I have always been a lazy diarist, although up to now no-one else has read it. I am sharing my thoughts in order to invite feed-back and dialogue as the topic I am interested in is in the early stages of development and I realise that in the not too distant future I shall pass on and I want to leave something worthwhile behind.

The other day my youngest son Toby (who is now 27) and his girl friend were having supper with us. Naturally some of the past events in our lives came up and I ended up telling some of the stories about our family when Toby was young. I was surprised to hear him say that I was telling him things he didn't know, and then realised that vivid memories for my wife and myself will be absent from my kid's own memories of the same events. Their recollection of those times will be completely different.
So I now understand the purpose of this Log. I need to record stories in a way and place where others can access them in the future, and perhaps they could add their perspective as well. So I will now try to share this with friends and family and try to get more accurate memories of past significant events.

As a doctor I have been fascinated when looking at babies and infants and wondering what they are thinking, and then what memories exist from early life. The received wisdom seems to imply that no real memories exist from the first two years, but many hidden reflexes will be learned which arise from the reactions to events no longer remembered.

However my earliest memory was at around 6 months of age. When I was grown up I was talking with my mother about earlier years and I recounted the memory I had of lying in a red pram and watching planes fly overhead (it was in the middle of the Battle of Britain at that time). She was surprised because she got rid of that particular pram when I was about 6 months old, and yet the memory had not been a false one as we had never before talked about prams and my time as a baby.

I had many other memories of the war-time, but I presume that the large stimulus of those times made quite an impact on my brain and so the early memories have been preserved. Many people say they can't remember anything of the time when they were babies, and I must admit that the above is the only memory I can recall before the time when I was an 18 month old toddler.  The strongest memory of this time was of the gas masks my mother tried to get me to wear. They were styled as Disney character heads, so I had to choose between Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. I screamed the place down - people going about with these particular gas masks looked like aliens - and very scary - another reason why the memory has stuck.

I presume that memories associated with strong emotions are more likely to stick - although in many people the memory is sublimated and in later life produces an "irrational" fear of some object or person. Later I shall try to write about my earliest days, mainly because our upbringing in the 1940s was so different to the life of children today.  So more later.

Newspaper reports today of research by a team of psychologists suggests that keeping a dairy (and even worse reading it again later) is an indicator of someone who has poorer health than non-diarists. Keeping a diary may be a result of poor coping mechanisms for stress and illness, so instead of working out your problems in the real world, you write about it to your own world, and so fail to become healthier through maturing through difficulties.

There may be some truth in this if the diary is used as an alternative for dealing with problems with others. Telling your diary that you have problems relating to your wife is a very poor substitute for working out the problem with her. However there is also the other sort of diarist (like Samuel Pepys) who like to record events, feelings and issues in a way they can be shared with others, and yourself at a later date. I enjoy reading my diaries from 40 years ago and realise how much I have grown and changed during that time.

Perhaps there are two distinct sorts of diarists. The healthy sort where the diary is not a substitute for living, but a way of recording a narrative for future reference, and the un-healthy diarist who uses their diary as a poor substitute for good coping mechanisms for life's difficulties. Naturally I am one of the healthy ones!

I'm quite glad that virtually no-one else is reading this blog at the present - I am writing it for myself, and for those in the future who may be developing the ideas I have been working on. What I shall do soon is copy into these pages the kernel of my developing thinking about whole-person health so that at some appropriate time others can interact with it.