Wednesday 23 July: Another day. The so-called shower is hand-held on a very short lead so it sprays water everywhere. The floor becomes a minor lake and could, a few degrees colder, become a rink. It’s deep winter, so heat leaches out in seconds, and showering is like dicing with death by iced water. The third person having their shower – poor thing! Also the Cory is cold with everyone in coats and scarves and we are the only folks who close the door to our Reader’s Room, so the only folks passably warm. But…

What is a diary? There are certain assumptions about the genre, but these are blown open by many diaries in South African archives for here the ‘farm diary’ is a recognised, indeed almost a compelled, genre. In the case of the Forbes collection in Pretoria, Kate and David Forbes’ diaries recorded temperature highs and lows even when nothing else was recorded, and often also wind direction and force. Also key farming events, like dipping animals, harvesting mealies and other crops, are omnipresent. In the Cory collections, mainly concerning people with Eastern Cape connections, the ‘farming diary’ appears to be a widely acknowledged type. It involves no deep thinking, no reflection, no ‘me, me’, but fields and animals and tasks and people in relation to these. This seems to have been part of instigating controls over farming in relation to climactic issues relating to drought and its management. However, nothing (so far) is actually said about why such diaries exist or why people tailored them in the ways they did has been found. But how interesting such diaries are, even though these ‘sun, rain, wind, tasks, people’ accounts are a world away from the angst, personal life and emotion on the sleeve of the ‘conventional’ diary. Conventional? Pah! Only if one does not know about or fails to see the variety of actual diary-writing that exists. This has been Liz’s thought for the day, although my practical tasks have been almost completely unconnected with this.

Last updated: 23 July 2014