Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 59 (#litres_trial_promo)
End note (#litres_trial_promo)
Names, Organisations and Acronyms (#litres_trial_promo)
Photographs – The way we are (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Notes (#ulink_5ac1c836-cd14-512e-8e24-4798745f34a7)
On Truth and Diary Writing
It might be assumed that what is written in a diary is true. What would be the point of recording an untrue account of the day’s events? (Unless of course you were a Machiavellian type with nefarious motives.) So yes, my diary is a true record of my day, each day, as it happened.
The truth. But not the whole truth; I’d be up all night if I set out to record everything that happened each day. A diary is a selective account - a moment can expand to pages when everything it meant is written down; long hours can be dismissed in a word, or less.
The truth. But not nothing but the truth. There’s what happened; and then there’s all the rest - how I felt about it, what I think it means, or could mean, for me, for others. Interpretation, elaboration, speculation, recrimination, extrapolation and commentary all embellish the event.
This is a true story, written day by day in my diary, volume twenty-one of thirty-seven (so far), but it is my truth, coloured by my perceptions of what was important for me to record, at that time, on that day. How I saw something then is not necessarily how it would appear to another observer, or how it would appear to me at another time. It is the truth of that moment.