Diary of a Madman

Literally:

It stops a few days later. There is no name.

This is one of the saddest things I've found.

The Age of Derek

Here are the latest offerings from the Book of Derek (if you're new to this blog and the name of Derek (Peace be upon Him) means nothing to you, then click here):

"And then in the bus station, Jacki Richards jumped out on me. It was more than I was willing to endure. With some force I told her to stop haunting me, that she was making a laughing stock of herself and that I was a married man who was twice her age and more and not prepared in any way to compromise his marriage even by a shadow of a relationship with another woman. She turned pale and said that it was my friendship she wanted.

We then got on the bus and I invited her to sit next to me. She started to make banal conversation. I told her that such conversation was an anathema to me. I then got out my book and started reading. She fidgeted."


"I made a terrible joke in one of the marriages I performed today. The surname of one bride was 'Winter'. At the end of the ceremony I shook her by the hand and said 'Fear not, Winter is past.' There was silence; and then a great roar of laughter from the guests."


"The town has been invaded by thousands of scooter bikers, many of them as shorn and decorated as Lamanites. There have been a few dozen arrests already. As I went to catch the bus this morning, one was wandering about wrapped in a purple blanket, his blond (sic) moll in tow. They were seeking breakfast without too much success at that hour of the morning. While I was standing in the bus station they dragged themselves by. After a while they returned. The lad was shouting at his moll 'How stupid! Fancy thinking we'd find them in a f*****g coach station!' He was not a man I would introduce to my daughters."


"A new temporary lady started with us today. She drove me home in her little mini and bombarded me with questions about the Church the whole way.

A most articulate blackman came into my office this afternoon to complain about Mr Limpet, who treated him in a most brutal and insulting manner for merely passing through the wrong door. The man was most upset. I put him on the internal line to Mr Woodcock, who is seeking enough evidence to damn Limpet once and for all.

Unfortunately a Labour Council is in power at the moment and they will defend their own kind, however villainous they be, to the death. That is their sadness."


"Well, my imprecation at the Creative Writing Group was a great success this morning. As one gets used to the other members of the class, one tends to notice a polarisation of views on various aspects of literature that show the period of others of greater age as opposed to the younger members. And there is a strong streak of feminism in Kathy Jones, probably due to her unhappy marriage. The subject of bad language came up and there was a tendency to say the use merely reflected the reality of life. Pam Bolloch said that she would rather not hear such realities; and that was an end of the subject."


"Last Saturday when I was in the garden, Richard decided that we ought to make a gift of some of our rhubarb to Mrs Reames. He pulled out a stick and proferred it to her. All though (sic) it had not been my intent to bless her, I did not want to seem mean so I gave her a dozen sticks. I then took the opportunity of discussing her youngest son with her. He has been coming out of her flat then leaping over our side wall to get out to the road via our gateway. I suggested to his mother in the kindest way that it was possible that my foot might come in violent collision with his crutch if he did not desist. He seems to be desisting."


"We wasted our home evening last night by watching part of the Sound of Music. Despite our many watchings the magic of this film remains, in spite of the fact that Sue draws our attention to details that are best left unnoticed, such as Julie Andrews wet armpits in one dress. And there is a lovely scene where Christopher Plummer calls Julie Andrews 'captain' instead of 'Fraulein', a line fluff that the filmmakers have kept in, and a wise decision it was."

The Further Adventures of Derek

As some readers of this blog will know, four months ago I came across a large box of journals written by a man called Derek. They were about to be thrown into a skip, as they had no resale value. But when I started to look through the foolscap files of typed A4 pages, I realised that I had found something special.

At first I laughed at Derek's diaries for their Pooterish prose; but as I got to know him, I felt a growing respect for this seemingly ordinary man who was plagued by extraordinary thoughts and desires.

In addition to his devout Mormon faith and passion for books, Derek's diaries reveal a man of eclectic tastes, from this:

To this programme from 1975:


I can imagine Derek enjoying an evening of jolly fol-de-rols with the King's Singers, but his passion for wrestling took me completely by surprise.

The saddest thing about Derek's diaries was his constant use of the word posterity. Derek clearly believed that his carefully-typed pages would be cherished by his descendants, but instead they were disposed of as part of a job lot with his book collection.

I have just finished reading Derek's diaries from 1988. Here is a typical extract:

The day is cold and gloomy, though dry. I spent the morning repairing one of my temple garments; I also hit the street to renew a book at the library and also buy some oats and peas for the rabbits. While I was in the shop, a man in motor cycle gear asked me if the oats were for rabbits. He spoke curiously. Anyway, he then ordered two pounds of mixed molasses. I asked him if they were for a lion. The girl serving us broke into laughter; he did not.

I repeated my fatuous remark. He then said "I do not understand what you say. I am deaf." No answer to that!

Bikers were obviously a problem for Derek. On another occasion he wrote:

Over the weekend the town has been full of "bikers", scooterists from all parts of the country, who foregather in the open spaces and spend their time drinking endless cans of lager.

This would have been a perfectly innocuous sentence, but the addition of two words - scooterists and foregather - inject a Pooterish element into Derek's prose.

Derek desperately wanted to be a writer and as he approached retirement, joined a creative writing class:

Well, I read out my piece of work on the history of the View through a Window in class today, and Mrs Jones suggested that I either offer it to the local newspaper or send it to Pilkington's house magazine. But read out to Brenda at dinnertime, it did not seem to have the same quality; I thought it a trite piece of work, Try as I may, I seem unable to get into my writing that density, that texture that is the quality of true writing. My piece seemed only like a clever piece of sixth form tomfoolery.

I felt rather like Charles Ritchie who wrote in his journal: "...always this piece of staring white paper in front of me with the few and feeble words strung across it. Nothing could be more stubborn than my devotion, nothing more stupid than my persistence. After all, I have written nothing - I will write nothing. Twenty years have not been enough to convince me of my lack of talent."

And yet I have prayed about this matter, asking my Father for time and opportunity to write if my talent is real. I believe he has answered that prayer. I cannot believe that he has blessed my efforts to retire in order to cast me on a barren shore. There are riches here if only I will persevere. But it will involve me in taking life far more seriously than hitherto.

But I would argue that Derek's weakness as a writer - his constant use of Biblical words and phrases like foregather and persevere- is that very thing that makes his diaries so appealing. Derek has a voice that is very much his own and thanks to the internet, some of his writing can now have more readers than he would have dreamed possible.