On this day

Whenever I see one of those On This Day things, I'm always momentarily interested. I'll go, "huh, well well well," raise my eyebrows then forget everything I've just read. On this day in 1880, France annexed Tahiti; in 1944, Gary Busey was born; in 1974, Isabel Peron was sworn in as Argentina's first female president; in 1986, Richard Branson broke the world record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic.

Of course, all of these things are insignificant compared to what happened in my life on this day. I've just checked the diaries I used to keep and, well...:

Sunday 29 June 1986 - Went to Ben's party. (Ben was a mate at school. His house was great. It had a huge garden and we used to play croquet and listen to Dead Or Alive records.)

Monday 29 June 1987 - Simon and Karl came round. Then we went to Karl's. (We went to Karl's to drop off sleeping bags, cos we were gonna stay at his house a couple of days later after we got back from a U2 concert.)

Wednesday 29 June 1988 - Learned about the greenhouse effect in Geography. Watched M*A*S*H* on telly.

Thursday 29 June 1989 - Dave and I gatecrashed Charlotte's party. (Aaah, that was a good party. I pulled.)

Friday 29 June 1990 - DJed a party at the Technical College. Knackered. (I used to do DJing every week at a nightclub in Lincoln, and occasionally at parties. This one, I seem to remember, was in the daytime, probably an end-of-term thing.)

Saturday 29 June 1991 - Went to Gran's.

Thursday 29 June 1995 - Dreamt of hiding in a market garden with Björk. Wrote a letter to [my then girlfriend] apologising for what happened on Tuesday. Bought Life by The Cardigans. (..and prompty developed quite a crush on Nina Persson.)

Saturday 29 June 1996 - Had a dream about [way too weird to tell you, frankly]. Spent the day having to tidy up at work. (My boss at the time was a very untidy man. I adore tidying.)

And you know what all this tells me? It tells me that my diary-keeping was a crap at the age of 25 as it was at 15, but not as crap as it is at 34 (non-existent). So, I'll do today's diary entry here:

Wednesday 29 July 2005 - Got up at 11am. Finished the last drawing for the job I'm working on. Not the best one I've done, but my hand is hurting a bit from all the clicking. (I'll tell you more about that job in the next few days.) Then I wrote some stuff on my blog about what happened on this day in history.

I think I'll listen to The Cardigans and gaze adoringly at the sleeve...