How Indiana Jones got me into Blogging

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade may have come out in 1989, a good decade or two before the blogging started to become popular, but the classic adventure movie may have planted a seed in me that led to the blog you're reading now.

Indy's dad Henry (Sean Connery) kept a record of his search for the Holy Grail because he knew his memory would fade. The diary, not just an account of adventures taken, led them into more scenarios that made great stories- including meeting some well-known historical figures, shall we say. I'm sure I saw this film first when I was in primary school, possibly around the time I started keeping a diary myself.

I got Roald Dahl's Diary 1992 as a Christmas present- a blank diary with themes for each month based on his classic children's books. Quentin Blake's sketchy illustrations adourned the pages here and there, an each month followed a theme based on one of Dahl' classic children's novels. January, for example, contains pictures and qoutes from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I wrote a lot about school and the clubs that my friends and I used to run, where we'd draw pictures and play games based on a certain theme. Friday was the SDA club, the Secret Detective Agency, where we'd look for thing to investigate (a small primary school in Oldham didn't have many remarkable attributes so it was quite a dull group) and there were others we'd run involving games and art.

According to my diary, I usually watched a lot of shit TV, tried to draw cartoon characters, played Amiga games and took extra maths lessons (resulting in no improvement). I kept up with notetaking from January to September. It wasn't a patch on Henry's quest for the Holy Grail, but it was a tribute of sorts. I was quite neurotic about keeping records, something I wish I'd done more of as I found they helped me to remember what was happening in my life. Records are essential not just for fictional explorers, but for people like myself with memory difficulties.

As I got older, I fell out of the habit as I became busier and didn't want to dwell on the challenges I was facing. I learned, though, to document the most interesting parts, thanks, I guess, to Indiana Jones and Roald Dahl.

I've kept this going to this day, thanks to the emergence of the blogosphere. But, unlike Indy, I haven't dealt with many world political leaders- just reality TV stars, fading singers and DJs, and authors. A handful of people find it interesting, and at least now I can remember it all.