I HAVE long been fascinated by diaries, and 25 years ago I resolved to keep a journal. It is one of the few resolutions I have kept, but reliving old memories is not always the happy experience I would like.
For the first few days of the year 2009, I coughed, snuffled and watched Ben Huron telly in the wonderfully centrally heated house of a long-suffering cousin, then, " Monday, January 5th: Very frosty. Think I am sufficiently recovered, so take myself to Kilkenny. Welcomed back to my humble home by a rat, who behaved with a great deal more savoir faire than I did. He wiggled his whiskers while calmly observing my hysterics then trotted off and disappeared behind the fridge. When I realised that standing on a chair and screaming was not getting me anywhere, I daringly poked behind the fridge with an umbrella. But the rat had left that haven for some place unknown. Put rat poison under the sink.
“Tuesday: Rat poison has disappeared – is rat now dying behind the cupboard? My meals are very simple with the minimum of preparation, in case rat leaves his sick bed. Car does not start so cannot escape. Cold water has frozen.
“Wednesday: Did not know what trouble was until today. Car dead – am not sure about rat. This evening as I was declaiming my sorrows over the telephone, I heard the sound of rushing water – water cascading into the bathroom from the tank in the attic – I put buckets under it but they fill up in a few seconds – leave them overflowing when I race round outside with torch, that needs a new battery, in search of the tap to turn the mains off. Find it in a bramble bush, but turn it the wrong way. The neighbours, who I have summoned, brave the bramble bush and stop the flow of water. They wring out the towels with which I was trying to soak up the flood while I can only wring my hands and weep. The carpet in spare room is under an inch of water and downstairs, it is like a monsoon, but miraculously missed the books. Plumber comes.
Friday: Is the smell in the house damp or dead rat? I can’t tell with my cold! Car costs €120.”
My diary has continued to receive these little ups and downs of life’s rich woof, for as Disraeli wrote: “We converse with the absent by letters and with ourselves by diaries”.
In the 18th century there were many spiritual diaries where the authors castigated themselves for the sins they had committed. Archibald Johnston, in 1632, refers to himself in one of his daily supplications to God as “the unworthiest, filthiest, passionatest deceitfullest, crookedest, backslidingest, rebellionest, unablest of all your servants”. Other journals or diaries are more a description of the daily round, the common task.
In February 1859, poor Major Oliver Fry who, even at the age of 86 always did the marketing for his family, tripped on a grating in Grafton Street and fell prostrate on his face; his nose was flattened and it bled profusely from inside and outside.
After staggering to a medical shop, he took a covered carriage home where the doctor was summoned to dress the wounds. He ended the entry in his diary: “As to my feelings, I rejoice knowing it could not occur save by permission of my Heavenly Father. Nothing but good can come from him”.
The pianist Liszt came on a concert tour in 1840. Among his entourage was John Orlando Parry, a singer of comic songs, who kept a journal in which he often remarked that the audience preferred him to Liszt.
On January 1st, 1841, in Cork, there were few people at the afternoon concert and then owing to Liszt having disappeared with a “smoking friend”, they did not start for Clonmel in their carriage until late in the evening. They arrived at seven the next morning “rather fatigued”. No tickets had been sold for the “Great” concert that they thought had been arranged. “The Court House filthy dirty and not a decent piano for love or
money”.
Instead, they invited about 25 ladies and gentlemen to their hotel sitting room where there was a little square piano at which "Liszt fired away at William Telland it withstood his powerful hand capitally". Parry sang The Governesswhich tickled the fancy of his audience "But it was all so quiet. After this funny sort of concert at half past six we left for Kilkenny, where we arrived at 11 o'clock. Found everything quite ready for us. Write my Journal. The wind is now howling most frightfully. Lewis is snoring, Joey cramp in his stomach – obliged to fetch him some brandy. Fire out – all very dismal – so now I'll to bed having written 15 pages of this book!"
Tomás O’Crohan, who lived on the Great Blasket Island, recorded the life of this unique community in diary form in Irish at the behest of his student, Brian O’Kelly. In January 1922, he wrote: “Several of the men are on the green. After sending the cattle up the hill they stand chatting together.” (That year, there was no sale for fish or lobsters) “They are completely idle without any occupation but to go to Diarmaid’s house and be arguing with each other until someone would mention it was time for dinner. Then they would bestir themselves to go home and in the evening return again until ten o’clock. When they are arguing together the noise in the house equals that in the great Dáil – one man asserting that there is still time to secure peace, another saying there is not and never will be.”
In 1839, a New Year’s party was enjoyed by Anna Fermina, the Spanish wife of Sir Patrick Bellew of Barmeath, Co Louth. “Among the guests was Lord Glenlyon with his piper. The piper played sundry reels and there were wonderful steps from Lord Glenlyon whose whole soul seems to be centred in his heels and his whole mind to the shaking of them in different ways to the tune of the piper”.
There are an infinite variety of occasions that are described in diaries, but few entries can be as prosaic as that of Mme Daniel Varè who wrote: “February 3rd, 1911. I have had a baby. A girl. Daniel had a stomach ache. Dull day.”