Covering my tracks

Since I was 22 I’ve been keeping notebooks of thoughts and reflections, mostly in diary form and sometimes in ‘morning pages’ form. These notebooks I’ve carted around with me from address to address, cupboard to cupboard.

After a few well-intentioned false starts I’m on a committed project to destroy them all. As I progress into Sniper’s Alley (my 70s) I really don’t want these left behind as a burden or an embarrassment to my family. (I believe this is called Swedish Death Cleaning – look it up.) But I lack the resolve to just pick them up as one bundle and burn them in single cathartic fire.

This too has passed

Before I consign each one to the shredder or the bonfire, I’ve been reading them and making the occasional digital note. I’m less interested in the mental and emotional turmoil which is 80% of it, than the factual information – where I was, who I was spending time with, and what music, if any, I was writing. I’ve torn out and kept first handwritten drafts of songs that made it on my albums. Often these originate ten or more years before the recording and are very different. I’m recording the factual information in Word docs and any observations that seem interesting from my current viewpoint – where I may have anticipated something I do or think now, or where problems I was struggling with have dissipated over the years – or are still pertinent. There’s a huge amount of repetition. I’m aware that this current viewpoint is just a snapshot in time and if I’d done this ten or twenty years ago the notes I’ve kept would have been different. But it’s now or never.

It’s interesting that when I find diary remarks about girlfriends, travel, bandmates, gigs, writing or recording, I can usually picture the situation and think myself back into the mind of that young, or not so young man. However, page after page talks about my ‘professional’ life – managers, clients and projects that all seemed vitally important and urgent but of which I can muster no recollection at all. I can remember close team members from the last twenty years of my employment but the names outside that core – the many senior managers who came and went in the organisations – they’re ghosts to me now. And all these projects, strategies, initiatives were constantly being labelled ‘essential’, ‘vital’, ‘crucial’ when they were nothing of the sort. They were completely ephemeral and forgotten as soon as the next big idea came along. There are so many acronyms there for projects or systems that were the most important thing in the world, but I’ve no idea now what the acronyms stood for. I’d like to go back to that guy who wrote those pages and say ‘Don’t worry!’

My back pages

I opened one envelope today thinking it was my first diaries from 1976 and found neatly written songs in school jotters dating from 1971. Of course I knew I was starting to write songs then but I’d no idea I’d written so many. Well, it’s thank you and goodbye to them. Although I started writing at 15 I generally feel I wrote nothing worthwhile until I was in my 40s. That impression has largely been confirmed! So there’s a lot of paperwork to say goodbye to.

Some of it’s hilarious. I remember in the 90s listening to a young singer in Edinburgh who portrayed himself as a blues singer hollerin’ about the trouble he’d seen, man, and finding it a bit ridiculous. Well I was at it from the moment I discovered Leonard Cohen, dispensing wisdom from my suffering heart at 16! In fact I might start a petition to enshrine it in law that nobody should discover Leonard Cohen until they’re at least 30. Or if you get hooked by him, you’re not allowed near a guitar until you’re 30. OK I know you want a taste of it now. Well …
I’m a blind man travelling
I don’t know where I’m bound
I’m looking for the right direction
But I’m just going xxxxx and xxxxx (fill it in yourself, I just can’t.)

Maybe if I hit my 90s I’ll feel the same about the stuff I write now. I hope I’ll have the grace to laugh.