Ten years ago

I have been writing a diary, more or less, for over ten years now. It was sporadic in the beginning, grew into an intense daily regimen for many years, and then, as Michael appeared on the scene and dispelled my superfluous angst, it dwindled away to brief and pragmatic updates at longer and longer intervals.

Recently I pulled an old volume from the shelf, dusted it off (not only has married life mostly dispelled my propensity to write down deep cogitations, it also seems to have removed my fascination with reading and re-reading my entries from the recent or distant past and contemplating whether I've changed much since then), and looked up December 1997, just on a lark, to see where I was ten years ago.

I had just read an article about double dactyls, a recently-invented (well, relatively speaking) poem form with very rigid parameters. I think the strictness of the rules fascinated me, because I popped off with one straight away:

Utterly uppity
Arrogant Aragorn
Knew that his shortcuts would
Never go wrong;

After a fight or a
Dawn he'd alight for a
Post-expeditional
Dinner and song.

Ha, ha! It still strikes me as terribly clever, although my far older and wiser self (who also happens to have access to high-speed internet for quick research purposes) realises that it was really more of a McWhirtle, because of the absence of a nonsense line.