Came into the New Year with Leigh, Boo, Nirpal and Holly – champagne in glasses, clinking then one-arm-hugging, Boo getting squashed. TV on for the countdown. Fireworks outside, and still going at 2 a.m. after we’d gone to bed (just the three of us, not N and H).
Januar 1 is the first day of Diary, A Writer’s Diary in its Substack form. Leigh gave me this softback journal for Christmas, when the one I usually keep is hardback, so I’m going to use this as a Diary Diary – if there’s enough to say.
We got up quite early and packed endless baby stuff and drove to St Leonard’s for a day and overnight stay with Lexi and David in their beloved crumbling and smoky house. We were three cars back from the police stopping motorway traffic on the drive down – a car had hit the inner barrier, dug up a trough of earth and fag ends. We arrived three quarters of an hour late. Emily there with Mingus, the friendly long-haired dog. A walk along the front, out onto the pier. Compliments on Boo. Food outside, a Sussex smokie. Back at Lexi and David’s, from my laptop, as we talked about the horror of universities at the moment, I sent out the first day of the Diary. Didn’t mention it. (We all work in universities.) There are about 500 subscribers, added before I launched on December 13th (Mum’s birthday). These were people previously subscribed to my blog, but also those whose email addresses I’ve collected over a decade – if they wrote to me or engaged positively. I know lots of these don’t work, but for morale it’s good to start with someone there.
Leigh has read last year’s diary, and has asked me not to include Jack so much in this year’s. She thinks he might resent being minutely recorded. I think he might equally love it. Everyone else, all his contemporaries, will have videos, or nothing, because the videos will be lost when the cloud evaporates. But I’ll do as she asks. Jack/John/Boo is cute and endearing. It’s fair to assume I’m sleep-deprived, even if it’s not explicitly mentioned. Soon we will enter the Dread Realm of Colic.