The journey itself was more or less uneventful, apart from the back end of the bus seemingly managing to have an altercation with a stationary lorry whilst stationary. I certainly noticed the secondary knock, sustained as we tried to ease ourselves away. Thankfully we were close enough to the bus station that the driver allowed us to disembark and flee the scene of the crime.

Woke this morning to the news that the art critic and author, John Berger, has died. I remember reading his seminal book, Ways of Seeing, as an art student myself and how readable and understandable he made it all seem. I seem to recall some of his thinking made it into how some characters in my (unmade) televison serial, Dreamscholars, looked at the world.

Ways of looking at the world is something that I’ve been thinking about a bit today. Much of what I am about to say will probably make it into some kind of book review, but I’m very much enjoying reading Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories. The first section – the untold stories of the book title – is untold in two ways. One, because it is actual untold family history and truth that you only discover years later. The other, secondary reason is because, unlike the diary entries that then follow it, this is Bennett looking back at somthing that has not been written about before in diary form. In this way, the two sections, balance themselves out. The first section is a narrative. The second section is a miscellany of life: long reviews of art or music, or accounts of discussions with famous people alongside in every sense of the word with records of the sandwich he made for lunch, or what ordinary thing he watched on television, or a curiousness about something he’s seen on the street. This is my kind of miscellany.

I’m currently reading Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories – it’s been woefully languishing, started, on my To Read pile since 1995. There is something very comforting in these days at the end of the long Christmas break (for me, who finished work last year on 9 December, an extended long Christmas break) that allows for just sitting in one’s lounge with the Christmas tree and music on the stereo, reading.

Next to a good story, this is the perfect time of year to be reading someone’s diaries too. Last night I spent some very enjoyable hours going through my #100HappyDays photos from the last year in order to put together a video review of the year. The act of doing this brought back so many nice memories. Reading the Bennett diaries has a similar effect – particularly reading these one’s which are smack in the middle of my lifetime to date, but still memories of some 20 years ago.

From 2003 to 2009 I kept a diary pretty religiously and it has been nice to go back and look back on, but since then the more ephemeral Facebook and Twitter updates have taken over – or latterly Instagram photos – as the the primary record of my life and its not the same. This is not to say that my life is of interest to anyone. I don’t write posts with the expectation that people will want to read them, much less be interested in them. But looking back on them? They are of interest to Me, and that is why I write them.

In the same way that I spent hours yesterday going back on the last year’s happy days photos, I am going to find some way of converting six year’s of ephemeral social networking activity into something, well, less ephemeral. And I am going to take today as a marker to write in these pages again, so that in 365 days time I spend some time going back and looking back on my life as it had played out.