by Dear Diary, I fell down a genuine rabbit hole tonight instead of doing anything productive, reading a piece about the whole long history of London satire, running from actual printed pamphlets centuries ago right through to now, and found myself thinking about my own small diary entries in a completely different light by the time I finished it.
I write about outfit disasters and Tube delays and flatmates walking in at bad moments, and I’ve always thought of it as fairly small, personal stuff, not remotely connected to anything as grand-sounding as a “tradition.” But apparently London has been doing exactly this, in one form or another, for hundreds of years: ordinary people writing down the specific, slightly absurd texture of daily life in this particular city, and other ordinary people reading it and recognising themselves in it.
What actually struck me about the piece
The bit that stayed with me was less about the pamphlets themselves and more about the observation, made in passing, that London satire has always tended to dismantle its targets quite politely, with a raised eyebrow rather than a shout. That’s more or less exactly what I do, on a much smaller and considerably less consequential scale, every time I write about a Tube delay ruining an outfit rather than simply complaining about it outright. The eyebrow-raise, not the shout. I didn’t know I was participating in a tradition. I thought I was just venting.
Whether this changes anything
Probably not, practically speaking. I’m still going to write about dating app small talk and flatmates and Tube delays, because that’s genuinely what my life is currently made of, and I don’t have any grander ambition for these entries than getting today’s specific chaos down before I forget the funny bits. But there’s something oddly comforting about reading a proper history piece and recognising a version of what you do yourself, tucked into a much longer, much grander story than you’d ever have claimed for it on your own.
What I told Priya about it
I read her the best bits over dinner, and she said, entirely deadpan, “So you’re telling me your diary entries about men not texting back are historically significant now?” Put that bluntly, obviously not, and I laughed properly at how deflating she made it sound. But I think there’s something true underneath the joke too: the small, specific, slightly embarrassing stuff is often exactly what actually survives, long after the grander headlines from the same week have been completely forgotten by everyone who read them.
Either way, I’m going to keep writing the small stuff. Tube delays and all. Apparently I’m in good company.
What I’ll actually do with this newfound sense of tradition
Nothing dramatic, realistically. I’m not about to start writing with any greater formality or pretending these entries are more important than they actually are. But there’s a small, quiet pleasure in knowing that somewhere, centuries from now, if anyone ever bothers digging through what ordinary Londoners actually wrote about their own lives in this particular decade, mine might be sitting somewhere in that pile, right next to someone else’s Tube complaint and someone else’s bad first date. That feels, oddly, like exactly the right company to keep.
One more thing before I close the laptop
I went back and reread a few of my own older entries after finishing the history piece, partly out of curiosity and partly to see whether they held up now that I was thinking of them, however loosely, as part of something with actual roots. They did, mostly, though a few made me wince slightly at how much I’d once cared about someone I can barely remember caring about now. That’s probably part of the tradition too, if I’m honest: writing something down with total sincerity in the moment, and reading it back later with the specific, gentle embarrassment of realising how much has quietly changed since.
The entry that made me laugh hardest, rereading tonight
There was one from early this year, about a man I’d completely forgotten existed, that ended with a genuinely earnest sentence about how I thought he might be “the one who finally sticks.” He did not stick. I couldn’t, reading it back tonight, even remember his surname without scrolling back through old messages to check. That’s either a slightly sad commentary on how quickly these things fade, or a genuinely reassuring one, depending entirely on the mood I’m in when I choose to read it that way.
What I’m doing with all these old entries now
I’ve decided, tentatively, to start a small yearly tradition of my own: rereading the whole year’s worth of entries every December, purely to see what’s actually stuck versus what felt enormous at the time and turned out to be entirely forgettable within months. It feels like a small, private version of exactly the tradition that history piece described, minus the pamphlets and the several centuries of hindsight. Give it time, presumably, and given enough patient years, it might genuinely earn those too, eventually, in its own small way.
