The Diary Of A Nobody - Introduction

INTRODUCTION Written sometime in the year 2022

If I were to say the word DIARIST whose name would immediately come into your mind ?

Ann Frank who died in 1945 in Bergen-Belsen convention camp.

Samuel Pepys who began writing his diary in 1600.

Or perhaps Jeffrey Archer the former Conservative Member of Parliament and millionaire author who added to his fortune writing a prison diary when he was banged up in 2001 for perverting the course of justice.

Who was perhaps the most prolific diary writer ?  Queen Victoria wrote in excess of eight million words in her diary but on her death in 1901 her daughter Princess Beatrice destroyed many of the books in which her mother had told stories the family did not want to be in the public domain.

I wonder if Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II wrote a diary. I think she may well have done but how many years will it be before it appears in print ?  Not in my lifetime I am thinking.

This is the diary of a nobody, David John Bekah Ashford writing under the pen-name of Max Robinson. When it comes to being a nobody I am a mega star.

2023, the year in which I will reach my seventy-third birthday. Flippin’ heck !  The picture on the right (above) is how I look but there are increasingly more days when I feel physically older. The picture on the left was taken when I was sixteen and that is how I feel mentally and is physically how I want to be. Who is responsible for dates within the calendar ? If you believe Gilbert and Sullivan (Pirates of Penzance) it is The Astronomer Royal and for my money he got things for me more than a bit wrong. 3^rd November 2023 will not be my seventy-third birthday but the day when seventeen candles twinkle on my birthday cake.

2020 The Year That Never Was. Pandemic and lockdown. 2021 More of the same. 2022 on a personal level this was a year of illness, twice admitted to hospital urgent care and then in December falling over breaking my right arm, bruising my left hand and breaking my nose – as if I am not ugly enough ! Perhaps I was simply experiencing symptoms of old age.

2022 was a beautiful year as we celebrated our Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, sadly followed by the passing of Her Majesty. Political chaos, are not politics and chaos one and the same thing ? Liz Truss the shortest serving prime minister our country has ever known. Industrial action, cost of living soaring like a rocket to the moon. What will 2023 bring ? With our NHS in crisis, politicians refusing to engage, Postman Pat on strike, with so many others striking and the war in Ukraine affecting the world things do not look good. This nobody is going to keep a diary to record all that happens.

Saturday 31^st December 2022:

Something strange happened. I awoke in the very small hours, before 1am and reached for my laptop to type up a dream I had just experiences.

I had another dream on Saturday 24^th September 2022, I dreamed the plot for a story

WEALTH BEHIND BARS. I wrote something for the story every day until Tuesday 15^th November by which time I had penned 25,505 words. I then set the story aside as MILTON KEYNES THE CITY OF LEGEND took over my life. When that was published I began compiling my anthology POETRY THE MELODY OF WORDS. I am in the final stages of checking the text ahead of offering it to Amazon tomorrow. I will then return to Wealth Behind Bars.

I am excited about returning to this story, I love the characters and the way they develop within the story line but that story line is moving simultaneously in multiple directions. How to draw everything together and bring the tale to an end is going to be a problem. Was going to be a problem. Past tense. I have just dreamed and typed up five hundred and twenty-eight words ending the story and filling me with excitement as I bring the tale from November to its soon to be January ending.

To end this introduction please  join me on New Year Eve 2022 to say Happy Eighth Birthday to my beautiful granddaughter Frances.