Reasons Not To Keep A Diary

What was to become a life-long obsession with diary-writing began like this …
Thursday 9th October 1986
“Not in an unpleasant way.”

I felt compelled to jot down the above snippet of homophobia made by one of my teachers when I was seventeen.

I made the note in my school homework diary, using Greek letters (I had studied Greek at ‘O’ level). The teacher had made a remark about another teacher which was ambiguous and could have meant that the second teacher was gay…