AUGUST 2002 Dear Diary

I'm not going to bother lying: I'm a massive egoist, but, y'know, in a good way. Since the age of eight I have kept a diary, and generally they've been bad- really bad. In a particuarlly painful entry from January 1996 I actually wrote a poem dedicated to (can I bare to write this?) Ronan Keating, in another entry from 1997 I confessed of my deep love for Daniel in my Year 6 class, who had hair like a coconut and a personality to match.

These things are bad, yes, these phases I went through (my love for Ant and Dec, my penchant for wearing stripy waistcoats, my adoration for all things Graham Norton) monsterous, and I dare say there is worse yet to come, but they have been kept private. And of course I've written that I'm going to kill myself, but a) I never meant it and b) I was pissed. I can read it all back, safe in the knowledge that nobody will ever read it unless I want them to. Or my sister finds the key again....

If you ever feel bad about your life then just log on to diaryland.com. Oh dear Lord. Why would anybody decide that it was a good idea to start one of those, unless they were, of course, drunk? The thing is, though, common sense, and human biology surely dictates that the type of drunkeness which would addle your brain that much, would also induce liver faliure and immediate death.

I don't want to read about other peoples sad lives. It's like Big Brother, only worse, because people use the abbriviation "coz" and write "innit". People who keep web logs are invariably suicidal and live in a bin (obviously, a bin with a phone line) and only have one friend- who is probably dead or a cat. Or both in some cases.

These suicidal wrecks tend to fall into two catogaries: The first are the people who are suicidal and have good cause to be. For a long time I emailed a girl from Texas who fell into this catogary: they're often teenage girls who have either been, or are being, sexually abused and have attempted sucide sixteen times, and yet have so far been unsuccessful. You want to cry for them, but their diaries are still dull and rather like a documentry on the mentally ill: it's bad, and life is cruel, but I want to watch Eastenders.

The second group are suicidal and have absolutely no need to be- generally their want to die springs from their mothers not letting them have their navel pierced. These people are often angry in a middle class way (you know what I'm saying) and listen to a lot of Linkin' Park. These diaries are slightly better because you don't feel dirty for reading them as if they were fiction, as you do with the genuine depressives, and as such you can have a bit of a laugh, but they're still about as interesting as Brookside post Beth leaving (I never really got over that).

I have never felt the urge to inflict the dullness of my life on to people, and that is what these things are- all the worst bits of life on your PC screen. (And no, this site is not the same as a weblog, before anyone emails me with the comparison!) Of course I want to read Sylvia Plaths diaries, but that's because a) she was famous and married to a poet Laureate and b) didn't write "peeps" "coz" and "homies" in her diary entries. And I don't care who actually wrote The Diary of Jack the Ripper- it's great reading ("Perhaps I long for someone to read this and understand") but that's because things actually happened to good old whore murdering Jack- unlike West Midlands Bob, 34, single, interests: computers and busty laydees, mobile number: 07767890876.