Finding you’ve written ‘Next Thursday’ or the day’s date in your desk diary instead of what you’re suppose to be doing, where, what time, and with whom.

It figures because what you’ve distractedly written there is what you were saying on the phone when you made the arrangement, and if your workplace environment is at all worth the name you would have had a lot else on your mind at the time. There’s collective relief amongst quotspotters to find they are not alone in doing this. Coming across what you’ve written on the day of the appointment is one of those ‘Am I losing the plot?’ moments like finding your shoes in the fridge or losing your glasses, deciding to retrace your steps and then finding you’ve forgotten where you’ve been. More worrying is finding you then have no memory whatever of when you wrote the entry or who you made the date with about what. It can also happen with personal engagement diaries but rarely with those retrospective records which are about what one did , and never in those very private confidential ramblings of bleeding hearts. With these the quot factor emerging from postings is that they tend to omit any mention of the really momentous events such as a birth, a death, sudden hospitalisation, or a hurricane taking the roof off. The explanation is that these are by their every nature disruptive of normal routines which includes the diary-writing habit and anyway their actual dates have more direct ways of scoring themselves in the memory. On the subject of diary quot there has also been this: ‘Teenage daughters always leaving their diaries in places where their mothers can’t help but read them ’.

(Drew Mossop , Slough) - QQ***