The Stranger Diaries

room smelled of her. Jo Malone English Pear and Freesia

Why do you keep a diary then?’ I said. ‘What’s the point of it?’
Clare held her wine up to the light and squinted at it. There were thick white candles on the table and they smelled wonderful. Jo Malone, like Clare’s scent.
‘It’s to make sense of things,’ she said, at last. ‘Nothing’s as bad if you put it in writing. It helps you to take control, order things. Find a pattern, like you said. When I was at my happiest, or when I was having most fun, at university, I didn’t write at all. I started again when my marriage began to go wrong. It’s a form of therapy, I suppose. There’s a strange comfort in looking back at your worst times and realising that you got through them.’

‘Diaries don’t tell you what people think. Just what they think they think.

Why do people do this? Why do they pour out their hopes and fears, night after night, to an audience of no one? Clare had this habit of peppering her diary entries with what were clearly quotations. Why did she do that? Did she imagine that her diaries would be read out on Radio 4 one day? Sometimes she even takes the time to attribute the quotes, as if she were writing a sixth-form English essay. ‘Nothing in the world is hidden forever’—Wilkie Collins, No Name. And why, when she was supposedly writing for herself, did she take so much care to craft her sentences? Is married love always a casualty of maternal love? Who the hell is she asking? And all that dialogue, in careful quotation marks. ‘Hope it keeps fine for you.’ It reads like a chick-lit novel, the sort you buy at the airport and regret before the cabin staff have finished their safety demonstration.

I spent many an afternoon there

Bit pathetic, isn’t it? Still living and working in the same place where you were brought up.’
‘At least you’re not still living with your parents.’
‘No,’ he laughed heartily then got the point. ‘Oh. Are you?’

Don’t say ‘what’, say ‘pardon’, my mum would say, although somehow ‘pardon’ turns out to be unforgivably common

She had a low voice—not posh exactly, but very much what you’d hear on Radio 4 announcing some financial disaster.

but it’s just nice to have one male teacher who’s not married or gay

I don’t use Twitter, either, because I’m not famous or mad.