Entertainment

Would YOU Read Your Housemate’s Diary?

So, you’re bored. Cleaning the house, ‘revising’, whatever it is and you stumble across your housemate’s diary. Now, you think to yourself, this is clearly an invasion of privacy. Your moral guide is screaming ‘NO!’ but your inner b*stard is screaming ‘YES!’ Then before you know it you’ve done it. You’ve read it. And published it on the internet.

Well, this is what one man (Ed) did when he discovered his housemate, Gareth’s, diary just under 2 years ago. Gareth is your average middle aged man, living with Ed since 2007 in Essex. They currently still live together with a guy called Panda (no real explanation as to why he’s called this, that’s just what people call him!). Dating from April 2009, we can revel in Gareth’s daily life, his musings, his (non-existent) love life, his crap-boring job and his plots for revenge against those who cross him (that crazy eBay lady). But these aren’t just the diaries of an average guy: Gareth’s journals provide for countless hours of laughter. Even if you’re just laughing AT him, you can’t help but giggle at his attempts to make a very mundane life (his ACTUAL life) funny. This includes antics like ruining page 3 in every dodgy newspaper his perverted colleague reads at work and documenting his reactions. Or noting the contents of his obese colleague’s diet and the desperate amounts of emails she sends him. It’s a fantastic depiction of what modern life has to offer the average 30 year old male, through a grumpy old man’s spectacles.

So how does Ed, author and ‘utter bastard’, maintain this catalogue of immoral genius? The site gets updated every Friday (‘except for when it’s not’) and every entry is published with painstaking transcription from the very diaries themselves. Despite being a foolhardy method, it’s a fantastic one and maintains the fact that what Ed is doing is actually extremely dangerous (he likes this just a bit too much). He notes on several occasions that if Gareth ever found out he’d ‘properly f*ck [him] up!’ Well at least we know what’s happened if the updates stop all of a sudden!

Despite there being no pictures on the blog, we are sometimes graced with hand drawings from the diary on twitter (@GarethsDiary) and Ed even gives away some free merchandise to lucky retweeters! So if you’re a fan, you shall be rewarded for your invasion of an innocent man’s privacy! (Me included!)

But believe me, if this doesn’t cheer you up then nothing will. And be happy- at least your diary isn’t plastered all over the internet!

2 Comments
To Top