Here's my effort. This is the whole thing, as an unreasonable and arbitrary character limit on the site stopped me uploading the whole thing:
I am 51 years old. I live in Seaford, a small, highly parochial, south coast Sussex town, where, coincidentally, my uncle Lewis Roper was vicar many years ago. I live in a rented house on a hill near the outskirts of the town with my wife, Helen, who works as a school librarian, and my two children Will, aged 15 and Jo aged 12, who attend Seaford Head Community College, the same school where their mother works.
I slept badly last night and had to rise at 5.30 to attend the second day of a conference in London. I’ve recorded the conference proceedings and my impressions on my blog at http://tomroper.typepad.com, so I don’t propose to repeat myself here. I feel considerably constrained though by the absence of anonymity. There are personal matters and feelings that I would happily have future generations read, but which I would have some difficulty parading in public for my contemporaries.
I should also say that this diary is covered by a Creative Commons licence: reuse is permitted, indeed encouraged, provided attribution is maintained.
I don’t know why I slept so badly; my mother died a little under a month ago, so that may have something to do with it. Also, though a librarian with nearly thirty years experience, I have been unemployed for seven and a half months, which has taken its toll. Or maybe I was affected by the stimulus of the first day of the conference, of hearing ideas and theories from my professional peers, something I haven’t experienced for a long time.
The matter of unemployment may need some explanation for future readers: you may find it hard to comprehend a society that wastes the talents of its citizens. But such is the case; I had a wonderful and highly enjoyable job working in a new medical school one of several set up to increase the medical workforce. By rights my contract should have run out at the end of 2005 but they were kind enough to extend it for a couple of months. Since then I’ve been unemployed. I’m not sure where I’m going. I may change career completely.
It is a warm and windy October morning. This autumn has been very hot. But rain threatened by the weather forecasters has not come to pass, so after, in the army term, “a shit, shower and shave”, dressing in a grey suit, blue checked shirt, an agreeably loud tie and some suede brogues, and my usual breakfast of muesli, toast and honey, washed down with tea, I leave the house, the others still asleep, and walk down through Seaford to the station.
Seaford being the terminus, I have no difficulty finding a seat with a table. I am not a regular traveller on this service, and there is a certain unspoken hostility from those who catch commuter trains regularly towards casual travellers like me. The journey to Victoria station takes around an hour and a half. For all that my ancestors would not recognise many of the things I have, the mobile telephone I carry, the iPod on which I listen to music, the PowerBook G4 notebook computer on which I compose this, write my blog entries and browse RSS feeds on the course of the journey, it is one of the intriguing facts that our trains run no faster, and indeed are more cramped and uncomfortable than a hundred years ago. To emphasise this point, the train into London was delayed, first, the driver tells us in a world-weary voice on the train’s public address system, by trespassers on the live near Earlswood, then by the emergency services.
I arrive a few minutes late at Victoria and take the tube to Kensington High Street. For the 25 years, I lived in London, I travelled by tube, but I still feel the same excitement I used to feel as a small boy at a trip on the underground when I was brought up from Cambridge for the day. The memory of the bombings of 7 July 2005 is still fresh in many travellers’ minds, which adds a frisson.
The conference is in a Kensington hotel, in one of those non-descript chain hotels that could be anywhere in the world. The guests seem to be a mixture of airline crews, presumably from Heathrow, late-season tourists, the elderly, not bound by school holidays, and delegates to the conference. Pausing to buy some shoelaces from a shoe repair shop at the underground station, I arrive late, and the speaker has started but I don’t think I’d missed very much. There is wifi access in the hotel, but it’s very expensive: I grumble with another delegate and we wonder why free ubiquitous wifi is so slow in coming. The coffee is execrable, but then conference coffee usually is. Lunch is odd, but I slip out and have some better coffee in a nearby café. Towards the end of the conference, I meet someone I once worked with, very long ago, though she hasn’t changed a bit. I, I’m sure, appear very much older. There was a brief flirtation between us, though I doubt if she remembers. I do not mention it.
I head for Victoria on the tube, and have a drink in the station bar. I drink a large glass of rosé, which looks pretty and seems modish at the moment. I don’t care, it tastes nice. On the train home, I drink some more wine from the trolley.
When I arrive home I eat some cold lamb, the remains of a joint of Harris lamb I roasted at the weekend, with a baked potato. Everyone else has already eaten. In any case, we never eat together as a family: such is the fragmentation of the modern family. The children go to their rooms where they have televisions and computers. I go to bed around 10.30, after an evening of writing up conference reports.
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