I’ve kept a journal since I first came to London, nearly 40 years ago. Those journals have slowly accumulated on the top shelf above my writing desk, until they were crammed up to the ceiling and in danger of toppling. What to do with all these words, this record of my life lived mostly in south London?

It is a strange business. It’s rare that I take down a journal and flick through it or read an entry. Yet writing in my journal is a habit I don’t want to give up. The compulsion to record my day, to reflect on and try to make sense of painful or difficult events, or to capture moments of delight, joy, cultural enrichment – that impulse is still strong. Writing is my way of processing the world around me, and the world inside my head. A friend I’ve lost touch with, a practising Catholic, once suggested to me that this reflective activity is akin to prayer. An interesting perspective, though I have no sense of addressing or appealing to a higher being.

Nonetheless, I’d rather not die under an avalanche of self-reflection. Would these journals ever be of interest to anyone else, in the future, when I’ve ceased to exist? According to the archivist at Wandsworth Heritage Service, in a word – yes. Of the 40 odd years living in London (and yes, there have been some very odd years), the vast majority have been in Wandsworth, mostly Battersea, with a few years in Southfields early on.

So I have taken down my journals, dusted them, stacked them in date order and will box them up ready to go to Wandsworth Heritage Service. There are 140 journals, and end to end they measure 2 metres and 33.5 centimetres. It proved too tricky/time consuming to weigh the whole caboodle, but needless to say, together they are damn heavy.

It was interesting to see the variety of journals I’ve used over the years, starting with soft-backed lined exercise books I bought in Chinatown, Melbourne, before I first headed overseas. In the ‘middle years’, when I had more disposable income, there are a few deluxe Italian journals as well as quite a few hardback plain paged volumes from Paperchase. More recently, for both cost and environmental reasons, I source my journals from charity shops. If the pages are lined, I just ignore the lines and cram in as much as I can, semi-legibly, on a page.

I feel very happy that my journals are going to become part of Wandsworth’s archives. The borough’s Heritage Service is a wonderful and important resource for those interested in the history of the area, and has proved invaluable to me for research and creative stimulation. If you want to rifle through the pages of my journals, you’ll have to wait, as they will be closed to the public until at least the centenary of my birth, by which time I’ll almost certainly have popped my clogs or, as Emma the archivist pointed out, if I haven’t, I’m unlikely to be bothered. In a slightly meta fashion, I will write about writing this blogpost in my current journal tonight. And to the archivists, biographers and nosy people in the future, leafing through those closely scrawled pages, I hope you spot the very occasional apology for my semi-legible meanderings.