Saturday Scenes

George Orwell (best known for Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm) kept a diary, that much we know. The The Orwell Prize | Diaries has made these available in blog format as a celebration of the 70th anniversary of the diaries, which they say began in 1938. They are posting his diary entries exactly seventy years after each entry was written; the first time they have been published in collected form. It’s most interesting to read Orwell’s thoughts from the late 1930s mixed in with current blogposts in my RSS reader.

However, the The Diary Junction Blog points out that Orwell most certainly had a journal before 1938. Paul K. Lyons has put forward the details of the various arguments, including this sample of Orwell’s diary.

13 February 1936

‘Housing conditions in Wigan terrible. Mrs H tells me that at her brother’s house (he is only 25, so I think he must be her half-brother, but he has already a child of 8), 11 people, five of them adults, belonging to 3 different families, live in 4 rooms, ‘2 up 2 down’. All the miners I meet have either had serious accidents themselves or have friends or relatives who have. Mrs H’s cousin had his back broken by a fall of rock – ‘And he lingered seven year afore he dies and it were a-punishing of him all the while’ – and her brother-in-law fell 1200 feet down the shaft of a new pit. Apparently he bounced from side to side, so was presumably dead before he got to the bottom. Mrs H adds: ‘They wouldn’t never have collected t’pieces only he were wearing a new suit of oilskins.’

So, if anyone should be wondering about Saturday Scenes, I’d like to offer up the following as proof that we were actively taking lots of great photographs as of 13 February, 2010:

Make sure to pop by the Twitter streams of everyone who took a photograph so we could see a scene from their Saturday:

• LannaGirl
• rauchy
• RAFairman
• Sithefire
• dlewis1701
• raumsinn
• rOcKeTmAn_76
• gwilkinson1989
• sarahfenn
• dreamsthedream
• twasntme
• ColinBrooks
• mousewords
• akaSylvia
• vaxanta
• timewind
• JanetIsserlis
• 7of12
• 9to5poet
• elibrody
• pixelesh

Every person who submits a Saturday Scene gets added to the Saturday Scenes list, so you can watch that page and see what people are doing the rest of the week!

Would you like to join in? Simply take a photograph on a Saturday and tweet it to SatScenes with the location!