This has been the year of liberation in South Africa - the most important positive political event of the year, a defining moment in my politically conscious lifetime, like the fall of the Berlin Wall in ’89.
Albert remarked, when we’d finished, that that was enough work for one year, and it was too late for anyone who hadn’t done enough work this year to make up for it now. I planted three trees in the wood this afternoon with Albert, my friend and gardener: an oak, a beech and a fir.
(Also Wilde’s remark about taking his diary with him everywhere in order to have something sensational to read on the train.) You’re constantly thinking about a potential public readership, and the joke in The Importance of Being Earnest about the young girl’s private thoughts and feelings applies. If you’re supposed to be writing a diary but in fact it’s an attempt at belles-lettres, you can’t possibly be sincere. It won’t matter if I use the same word accidentally in successive sentences, or if I use a cliché because I can’t think of a more original or individual way of saying something. I want to turn it out quickly, with concentration, yes, but without the constant self-monitoring of the other writing. I know that’s true, and I want this to be different. People congratulate me sometimes on the finished-ness of what I write not much drafting apparent, and it’s tight and well made. The rest of the writing I do, at work or when I get round to producing a poem, is above all careful. I definitely don’t want the diary to be an act of auto-analysis or auto-confession, therefore, and I’m probably accepting, before I’ve even started, that a measure of self-censorship will operate much of the time. You’re supposed to be able to write exactly what you like in a diary, but some of my private thoughts are unprintable - I expect most people are the same - and would embarrass me and/or hurt other people if they read them. I’ve no idea how the diary will turn out, whether I shall manage to keep it regularly, nor quite how frank it’s going to be. I’m 43, time is passing, and so many things happen, small and large, which seem noteworthy at the time, but then, through my laziness or the press of other concerns, get forgotten about and wasted. The last day of ’94 marks the beginning of my first serious attempt to write a regular diary.
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