5 Year Diary

From Ms. Abby Ulman, Sunday shopkeeping mistress extraordinaire:

If you’re a journal-keeper and anything like me, your diaries are archives for your thoughts, feelings, dreams, and most meandery meanderings, and pretty light on practical detail. I can read through old notebooks and—entry after entry—have no idea what city I was in, what job I was working, who I was living with, or who this mystery “S.” was to whom I was forever devoted for a week in April 2004.

In walks: the Five Year Diary. A lovely little notebook that stacks five years of, say, April 21sts on top of each other, so you can see in 2015 what you were doing on that date for the four preceding years. Daunting? Yes. Amazing? Oui.

The diary can be started on any day of any year. I procured mine last month ($25 = $5 a year. Stoke city!) Following the example of the ladies of G&G, I keep mine on my bedside table, and I record each day’s events before I fall asleep. So now I have a record of the who’s, what’s, and how’s of my everyday days. Who did I eat brunch with at Foreign Cinema? Lisa! What did I eat? An omelette and a cheeky glass of morning champagne. How did I get home afterwards? I walked! Down 21st street! In the sunshine! If god lives in the details, then this sweet lil notebook is my brand new bible.

Please do not panic, dear diary-keepers. This is not a replacement for your regular notebook. Just its left-brained, right-hand man—with a red ribbon attached to mark your place, and a section in the back to log the books you read and the places you travel. There is something so delicious about a product that is designed to be treasured and used every day, and only replaced once every five years. It’s surely the gentlest, most thoughtful, and least capitalistic form of planned obsolescence there is.

Thank you, Tamara Shopsin, mysterious maker. I truly my 5YD.

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