Recently, I discovered something of a gem on Radio 4. On Tuesday evenings (at 6.30pm) you can listen to various celebrities sharing extracts from their teenage scribblings on My Teenage Diary. Anyone who kept a diary as a teen, or who can remember being that age can imagine just how cringeworthy and hilarious this might be. This is now the second series (I’m gutted I missed the first) and has so far featured Sheila Hancock’s journal of her first trip to France aged 14; Victoria Coren’s tales of a teenage life in which interviewing celebrities was less exciting than going on actual dates; and Julian Clary’s early university obsessions – all fabulous.

Unsurprisingly this prompted me to dig out my diaries. I think I first regularly kept a diary from the age of 13, but prior to that any time we were on holiday, journalling was compulsory – beginning with scrapbooks and continuing into the proper (obsessive) travel diaries I still keep whenever I go somewhere interesting. When I extracted the box the really old ones are kept in, I thought I knew what I’d find. My main diaries (1994 onwards) are basically a chronicle of every boy I ever liked – ridiculous crushes, friends who were boys, unobtainable and unsuitable men – and copious details of singing weekends, arguments with friends and related traumas. Not particularly interesting.

What did interest me was the discovery of a notebook in which I journalled two consecutive summer holidays, one aged 12 (1993) beginning at Guide Camp and continuing in Bavaria and the following year’s less exotic trip to Yorkshire (in our new, but second hand, trailer tent). Not least because each day’s entry was written in a different colour – a practice I know for a fact was continued in my New Zealand journal (2008) and New York diary (2009) – I’m clearly a creature of habit.

It’s long been a joke that my travel diaries basically list the food I’ve eaten, and this was no exception. Even short entries mention dinner or at least an ice cream – and could get very specific. For example:
1/8/93: “…we drove to Bad Tolz and had a look round and a coke & calippo (strawberry).” You can kind of understand the interest in food when in a foreign country – there were no end of interesting things to explore…
8/9/93: “Miriam and I had sausages and ‘cola mix’. (Cola mixed with lemonade, yum.)” [There is nothing more exotic than mixing Coke and lemonade in the same glass, clearly.] But, even on holiday in glamorous York, food was an important topic:
1/8/94: “…I had to have a cornish pasty cos I didn’t like any of the sandwiches…” Fortunately, by the time another picnic rolled round two days later, Mother had learnt a valuable lesson: “When she was at Sainsburys, Mum had bought me an egg and cress sandwich.” 

In fact, food wasn’t the only tedious feature of these diaries, shopping was carefully listed too – though as this was often food related, there is a connection. It seemed that on every holiday there was an opportunity for a little bit of retail therapy. At Guide camp it consisted of a trip to the tuck shop where I bought “a white toblerone, some penny sweets and a badge for my camp blanket saying ‘Cherry Green Trees’.” In Germany, it was all about the chocolate (quelle surprise) – “I bought a mini pack of Ritter Sport to share with my friends and 2 bars of normal RS (Peppermint & Cornflake) for me & Mims to share.” [Personally, I’m dubious just how truthful the use of the word ‘share’ was. I flipping love Ritter Sport.] Even in York I was able to satisfy shopping needs, not to mention my bookworm tendencies: “…then we went into Blackwells where I bought: Joey & Co in the Tirol, The Chalet School Reunion, Prefects of the Chalet School & Zlata’s Diary. Boy wasn’t I a happy bunny! Eventually we found Lakeland Plastics where I bought a new lunchbox and Mum bought some lids to put on cans to keep the fizz in.” [The search for the Lakeland Plastics shop was chronicled in detail, so must have been an extremely important element of the day.]

A key feature of our summer holidays was often my birthday – frequently right at the beginning of our time away. This meant that birthday gifts were dutifully recorded in the journal, and, for some reason, birthday cards. On my 12th birthday I listed every card I received, which is how I can tell you that I had two from my sister and one from Bubble and Squeak (our gerbils). On my 13th birthday I went for a slightly different angle, ranking all my cards in order of how tasteful they were (oh yes, this is what I spent my first hours as a teenager doing…). So, whilst my paternal aunt gave me a “v tasteful” card, both sets of grandparents’ were “not tasteful” – one card even managed to score high taste points from me, whilst my father thought it wasn’t tasteful at all! (Plus, yet again I had two cards from Mim – though fortunately both were tasteful and one was handmade.)

Aside from the strange lists of food, shopping trips and birthday cards, the journals also had odd gems and insights into our family life. The following were personal favourites:

1/8/93
“…but then we had to stand through an extremely boring serviece in GERMAN!” [We were in Germany, I can’t think why this was surprising.]

7/8/93
“In the evening M&M [me and Mims] had McDonalds in the car while M&D [Mum and Dad] had dinner outside a restaurant. While we ate Miriam ruined the Talking Heads tape by jamming it into the tape player. Mum and Dad were angry, as it was new.” [It emerges that this was their wedding anniversary. I would also like to question the wisdom of playing Talking Heads to a 9 year old – which is how old Mim was at the time.]

9/8/93
“…later on Mim and I watched Neighbours (in German and 6 years behind us).” [If I remember correctly, it was an episode in which Harold and Paul got stuck in a lift together. Again, why was I so surprised by the German?]
“When we got home Miriam went to sleep because she was VERY bad tempered!* (*Mims didn’t want me to write this!)” [I can imagine that as with all my other diaries, my sister was a regular reader of my travel journal.]

30/7/94
“I was wearing my new dress and straw hat.” [It was my 13th birthday, how the heck did I willingly agree to wearing a straw hat?! Incidentally, we were at a wedding, it wasn’t my party outfit.]
“After 5 mins xxxxxxx came and sat 2 rows behind us – I was thrilled!” [Far more typical of a 13 year old’s diary entry. Until I read that sentence I’d forgotten that particular inappropriate crush had existed! But how pathetic to get excited that someone had sat a whole 2 rows behind me at a wedding?!]

And finally, possibly my favourite sentence of all – particularly because it began a day’s entry, so was obviously the most pressing thing on my mind:

1/8/94
“Today, we discovered that The Independent is now 30p! [Big letters.] Dad was shocked! He never thought The Independent would lower its price.” 
Oh yes, the fact that The Independent had followed in the footsteps of tabloids and The Times in engaging in a price war was major news in the Clutterbuck household. This also means that by 1994 we had entered our phase of reading The Independent rather than The Guardian – this lasted for a few years, until my parents got annoyed with the former and returned to their natural newspaper.

Apologies, this is an extraordinarily long post – I must have got rather carried away. For once I’d actually have been willing to supplement it with photos from the same era, but sadly I have none in London. (I’d be particularly interested in one of me in the wedding outfit complete with straw hat, especially as I believe all I wore around that time were leggings and baggy t-shirts – how the 90s treated us well.)