Hello, I’m back from my gap year, did you miss me? What’s been going on? My dirty washing? Yes, here it is. Thanks. Can you lend me some money please?

I closed the public diary last year, having got a bit paranoid about nursing rules, confidentiality, and how things might be interpreted. I’ve missed it though as I’m rubbish at keeping a diary I don’t show people and now all the good stuff is missing. Neither you nor I will know what happened. How can I be expected to remember things I haven’t written down?

So I’m coming back to Dee’s diary, but I’m making a few changes. I’m going to alter some of the things I write about so that the people and organisations in them are less identifiable. It seems a shame, an untruthful diary starts to become a work of bad fiction after all, and I have no concerns about anything I’ve written in the past. However, Nursing is a sensitive trade, so you and I are going to have to compromise a bit.

Talking of Nursing, I’m going to be writing more about mental health and a bit less about family stuff. That’s mostly because I’m coming up to the end of the second year of my training, and all kinds of things are happening. I want to be able to think about it (‘reflect’ is the word used in nursing, mawkish isn’t it?). Don’t imagine that I’ll be able to resist showing off a luscious bit of stitching though, or bragging about seeing Richard Herring’s latest show.

Hope the changes don’t put you off. I know you really want to read all the juicy personal stuff. A friend reminded me that I somewhere in this diary I wrote about my first sexual experience. I hope reading about it was a memorable for her as writing about it was for me.



I don’t remember penning it at all.