Is it a significant day when the first appointment that needs to be written into my paper diary of 2025 occurs?

I am a reluctant accepter of the last quarter of 2024. I think the constant rain of 2024 is to blame.  Today is wet and foggy. If I met a person who was wet and foggy I would give them a wide berth. Fog horns and low visibility are not my thing. But in this strange year of weather the yard continues to create growth and produce. My climbing plants are still climbing and the tomatoes still fruiting.

I have had my last haircut of 2024. Mid-October seems extraordinarily early for such a thing and it is the reason to unwrap the diary as my next appointment is January 2025. If this curious weather keeps up I might just about be eating my last outdoor grown tomato at the same time.

I wish I were a better diarist of the mundane things in life, like haircuts and tomatoes. Sometimes it is the little things that are the glue that hold memories together.

2022 home grown tomatoes at Christmas.

2023 no home grown tomatoes at Christmas.

If I kept better written records of the mundane  I could predict the likelyhood of tomatoes in 2024.

In my dreams as a ten year old I was going to keep a diary as encyclopaedic as the very best. My parents bought me a five year diary, with a lock.

The lock stayed firmly locked, nothing occured for five years or indeed 50 or so years that I felt the urge to record in a diary. Then daily blogging occured which is as close as I have ever got to keeping a diary of the mundane.

I am ashamed of my paper diaries, they are a curious cross of notebook and reminder.Scrappy notes with underlinings and arrows fill the pages. Every year I look at a new one and vow to do better. What if I suddenly become famous how will I ever write my biography. The diaries will say I had a lot of haircuts and that a lot of different events had some random notes written but there is nothing significant in them. All that stuff is stored in my head. What will happen when my head starts to fail?

October 14th 2024 a pledge to myself to keep a better written diary. Not starting as you might expect on the January 1st 2025 but starting today in the old diary.

October 15th. Haircut.

October 16th. Ate outdoor grown tomatoes. It was foggy.

Riveting stuff, lets hope I don’t get famous any time soon.

I wonder if this ponder on diary keeping has been caused by my misunderstanding of the word ‘Nostalgia’ I had always thought it simply meant remembering the past or indeed retrieving the past by discussing it with other people. I realise now that nostalgia has an element of thinking the past was better or more comfortable, longing is a word often used. I think I see the past more as a foundation for the now. A resource for learning and often a reason to be grateful and a pathway for the future.

Am I allowed to look back without ‘longing’ but just interested.

We are on a little weekend break to Torbay. Only one hour from home it was one of the holiday destinations of my childhood when it was a seven or eight hour drive.

The weather has been very kind to us and we have walked and basked in autumn sun.

We visited favourite holiday spots from my family holidays of 60 years ago and for the most part they remain almost unchanged. Fairly unchanged too from the Victorian boom years of holiday travel.

Torbay became a holiday destination during the Napoleonic Wars , 1803-15 when European wars forced wealthy British people to stop travelling in Europe. Tourism at that time made the Torbay area one of the wealthiest locations in Britain. Agatha Christie was born in Torquay. Other authors who have lived there include Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, Wilfred Owen, Mary Shelley, Charles Darwin, James Joyce, Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lord Tennyson, James Joyce, Beatrix Potter, T.S Elliot.

My parents visited in the post World War I I era when Torbay was still a hugely popular destination before mass tourism moved on to mainland Europe.

Great physical beauty and slightly faded glamour are good reasons to visit in the 21st Century.

For us the motivation was just to spend some time together as a three +2  dogs who are allowed to run wild on beaches open to them after the summer dog bans.

Lola is not in a photograph as she prefers to dig deep holes in the soft red sand. Not photogenic, and when she involves herself in dead crabs she is not too fragrant either.

Nostalgia also played a part in our little jaunt. We paid a visit to a pub/restaurant I first visited at age 5 with my parents. Built in the 17th century as a fish cellar and net store, the building remains very much as I remember it. The internal decor changed but the physical space not at all. I gave myself free reign to choose from the menu. 5 year old me was only permitted a couple of choices.

20,000 steps well used and ultimately well rewarded with good food.

This is not, as you may at first think a fire,  but a glorious autumn, stormy sunset. At the very bottom of the street are the wharf steps where we either walk down to a beach or, at high tide, enjoy the sound of flisvos on old stone steps.

As Florida waits for Hurricane Milton to touch land, calm views like this seem such a privilege. We will all know how bad it has been by the time our sun rises again.