364 To Go
By KATHARINE WHITEHORN v _r You turn to the front for handy reference to this tl°o, ignoring rods, poles and perches altogether, begins: son) into an eye-catching beauty!' And a few Pages later on there is a picture of a girl on a roC k : remember) with the caption 'To tan or not to tan? 1°14 ur the ease with which Miss 1960 can blos- Take, for example, the Woman's Own diary.
'Well might our grandmothers feel en- nowadays piled into the her way the question.' The keen reader can work in a bathing dress (this is a woman's diary, way through pictures of Beverley Nichols, laundry hints, comparative oven temperatures, and Pictures of flowers in vases CA little extra time and Patience in arranging your flowers in a vase can Ani.ake them look even more beautiful') to the actual "darY—and even that is choked up with horo- sec.Pe predictions. I don't know why they don't Pri.nt the weather forecast while they're about it it could hardly be less accurate than it is now. The Girl diary is even more bizarre in its way. ,, ere there is obviously an awful confusion either ;nil the minds of the young girls or of their advisers; "ey are offered on consecutive pages pictures of argaret O'Brien, Jean Simmons and Badger Peeping from its Sett; Marcus Morris, Girl "1.oventurers and the World's Athletics Cham- . I:1°ns; and the book opens and closes with highly ' :loured pictures of the Racquet-tailed Motmot and the Yellow-winged Sugarbird. p. Plainly it is now ludicrous to pretend that the „,d,ges.of a diary are simply for ready reference; 4.11 this.is reading matter, but reading matter to able, carried about for 365 days. Does anyone actu- fo Y refer even to the reference pages? I have i,sr a good many years now received each .114.11Uary a Farmer's Marketing Diary with my on the cover in silver. This was the un- (ieri_eseen result of trying for a few months to sell 1,5nYdrated vegetables in Finland in the winter of be 4; In fact the whole project came to nothing veedose the Finns proved to be not wild about abg_etables of any sort and particularly lukewarm enen.t dried ones, but still this diary keeps on nInig to me. anelit tells me when to plant my mangold-wirr,7els iet,4when to put my ewes to tup and what milk to expect from differing brands of cow. And Point about this is not so much that I almost ever Plant mangold-wurzels myself; but that Ply cannot imagine anyone who does leafing with huge earthy fingers through this little book to find out when he should do so. Nor, for the matter of that, do I think the Nursing Mirror diary would be much used by professionals: how would you feel if you saw your nurse looking up your blood-pressure in a chart in her diary? It would rocket at once.
Maybe it is time the Spectator, or somebody, got out a Radical diary. Unlike the Labour Party diary, which offers sentiments plainly applicable before the general election, and not quite so fresh on January 1 as when they were picked, the Radical diary would merely offer a few uneasy suggestions. We could have August 6, 1945 (the date of Hiroshima), printed on a black page. Along with Summer Time Should Begin we could have a terminal date for all the more stone-bottomed of Royal Commissions: it would read Ministry of Housing Inquiry on Pic- cadilly Circus Should End. Instead of stickers saying : 'Tomorrow is my godmother's birthday,' we could have stickers saying : 'Lobby your MP now.' It would be encouraging to record the days of the deaths of a few politicians; and a good idea to print a few political predictions alongside the dates on which they have failed to be fulfilled. People born on a certain day might like to know with whom they shared their fate; that Alan Brien and the Russian Revolution of 1905 both saw the light on March 12; that those who were born on April 1 share the disadvantage with Sid Field, Cicely Courtneidge, Thomas Fowell Buxton (who helped to abolish the slave trade) and Bismarck.
The only thing common to all diaries, it seems, is the times of the full moon—a fact which can surely be of interest only to midwives and were- wolves, reputedly more active then. When I started asking people round the office what, if anything, they would like in their diaries, some said: 'More blank space at the end' and some said : 'More blank space at the beginning.'
One intellectual contributor said he'd like to be able to vary the amount of space given to the various days; he would like, in fact, to write in the days himself. There was nothing else he wanted: not the Sitwells' family tree or the Encounter deadline days or the telephone number of Glyndebourne or even the black-market con- tact for getting Glyndebourne tickets. Just blank space. Which was all Pepys had; but then he only wanted to write a diary.
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