Keeping Secrets

My sister used to keep a secret diary. Everyone in the family knew she kept a secret diary because she had helpfully printed the words SECRET DIARY KEEP OFF!! on the cover in felt-tip. The diary’s hiding place would change from time to time but it was never very difficult to locate. There are only so many drawers and cupboards in a two-up, two-down.

In keeping with the tradition of making your older sister’s life a misery, I read the diary whenever the opportunity presented itself. I don’t recall making any shocking discoveries. On reflection the diary was just the usual emotional jumble of teen angst. There were lots of frustrated references to boys with names like Baz and Oz and Tezza, who, in so far as I could tell, seemed to spend most of their waking hours not looking at my sister in the dinner queue. I never found out anything useful. There were no entries along the lines of:

WEDNESDAY

That brother of mine is a right pain!!! I hope he never finds out that I have hidden 40 pence and a packet of Spanglers in one of my David Essex socks!!!

That was the kind of thing I was looking for: Immediately useful information. I had no interest in gathering intelligence as perhaps a more devious sibling might have done. I was smart enough to do that, I guess, but at some deep, insistent level I was also aware that I was treading on very precarious moral ground with this. It was perfectly reasonable to read your older sister’s diary, and perfectly inevitable that she would suspect you of having done so (at ten years old, your fingers are perpetually grubby, a grubbiness that is seemingly resistant to everything but Ajax powder), but God forbid that either of you should mention it. It was an unspoken understanding between the two of you, the devastating power of which was more than enough to keep it that way.

As for myself, I never kept a diary as such, even though as my teenage years progressed I seemed doomed to repeat my poor sister’s struggle to be noticed in dinner queues. In place of a diary I wrote songs – or more precisely song lyrics, as I never actually set any of them to music. They were necessarily gloomy poems reflective of a mind equally at odds with himself as the world around him, full of introspective self-loathing and fatalistic prophecy; songs concerned with suicide and lovelessness, most of them dedicated to those towering, unobtainable girlfriends of school football captains, the ones who – why oh why? – never looked at me in the dinner queue. It wasn’t the kind of material likely to end up on Chas and Dave’s Christmas Knees-up album, that’s for sure.

The other thing my collection of morbid songs had in common with my sister’s diary was its burden of secrecy. There is a fundamental awfulness that goes with keeping any secret. A secret can burn a hole right through the middle of you, like a hot stone sinking through a softer, more fitting simile. It’s true though. The secret you clutch to your chest like a vulnerable baby is slowly gorging itself on your blood like some monster leech. There’s even something horribly secret about that too.

Probably the biggest fear I had at that time of my life - other than the abject fear of being woken in the middle of the night by the kid from Salem’s Lot scratching at my bedroom window with his sharp yellow fingernails – was the fear that someone would read my songs. There was always a quick, gut-sinking moment whenever I opened the box that I kept them in to check that they hadn’t been disturbed, something I did on a ritual basis the moment I got home from school.

Almost as bad, if not actually worse, than the thought of someone sneaking a look at my songs - which in a weird secret-within-a-secret sort of way, I used to try and imagine, always with the result that I was declared a misunderstood genius and henceforth accosted in the dinner queue by gooey-eyed groupies - was the thought that someone would recognise the fantasy structure I had built around them. In a way I was much less concerned with my mother tearfully asking me if I truly felt suicidal and lonely than I was with her or my sisters saying something like:

“Here, why did you write ‘ALL SONGS WRITTEN BY GARY JAMES. PRODUCED BY JAMES/COSTELLO. BRYAN MAY APPEARS CURTESY OF EMI RECORDS. THANKS TO EVERYONE AT THE DINNER QUEUE STUDIOS,’ on the top page?”

How do you answer that one? How do you honestly answer that without simply throwing up your hands and saying, “I wrote it because it made me feel good!”

I mention all of this because I’ve been giving some thought to the whole strangely inverted world of weblogs and the like. I was in the pub with a mate of mine, one of those grunting northern souls who think that men like me – rugby union fans, hikers, readers, fucking literary sorts, et al – need a good dunking in the mud to bring us to our senses, preferably as half-time entertainment at the next Leeds Rhinos game. He’s alright though.

“I read your diary,” he said, and for a second or so my heart slipped down into my stomach. I was trying to remember if my last entry said anything like: Wow, two new hairs this week!

“My Diary?”

“Yeah, you know, on the computer.”

“My weblog,” I said with obvious relief. The relief was somewhat short lived. “How did you know about my weblog?”

“Caroline,” he said.

“Dave’s Caroline? Thin legs and really tiny feet, like a goat?”

“No, Caroline from the Dog’s Arms. You know her, she’s got big eyeballs.”

“What a strange name for a pub,” I said quietly. “Well how did Caroline with the big eyeballs know about it?”

My mate just shrugged. Then he said something so obvious that it was briefly amazing. “You left it out. If you didn’t want people to see it you ought to have squat it in your sock drawer. Metaphorically speaking of course.”

“Of course,” I echoed quietly. He was right though. More to the point, it wasn’t simply a case of leaving it lying around accidentally-on-purpose in the hope that whoever found it would pity me. Perhaps they would even pity me twice if the first time were something of an urgent disappointment. Instead I was actively encouraging people to discover my innermost thoughts and feelings; I was exposing myself in all my honest, naked glory, like someone shivering on a windswept ledge high above an indifferent city. Only funnier than that, hopefully.

This behaviour, which feels mostly natural and anonymous, is in direct conflict with the sound principle of diary-keeping that lasted me so well back in my youth, namely that while it is a great source of illicit fun to read someone else’s diary, your own should stay under lock and key.

“What did you reckon then?” I asked.

My mate broke wind loudly. “No comment,” he said. “I refuse to be drawn into a conversation which in the end may reveal me to be no more than a figment of your imagination, merely a rough metaphor for the internal struggle with your (limited) literary skills over a subconscious desire to be accepted by your more grounded Northern peers.”

Actually he didn’t say that. What he said was, “You sound like a puff in it. All them fucking words! Why don’t you do a footy blog like Mac?”

I didn’t know how to answer that one. Life, eh? It’s a funny old game.

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This weblog entry was first published in Tales from the Dinner Queue, an upmarket poncy literary magazine full of good writers and read by top totty and that.