I'm cataloguing my father's belongings with a view to using them as part of a memorial to him.
One of the boxes has a bunch of pocket diaries. Mostly, he used these to record gigs, which is an interesting part of his musical legacy and then there are holiday and Christmas arrangements. But going through them in a bit more detail, I'm starting to see the problems with opening them up. There are things in here that aren't mine to share. I'm not talking about awful scandals or embarrassing teenage diary stuff, just the fact that there are references to people who are still alive or whose memory is still alive in others and it would be unkind to just throw everything out there without treading very carefully.
There are bits that are simply between me and him. There are dental appointments for me, school trips and plays.
And then there are the records of mileage and money spent on petrol, dinner, beer. And notes of walks and days off.
They start out in the mid-sixties, go strong through the seventies and eighties and start to tail off in the late-nineties when email and other technologies started to take the place of paper diaries. So there are stories to be told and data to be collected, but none of it shared willy-nilly, but with care and love.