, but a tiny bit. Widnes isn’t a big town, which makes it so strange to see it televised, and even though all you can really see are the stadium’s stands and a little house in the corner it feels good to see home turf again. Can’t wait watch a few matches in person again. I’d played rugby league as a kid but despite being a monster of a child, bumped up into the team a year older than me because I was so tall, I was never much good at it on account of being too soft; I’d slow down when I ran into people, for example. I didn’t grow up in a house where sports were on TV all that much and I never really took any up as a kid when I gave up playing rugby, but as I turned 18 I started watching sports more, and the sport I started out playing was the one I ended up liking the most.

The journal is something I started 3 years ago. When I first went away on my travels I was given a journal as a gift from some friends on my very last night in the UK. A yellow paperback book with ruled paper, I shoved it into my backpack when I got home along with a cheap ballpoint pen, not having much time before I had to rest up before my flight. I hadn’t considered doing any kind of diarising before but as I thought about the book it made complete sense to record my summer abroad. Those first few days after arriving at summer camp were so overwhelming, everything being brand new, that I didn’t even pick the book up, it was only after a few days in when I found a little time to myself that I was able to start writing down my thoughts. My writing was awful; hastily written phrases with no description or sentence structure. Even my handwriting was markedly poor and oversized because I’d spent little time holding a pen in the years since I’d left sixth form. As the time at camp went along they both started to improve a little, but the real difference came after I’d left, and I was travelling. With the extra time to myself and having this real feeling of being out on my own adventure, I took to writing much more. It’s amazing when I look at this journal now to see how the writing looked on the very first page compared to the last – I never actually wrote about the final day when I flew back home so it’s the final day of fun in Boston, saying goodbye to people and the like. The journal wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, it was my first real foray into writing so it wasn’t too creative or well done, there are big stretches where I’d just forget to write and miss days on end, and (probably the thing I regret the most) rather than dating each entry I’d mark them by counting how many days I’d been out there, so now, looking back, I have to do some mental gymnastics to figure out when exactly I’d written it.

I get home, and I give it up. What’s the point of keeping a journal back home after all? It’s not like I’m doing anything exciting if I’m just sat around at home. I picked up a shitty job at a supermarket to pull me through ‘til next summer, when I was going to go back to camp and then go to Canada after that, try and get a job there and stay as long as I could. In late spring, as the build up to the summer began again, I decided it was time to pick up pen and paper once more, so I went out and bought a journal myself; a large ruled moleskine notebook. Such a great book! I fell in love with them straight away, and they’ve been my journal book of choice ever since. I noted all the things I did before I went back across the pond; the trip to London for my visa, the goodbyes and fears, then the time I spent in Boston before going to camp, the day-to-day routine of camp. The journal double up as a scrapbook; as I’d gone along and found little things I’d taped them into the journal, things like tickets from gigs and my flights, a map of Boston’s mass transit system, etc. And then, suddenly, it just stopped. I can’t explain why but it came to a shuddering halt, and never started up again. Those experiences in Canada, the leaving of camp, it was never written down (though blogged about a little). I never threw the books away, but I didn’t pick them back up, I just brought them home with me and put them in my bookshelf.

After the mess of an experience I had in Canada I went to university, and about 5 months into that I decided to unearth that journal once more and start writing again. I was writing regularly with my studies now, after all, picking it up again would be easy, and I’ve finally kept it going. It’s now been 18 months solid of journaling my experiences. Spending an academic year abroad has probably made it easier because it’s packed with so many new experiences, but even without that I feel like I’m writing solidly, confidently, and enjoying it. I finished off that old journal and started a new one, a moleskine again but a smaller one, better suited to travel, that I finished in the space of 8 months. I read recently that the act of keeping a journal is an act of producing legacy, that though our day-to-day lives may not seem all that interesting to us right now, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren would find them fascinating in the same way we’d find a journal a relative had written in the late 1800’s absolutely enthralling. Whether I keep it up for years to come or it starts to come to an end when I’m finished with my degree, keeping a journal is one of the things I’m going to be really glad I did for years to come.

Three of my journals - one for the past, the present, and the future. The plain one on the left is the journal I started when I came to Plattsburgh last August, and finished it this March. The pac man journal in the middle is my current journal, it's about half-full by now, and the one on the right is a spare for me to use when I travel next (I have a larger spare journal that I'm going to use while I'm at home)