So The Orwell Prize has commenced publishing Orwell’s own diaries as a blog. A pretty novel idea I reckon, and a great way to try and bring a deceased writer’s diaries to a new audience, using the medium most are comfortable with. The entries are being posted exactly 70 years to the day after they were first written, so they will continue to unfold as the readers drop by. Kinda cool.

Got me thinking though about the whole notion of ‘diaries’ and journals. Writers, artists, activists, politicians, and other people used to keep journals as a matter of course, in eras gone by. Nowadays we have some people blogging and so on, but I wonder if there are diaries we will discover or see published once people pass on, just as they used to.

Does Andrew Bolt have a secret, personal journal detailing his actual love for all things Left? Does Jessica Simpson keep a diary about how hard the transition from bleach-blond-manufactured-but-successful-personality to country-starlet-still-lacking-integrity-but-now-without-the-record-sales-to-point-to has been so far? Will we one day read about George Bush’s ongoing struggle to conform to his buffoon-idiot persona so he can wage a war his daddy really wanted?

Who knows, perhaps people do keep diaries and journals still.

Personally, I have started a diary about 10 times over the past 10 years and always throw in the towel after a few weeks. I like what I put in it but I invariably miss a few weeks and then give up or start writing things just so I fill in the pages, eating any credibility my notes might have (hopefully!) had.

I love the idea of shoe boxes full of Moleskine notebooks and may give one another go and see what happens, but I also think that I am doing much the same thing through the world of blogging that’s now available to me and not hanging on to the leather-bound notebooks of earlier times. I mean, it makes a little sense - people’s stories were once an oral record and presentation, then paper came in and people kept diaries, so now that the internet is about, people move with the times.

Regardless, it’ll be interesting to read what Orwell thought worth recording.