The diary of a crow, on this day in 1970:

Woke up in a foul temper. I was really, really pissed off. Sat atop a tree and shouted my head off. I was still pissed off but I went down to the car park to meet my crow pals. We strutted about, intimidating smaller birds and indeed anybody else we came upon.

Later I went to sit atop a tree just outside Mytholmroyd in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Did a bit of cawing. Spotted a bloke with a notepad and pen, who seemed to be jotting down my caws. I wasn’t having that, so I swooped down and had a quick slash at his face with my talons.

“By ‘eck!” he cried, “’Appen you’ve drawn blood, crow! Just like the first time I kissed my poor wife Sylvia, dead by her own hand these seven years.”

Then he added “BULLORGA OMBOLOM FROR”, in Real Orghast. I didn’t realise darkness had opened its womb, but looking round I saw night was falling, so I headed for a different tree and shouted my head off for a while because I was still in a foul mood. Then I fell asleep.

Snap of crow copyright Arlette Berlie

A recently dug-up diary for this day in 1900:

I am a pimply ragamuffin of no great consequence in this world. But my doings will resound down the ages, and be pored over by generations yet unborn, because I am keeping this diary and, at intervals, every one hundred pages or so, I put the scribbled sheets into a bag and the bag into a sack and the sack into a box and the box I bury in a field, in different fields dotted hither and thither, where one day in the future a man wielding a spade or shovel will dig up my diary and it will be pored over, as I said just now, by generations yet unborn.

First thing this morning, I gazed into the greasy glass and counted my pimples. There is a different number every day, which I jot down in a separate notebook. It seems that overnight, while I lie on my straw pallet in the corner of the barn, thrashing about, fast asleep yet disturbed by terrible dreams, several pimples erupt and several others subside or vanish. Sometimes I trace the patterns they form on my whey-coloured face, just in case, like the constellations of stars in the sky, there is a message to be read in them. I have buried some of my pimple diagrams alongside my diary pages, so perhaps in the future a significance I cannot fathom will be apparent to those who come after me, armed as they may be with a greater knowledge of patterns and mysteries and pimple distribution.

Then I took my begging bowl and sat on a clump by a verge and hoped for alms. A passing person gave me an old holed woollen sock to serve as a mitten for my tiny frozen hand. Oddly, both of my hands are unpimpled. Another passing person had no matching sock, alas, but did give me a bar of soap. But today I had chosen the wrong clump, or the wrong verge, or both, because nobody else passed all day long.

Towards sunset I trudged off to Brantwood to see my one pal, the mad old gent with the Old Testament beard whose demented ravings I keep meaning to transcribe. But I will need a different notebook, different from my diary notebooks and my pimple count notebook. Perhaps I will be able to get one in exchange for the bar of soap from a filthy stationer.

As I approached Brantwood, skirting the reservoir and passing the waterfall and the harbour, where the Jumping Jenny was tied to a painter, and the ice house and the slate seat facing the tumbling stream, I sensed something amiss. My pimples grew hot, a sure sign of impending calamity. And indeed, as I came to the house, out of it emerged a black-clad fellow with a grave look etched upon his countenance, who exclaimed:

“Mistah Ruskin – he dead.”

The diary of Ford Madox Unstrebnodtalb, on this day one hundred years ago:

I gargled. You gargled. He, she, or it gargled. We gargled. You lot gargled. They gargled. That was the gargling done, and it remained only to regargle before getting down to the lesser business of the day, the gargling and regargling being, of course, the main business, on this day as on every day in the current dispensation.

I know for a fact that some queer folk like to gargle with stuff that comes prepared in bottles available from the chemist’s shop, such as Dr Baxter’s “Zippy” Fragrant Spitting Fluid. I abhor those concoctions. I make my own, a mixture of ice cold water scooped from the duckpond, table salt, crushed violets, vinegar, and goaty milk. The precise quantities of each ingredient I measure out in my so-called “gargling jar”, which in truth is just an ordinary jar with horizontal lines scratched on the side with the sharpened ends of a pair of sugar tongs. It has served me well these forty years, and will I hope continue to do so for as many more years as the Lord sees fit in His ineffable wisdom to grant me. Not that I am a religious man. Pious yes, religious no. If there is a Lord, then He is a phantom in my head, lodged somewhere between the brain and the skull, forever eluding the forceps of enquiry.

I must admit that there are days when, having gargled and regargled, I find myself at something of a loose end. On occasion I throw caution to the winds and repair to the bathroom to gargle one more time. Spellbinding as this can be, I know it only staves off the inevitable, which is to buckle down to all those non-gargling activities with which I am afflicted. On any given day these might include: not gargling, taking a constitutional round and round the flowerbeds, scooping water from the duckpond, plucking then crushing violets, milking several goats, resisting the temptation to regargle, firing off a letter to the editor of the Gargling Gazette, shimmying up and down a rope ladder as part of military training for a war I am convinced will never come, dispensing alms to beggars and widows and orphans, communing with my spirit guide, hooplah!, polishing the gargling jar, and writing in a crabbed and barely legible hand in my diary. Today I did some of these things, not others, but with a heavy heart. I felt drawn, irresistibly, to the bathroom sink, to gargle again, though I knew it was madness.

Dr Baxter himself, in spite of his “Zippy” potion, warns against the dangers of overgargling in a pamphlet distributed by an urchin in the village square. I do not think the urchin receives a farthing for his labours. Come rain or shine he stands there, weedy and disease-ridden, handing out pamphlets to passers-by. “Sickness Of The Brain Brought On By More Gargling Than Is Wise And Proper” are the words emblazoned on the cover, below which appears a mezzotint by the noted mezzotintist Rex Tint showing a horrifying brainsick mad person in the throes of unreason. Why does Dr Baxter at one and the same time manufacture and sell his spitting fluid while dissuading people from wishing to purchase it? The only reason I can think of is that he is brainsick himself, perhaps from overgargling.

My own head, it must be said, or the brain inside it, has not yet succumbed to lunacy. I feel my phantom Lord, nestled within, would tell me were it so. He said nothing today, which I count as a perk. And so to cot.

Today is the feast day of St Mungo, so let us unearth one of his diary entries, for this day in 573, precisely one thousand five hundred and forty years ago.

Woke up in the Kingdom of Strathclyde. Sausages for breakfast. Thought about building another cathedral but quite honestly did not feel up to it. While I knelt in the muck praying, a messenger person came hurrying along and told me that a mad prophet by the name of Lailoken was rampaging about the place. He is apparently one of those wild men of the woods, the only difference being that he spouts prognostications which have the effect of turning the heads of the peasantry away from the glory of Christ Jesus.

“Can you do something holy to bring an end to his mischief?” said the messenger person.

“I shall see what I can do,” I said, wearily, for forsooth I was weary and footsore and had many another malady as tend to afflict those of us living in such barbaric times.

I struggled up from my knees and tottered off towards that part of the blasted and inhospitable countryside where this mad fellow was reportedly to be found. On my way I saw a bird that never flew and a tree that never grew and a bell that never rang and a fish that never swam. It is not often you see a bird and a tree and a bell and a fish all together in close proximity. A bird and a tree together, yes, and conceivably a bird and a tree and a bell, but the fish as well, that seemed anomalous. I wondered if it might be a miracle sent by the Lord. If so, what did it portend? These are weighty matters of great spiritual significance.

Something that is most definitely not of great spiritual significance is the raving of this wild man Lailoken, who I found cutting capers at the edge of the forest. He was engarbed in animal pelts and exceedingly wild and hairy. I brandished a jewel-encrusted crucifix from the cathedral at him and bid him desist on pain of hellfire. It started to rain and he retreated into the woods. I blessed a few Strathclyde peasants who were loitering thereabouts and was pleased to hear them begin wailing and keening my name over and over again – “Mungo! Mungo! Mungo!”, they wailed and keened. It was music to my ears.

In the evening I had a bath and an eerie premonition of death in a bath at some point early in the next century. Oo-er, missus!