THE past is another country. Even if it's our own. At some point over Christmas I looked out a couple of old diaries. For the years 1995 and 1997. I spent an hour or two wallowing in all my yesterdays.

They’re not, I’m afraid, the most revealing of reads. Mostly a list of films seen and books read. But you can hear the persistent rumbling low noise of boredom and uncertainty running through them.

Which is weird more than a quarter of a century on given that those years were big ones for me. The year 1995, after all, was the last before I became a dad (there’s a weekend in October marked in the diary where I suspect my first daughter was conceived) and 1997 was the first year after. (Did I keep one in 1996? Or was I just too busy?)

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It’s always a disappointment when I bring them out from time to time and browse through. Because they are not the resonant time capsules I want them to be. It’s why I’ve got rid of most of the ones that date back to the late 1980s and early 1990s. It’s not just because of the boredom catalogued. It’s that they were boring too.

There’s a skill in being a diarist, one I never acquired unfortunately. Reading the filmmaker Derek Jarman’s diaries (as gathered together in books such as Modern Nature and Smiling in Slow Motion) I’m always struck by his eye for the piquant detail, the well-rounded story, the sense of a life lived at full tilt even in the face of his Aids diagnosis.

“Men, pink as Pacific prawns, barely covered by their small bath towels, stroll along the ancient floral carpets to the bathrooms,” he writes of a stay in Glasgow’s Central Hotel in October 1989. A throwaway remark that’s also a movie scene in waiting.

“I exist in the spaces between these words,” he also writes at one point. Now, all these years after his death, he exists in the words themselves.

By comparison, I’m not sure my June 24, 1995 entry has quite the same piquancy. “Seinfeld’s back – such bliss.” Samuel Pepys will probably be turning in his grave.

That said, there is a life being led in my diaries. One that can be spotted in the margins. There are mentions of people I had forgotten. More poignantly, there are appearances by the people I have lost in the years since. My dad. My wife.

As a result, for all the low-grade grumpiness recorded in their pages and for all their evasive emptiness, they have become, in retrospect, a vision of a land of lost content, one I would return to in an instant if I could.

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This year, 2022, would have been a good one for a diary. I’ve changed jobs, moved house after 20 years, ordered my wife’s memorial stone and had most of the summer off for the first time since I was a student. Oh, and I’ve been in a proper car crash (no one hurt, thank goodness. But the car’s a write-off).

The baby conceived between the lines in that October weekend diary entry in 1995 left home this year and moved into her own flat on the other side of the River Forth. Her younger sister turned 21. Oh, and the Queen died and we had three Prime Ministers and a winter World Cup and I finally stopped off in Carlisle for once.

But it’s not down on paper anywhere. Well, actually, I guess it is now, here. But in 20 years from now (if I’m even still about) I’ll not have a paper record of what this year has felt like in my head.

So, I’ve been thinking I should have another go in 2023. Get myself a notebook and write down the odd thing as the days pass. Maybe not about sitcoms this time. If I make it as far as February I’ll let you know.