I'm a bit hypocritical on the stance of diaries. Half the time, it's my unshaken belief that no one should ever be allowed to keep a diary. Children who are encouraged to keep diaries while extremely young and impressionable should be ushered into care by perpetually smiling foster parents while their natural parents are rounded up, given a stern talking to, and then eventually shot while cowering for their lives.

Diaries are a bad thing. Evil. On a scale of evilness ranging from the M25 during a rush hour in which everyone is trying to escape London to vending machines that spill hot coffee that tastes like shit all over your trousers, diaries go off the scale for one simple, easy to follow reason. Anything good that happens to you, and I mean really terribly ecstatically good, will be unforgettable. You'll be giddy for at least two days before you start the comedown from your euphoric high, you'll go through the stage where your friends avoid you because quite frankly that permanent fixed grin on your face has started to unnerve them to the point of reaching for the phone and asking directory enquiries for the nearest sanatorium, and you'll probably also go through the stage of telling everyone you know how wonderful you feel and that you've never felt so alive. So believe me, you'll be able to remember the good times.

What you don't need, and I suspect what no one in their right mind would ever need, is a full written record of every shit thing that's happened to you in your life. You'll remember those as well, and I can bet a quite astonishingly large amount of money that you won't want to and will experiment with strange new world of alcohol poisoning in an effort to be able to say with honesty that you don't know what your name is the following morning. Look what happened to Bridget Jones. Now there's a tragic case of death by pathetic journal writing. Granted she's not dead, for the main reason that she's a creation of Helen Fielding and that always makes people incredibly hard to kill off in a convincing manner, but don't you just wish that she'd stop whining and grow up. Yes, I can hear the irony. Thank you.