I’ve been keeping a diary since 1999. It started with a faux fur covered faux filofax thing that Father Christmas put in my stocking in 1998, and it’s grown into a shelf and a half of a billy bookcase full of notebooks and diaries. I live with the fear of house fires, and the fear that one day when I’m dead, some relative or stranger will decide to bin them all.
Further to my instagram post about using my 2005 diary in my video work, I’ve had to resort to pooling embarrassing pages from three, because I must have been too distracted by Nu Metal and Punk Rock to write anything much, and waited until 2008 for all the juicy bits. That’s not entirely true, but when I’m trying to tweezer out 41 dates that said things that actually express this time as a whole, it’s easier to use the bits that are funny, and also the bits that I’m still angry about. The difficult bits mean something different now, and I’m finding it freeing to share parts while keeping others hidden. In a private diary, nobody actually really writes the whole truth, anyway. (I don’t think it’s really even possible). Editing my past feels like clarifying it or distilling it, into something that’s maybe more communicative than the whole story would be.
I wanted to add something hand-written by myself to these postcards, to connect them with a separate story that’s being told in another video I mentioned here. It didn’t feel natural at all making new notes, or using the ramblings that are in my current notebook, and the notes I took in the Peter Scott factory didn’t speak to that experience of high school that these parts of the project are aiming towards.
I’ve paired postcard 6 with Hawick High Street. I travelled against the one-way system, because I can break the rules and not get run over when I’m doing another evening-time physically-distanced tour of the town like the rebel I am. I kind of feel that The Horse (The 1514 Memorial) should be approached from the front anyway.
The postcard is dated the 15th of March 1960. 45 years later, on the same date, I had clearly decided that my actual day wasn’t worth writing about, so I instead transcribed the lyrics to the My Chemical Romance song, Helena. It’s a classic.
Jessie Growden 