Today’s entry has been prompted by this:

  Those are my diaries, folks, covering every year from 1985 (the year I turned 14) to the end of 2000 (when I was 29). 1992 and 1994 seem to be missing. There were quite long periods when I didn’t write, but I don’t remember ever not having a diary, so I wonder where they are? 1992 was my second year at university, and 1994 was a difficult year for me, but even so….

Let’s start with 1985, though, shall we? I was very precocious. Don’t look surprised. I was (am) an only child, so spent a lot of time on my own in my bedroom pretending to be creative. By this point my parents were divorced, with my father living overseas, so for the most part it was me and my mum, although for some time my Nana (mum’s mum) lived with us, and then my Auntie Pat. My diary records that I found this quite difficult. I must have been a fecking nightmare to live with.

I spent a lot of time typing, on an old electric typewriter I’d bought from a junk shop, or maybe from the Friday Ad, which was the local free advertising paper. Among other things I remember writing was a long ‘coming of age’ story set in Cuba (I knew nothing about Cuba but I liked the idea of the beaches, and the sunshine), and a long – very long – story that turned into a novel called The Yearbook. I remember this one well – it was about a girl who lived on a farm and had lots of brothers and sisters, but she had found an old book in the attic that changed the future if you wrote in it. It was almost a ghost story, or at least it was turning into that by the time it fizzled out. I never finished anything, that was half my trouble. I just kept going.

‘The Yearbook’ was set in the depths of winter, and I remember lots of descriptive passages about the cold and the wind, and how the girl first found out the book’s magical powers when she accidentally made it snow. I think around this time I was reading Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series, so I can well imagine that was a strong influence.

I also seem to have spent an unfortunate amount of time watching television. My best mate Angela and I were particularly obsessed with the BBC’s adaptation of John Christopher’s ‘The Tripods’. This had very little to do with the acting, the special effects and the plot, and everything to do with someone called John Shackley who played the hero, Will. That’s him, the dark-haired one on the right. Funny now how every single picture I can find of him online has exactly that same gormless expression. We ADORED him.

We wrote endless letters, to him, to the Radio Times, to Terry Wogan, to a teenage TV magazine called ‘Beeb’, to the Radio Times, to Barry Took, who was the long-standing presenter of a show about TV shows, called ‘Points of View’.

I got letters back.

Each one was carefully inserted into the diary, occasionally with sarcastic comments, mostly with just general excitement that someone had taken me seriously enough to write back.

Ange had a letter published in ‘Beeb’. I recorded this in the diary rather flatly, and I imagine I was beyond jealous. She was also the first of us to get a signed photo of John Shackley, although I got one too, not long after.

These people must have had a right laugh at us.

My other obsessions were church (despite my mother’s staunch atheism, I was a proud Christian and member of the local Baptist Church) and boys at school. I went through one after the other (boys, that is, not churches or faiths), writing endlessly about sightings at school, any snippets of information I’d gathered about them, and none of them at all showed the slightest bit of interest in me whatsoever. Which, with hindsight, is probably a very, very good thing. Goodness knows what would have become of me if I’d been born in the days of the internet. I’d have been a total stalker.

Along with most other teenage girls, I suspect, I had no self-confidence whatsoever. I had no idea what I looked like, how to dress, how to not appear desperate. I wonder if being an only child had something to do with this. I thought I was massively overweight because I was rubbish at PE and couldn’t run for toffee (although, thinking about it, I possibly would have run for toffee) but with hindsight I wasn’t that overweight. I seem to have spent a lot of time avoiding doing any sort of physical exercise apart from swimming, which I was good at. I also seem to have thought I was immensely funny and very entertaining. And shameless about plagiarism.

Note this one on the left, which I’m fairly sure comes from Adrian Mole (a particular favourite at the time, along with its Christian parody, The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass, Aged 37 3/4).

Finally, for your amusement, on the right is the carefully recorded list of exactly what I got for Christmas. A Sony Walkman! Top gift. Makeup! Earrings (two of them!) And best of all… I’m guessing this particular gift came from my mother…. A BING CROSBY TAPE. I must have been beside myself with joy at that one.

Hope you’ve enjoyed that little insight into 1985 in a little seaside town in the south east of England.

I may well do an occasional series of visions into my other diaries, if I can find anything in them at all that isn’t a) excruciatingly shameful, b) frankly libellous or c) suitable for public consumption.