Write Diaries. Use Paper. Make Back Ups

I thought this ‘skeet’ was interesting:

Please remember to keep diaries, use ink & paper, they will not believe the 2020's unless we unite in poems, letters, written testimony corroborating it was what it was & we saw what we saw. The past won't believe we repeat it. The future won’t believe we endured. The present hardly believes us now.

— Salena Godden (@salenagodden.bsky.social) March 26, 2025 at 12:04 PM

Yes. Doing this, and making sure that there are copies that cannot just be deleted by irate billionaires who get a whim, is important.

But… the physical is so vulnerable too.

If you don’t subscribe to Toby Litt’s A Writer’s Diary, you should. It’s complex, and banal, and brilliant. And in today’s piece – from where I found the post Salena above – is all about an anxiety of losing his physical diaries, and what to do about that:

To quote the introduction:

If one entry I’ve made in A Writer’s Diary stays with me, haunts me, it’s this about the destruction of England —

A piece of Russian propaganda, seen in a tweet with a link that followed, has overwhelmed me.

They threatened England with an underwater nuclear bomb, undetectable on their cloaked submarine, irresistible if detonated in the Channel (which would finish France, too) or the Atlantic (which would do for Ireland). A man-made political but entirely watery tsunami was promised, threatened, by Lavrov. It would pass, a hundred or more feet high, across everyone and everything I know intimately. Across and through, for there would be trees shooting sideways as spears, and cars tumbling as if catapulted. We would wash away. All the details of decades of architectural preservation, and every attempt at small DIY improvements – the totality would be instantly meaningless. Perhaps we would stand for a moment, in awe of the grey wall, as victims do in disaster movies since CGI got good. At the crest would be a white fringe of radioactive foam, and beneath it would come Bristol, Stonehenge, Slough and the Peace Pagoda from Battersea Park. Every diary and letter, every hard drive and Victorian necklace populated by hair, every knitted hot water bottle cover and pair of spectacles lost behind the radiator, every rotovator and prayer mat, every cat and multistorey carpark, every plan and promise and confusion and nostalgia, everybody unlucky enough to have a government who annoyed a man powerful enough to give an order to wash away a land…

From: https://open.substack.com/pub/awritersdiary/p/relieved

In short, our worlds are at risk: physical, digital, internal. Everything not saved will be lost.