Keep a diary. Not just the kind where you note appointments and addresses and the birthdays of your family and friends. A diary that tells of your doings and thoughts, maybe just five or, ten lines written at the end of the day. Regularly someone says "The leaves are very late coming out this year", and you might just, have been interested enough to have noted when they were emerging twelve months before. Or did you and J.H. really catch two pounders in that wonderful little river that was? And will you ever forget the first time you stood on Errisbeg and saw Mount Brandon in Kerry. Just when was that and who was there?
It may be about small things like that, but writers of diaries in the past have followed an inconsequential course and ended up with a volume that paints a lively and true picture of you and your world. Do it for your children and grandchildren. Francis Kilvert was a young cleric in country parishes near the borders of Wales - May 11th, 1872; May is usually the worst and coldest month in the year, but this beats them all and out Herods Herod. A black, bitter wind, violent and piercing, drove from the east: with showers of snow The hawthorn bushes are white with may and snow at the same time."
And, as pointed out here more than once, in May, 1943, there was a foot of snow on the Curragh. Was it the 9th or 11th? Didn't keep a diary and the newspapers weren't allowed to print weather news during the war. That should be in brackets, for Kilvert on the 27th of the same May 1872: "As I sat in my bedroom window seat with the window open towards Jerusalem in the early beautiful May morning, the nightingale was singing and a cuckoo was calling, a cushat was cooing and a turtle dove was trilling." The Reverend had a weakness for pretty girls and there are sentimental passages. Also this one liner. Wednesday, 5th August, 1974 - "A splendid romp with Polly Tavener."
One of the most brilliant diaries is that translated from the Irish by the late Tomas de Bhaldraithe. Cin Lae Amhlaoibh becomes The Diary of an Irish Countryman in a Mercier paperback. Hedge schoolmaster like his father, he later became a well to do businessman. The diary is set in Callan, Kilkenny, between 1827 and 1835. He remembers 1817 "when we had seventeen weeks of continuous rain which rotted the ripe corn and that already cut on the ground . . . I myself saw oats, still unripe, being cut on the first day of the new year 1818 . . . There were streets in Cork of the Harbours which were so full of the plague and disease that walls had to be erected at each end so that the healthy people couldn't go through them."
He hears the thrush sing; he admires the plentiful primroses and violets . . . Later he sees "the dark backed brindle bellied swallow hunting for flies." A wonderful book. A hardback edition came out in 1970 from An Clochomhar, Irish with vocabulary. There is the whole, in four big volumes.