Sometimes it is difficult to realise that you are alive.It is easy to come to the bookshop everyday, then take the tube, watch TV, have some dinner and go to sleep. It is easy to be a machine. We try our best. We always try to make something special out of our day, but you have to be very strong: routine ends up swallowing you, making of you something flat and grey.You start writing a diary, I suppose, to make yourself believe that there are things that are out of the neverending day-by-day here-we-are-again, to point out the really small special things that happen at a certain moment, at a certain place (maybe inside yourself), and are not meant to be repeated ever. Those things leave a special taste in your mouth. They are sometimes so subtle that it is difficult for them to be noticed, and even more to be expressed. But you want to keep them whatever it takes: they are too valuable to let them get lost, to let them be forgotten.A diary is therefore, first of all, a warehouse of memories. But a diary turns unavoidably into a way of sharpening your look. You do not simply conform to get memories in a passive way. You start looking for them everywhere: in the supermarket, on a quiet street, inside a club, between the stones of the beach on Brighton... and, sometimes, you even start to invent some because you do not have enough with the ones you have at hand, or just because you do not really feel like feeling things in the way they exactly happened, but in the way they should have happened, or in the way they could happen one day, if things were not the way they are and I was not myself but another person.We are constantly borrowing memories from the others, most of the time through music, cinema, books... How many of these are really valuable? Is it that I cannot do it better, that you cannot do it better? You are here, by my side, but, as it happens with myself, I hardly know you. Do I not have more to learn from you than from the latest platinum selling pop star who will disappear tomorrow from our lives? Maybe you can teach me to look your way, to look in a different way, or maybe you could just amuse me.A diary is supposed to be a lonely vice, but there are many levels of intimacy, and many kinds of diaries. "Diary" is, after all, only a word: call it whatever you like. You do not need to be sincere to me as long as you think you are being sincere to yourself. You do not have to be serious or lyrical. Be funny or ordinary or even obscene if you please. Be however you want to be. Invent yourself for the others from within. I am dying to hear from you...