greetings! my dear ghost

notes on the personal archive

The year is 2003. I am seven years old in a blue velvet tracksuit. I sit at a round table with a brown leather cover that makes the table look like a giant chocolate digestive. I am hungry. The house smells of soup, warm and salty, and belongs to Stacey’s grandparents. Stacey, my school friend, is just home from Florida—a far-off land I have never heard of. I am jealous.

We move through to the living room, and Stacey’s nanna puts in a VHS tape of a cartoon adaptation of Enid Blyton’s The Magic Wishing Chair. I sit on the flattened leather sofa, and Stacey produces a framed photo of herself kissing a dolphin. His name is Bluey. I am annoyed because I love dolphins. I have five dolphin figurines on my shelf at home. Well, my big sister does. Passing the picture back, I imagine the cold, silky feel of the dolphin’s mouth, the salt in his smiley kiss. I am sad, knowing that this experience is beyond my realm of possibility. I am about to make an excuse to go home when her nanna hands me a little paper bag. A gift from her holiday that will change my life.

In the bag was a small red journal with lined pages. It had a shiny cover, like a Poundland gift bag. I don’t remember how I felt being given it, only that I reasoned myself out of my jealousy after that. How can I put it? The journal and I became inseparable. Overnight, it became my best friend, secret world, vault, sketchbook, spellbook, sleepover planner, and confidant. It took me a year to fill, my writing getting smaller and closer-knit as I reached its final pages. I mourned it when it was full, in the way that children mourn missing teddy bears. But I acquired another, and I kept going.

Do all writers recall their first journal with such clarity and sentimentality? It might be something that unites us all. I love what Virginia Woolf said about deciding to keep a journal:

I fancy old Virginia, putting on her spectacles to read of March 1920, will decidedly wish me to continue. Greetings! my dear ghost; and take heed that I don’t think 50 a very great age. Several good books can be written still; and here’s the bricks for a fine one.

I can’t say my first journal has in it ‘the bricks’ for a fine book, though reworkings of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, it has a few. However, it gave me essential access to my inner world—a vaster, more colourful land than that of swimming pools and captive marine animals. As a council estate kid, that was everything.

It is childish, but even my current journal retains the quality of an invisible friend for me. It is as if the soul of that first journal has persisted through each that came after it. Cheap gift shop paper gradually gave way to creamy 90 gsm pages, lines gave way to plain, borrowed biro gave way to black gel, and shiny covers gave way to fabrics and leathers. And yet, I never feel as though I am starting over. Opening a new journal always goes a little like this: hi again, diary, sorry it took me so long to find you a new body. Nowt at Waterstones last weekend.

I find it strange that Woolf speaks of her mature self, the one rediscovering her old words, as the ghost. I have always thought of this in reverse. The ghost is the child who wanted to kiss a dolphin. She gets to, by the way, though she’ll have to wait six or so years.

Is this not the beauty of this kind of personal archive? The opportunity it creates for us to greet the ghost of our former self. There is such pleasure in meeting that ghost, her dreams and desires laid bare upon the page, with the knowledge of which will—or thank goodness, will not—manifest in the years ahead of her. It strikes me now that the soul I sense between covers, shiny or leather, might simply be my own.

Greetings! My dear ghost. You shall make it to the faraway land of the United States.

Your dolphin will be named Iggy. And, rest assured, your photograph will be way better than Stacey’s.