The first diary entry in the new format. I am indebted to Neil Scott of Noble Savage Web Design, for creating a brand new DE website incorporating the diary safely within its own virtual bosom. There’s still some minor tinkering to do on the archived diary entries, which stretch back to 1997, but otherwise the new website goes ‘live’ today.

Welcome, then, to the New Martian Chronicles. Do take a look around.

If you know about RSS feeds, use the little orange Atom and XML boxes to the right to be alerted to future diary entries.

If you’re a LiveJournal user, you can add the new diary to your Friends page with this link.

At Mr Scott’s suggestion, there’s some discreet Google adverts lurking at the bottom of individual diary entry pages. This is in the vague hope of paying off the site costs. I rather like the look of them, actually. The adverts are automatically selected to fit with the content of each diary entry. So when I moan on about my dentist experiences, this results in a small text ad for a tooth whitening service. Far from compromising the style of the diary, I equate these with the adverts found at the back of old 1940s Penguin paperbacks for Craven A cigarettes. ‘The Doctor’s Choice’.

So, after three years, I bid the LiveJournal ‘blogging’ community goodbye as an active member, though I’ll keep my account there to read the diaries of others. It is an excellent system, arguably bringing the likeminded but otherwise isolated together better than any other set-up involving computers and phone lines. But I have to conclude it’s not really the place for my diary anymore. As soon as I feel I’ve become part of a club, I feel I’m at its mercy. I can be pigeonholed, written off, explained away. That won’t do. A certain distancing is a healthier option.

I hasten to add I feel this only applies to myself. I remain a voracious reader of other people’s published diaries, whether they’re by Virginia Woolf (A Moment’s Liberty: The Shorter Diary. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell. Pimlico Books, 1997) or a teenage girl from darkest Middle America waxing lyrical about her love life to Internet Friends (which often means complete strangers) while hiding behind a photo of a kitten.

But once I’d turned off the public comments function on my own diary a few months ago, I felt I was missing the point of the whole LJ structure. With LiveJournal, a diary entry is encouraged to become the opening of a debate, a chat, an exchanging of information, or a coconut shy. All very well, but I started the diary in 1997 to give recent thoughts and events a permanence. Marking Time before Time marks me. With a public comments box, the permanence is gone, and the entry will never be finished. There, I want to say as I put down my pen, that’s an end to it. If further thoughts spring forth and demand to be chronicled in the same place, I feel happier they should be my own, chronicled as and when I see fit. Perhaps in later entries, perhaps not at all.

I’m reminded of what Katherine Mansfield wrote in her own diary about living alone in London in 1917, “If I find a hair upon my bread and honey – at any rate it is my own.”

If I wasn’t going to use the comments function, I concluded, I might as well not be on LJ at all. Once Mr Scott assured me a stand-alone diary was as easy to update as a community blog, the move was inevitable.

Apart from anything else, my mother reads the diary now. And my aunt. So I feel, as Mr Nelson felt 200 years ago this week, that this increasingly diverse nation of readers expects me to do my duty. To present them with a fresh diary that doesn’t favour users of particular system above non-users. A diary tailored for readers who may not want to go anywhere else on the Web. That’s the difference between a blog and an online diary. Blogs point outwards, encouraging the reader to look elsewhere, look away. Diaries point only within. Blogs are surface signposts; diaries are deeper destinations. To this extent, I’ve banned myself from putting links in future diary entries.

My mother must be protected from people at a loose end babbling on about the new Doctor Who to anyone who will listen. She gets enough of that at home with my father.