MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IT is said, with what truth I know not, that the most frequent of all New Year resolutions is the resolution to keep a diary. It is also said that out of every ten persons who at the end of December form this resolution, only two persist to the end of February, and only one till July. This high percentage of casualties is due, I suggest, to the fact that people fail from the outset to differentiate between a diary and an engagement-book. The latter should be stout, solid, uniform and small. It should be portable, indestructible, legible and precise. To each day of the coming year a defined space should be allotted, and within these ,paces should be noted, not merely the motions of the moon and the tides, but also the feasts of the Church and the State. The engagement-book becomes a task-master and a metronome ; it can never become, and one should not expect it to become, either a companion or a confidant. The first rule, therefore, for the in- tending diarist is to realise that between the diary and the engagement-book a great gulf is fixed ; the latter provides equal chronological space for every day of the year ; the former should be subject to no such false restrictions, but should contract and expand even as time itself contracts and expands. If the intending diarist be also a typist he or she will find it convenient to type the diary upon separate quarto sheets carried readily in a file or folder. As the weeks pass the earlier sheets are put away in some more durable receptacle, and at the end of the year the whole bundle is preserved in a book-box with the date of the year legibly inscribed outside. The habit, once acquired, becomes automatic. It would be as irksome to me not to write my daily diary as it would be to miss my shave
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