The avocation of diarist is an ancient and respectable one, and certainly historians and biographers have reason to be grateful for their work. The world would be far poorer without the words of Samuel Pepys, Virgina Woolf, James Boswell, or Anne Frank. But few people have the time to keep a journal, and of those who do even fewer have the time to keep one that is genuinely worth reading.

A journal is ideal for recording observations as they occur, and so it is without peer as a means of understanding what it was like to be in a given place at a given time. But daily observations are only that: observation. Taking place as they do in the midst of events, they seldom represent the result of considered thought. The major concern of today is all too often the irrelevancy of tomorrow. It is only when a certain amount of time has passed that we can stop to sift out causation and meaning from events.

Nor do I see any point in documenting the workings of my mind for others to observe. The false starts, blind alleys, errors and corrections I must pass through to arrive at a finished result can only lower me in the estimation of the observers. Hence: no weblog.

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