I thought it might be amusing to record an old man (“older man”!) reading his nineteen year-old’s words aloud — the diary I wrote over the Summer of 1965.

Honestly, I was amazed — by how much we did, most of it forgotten. By our youthful exuberance and the sheer energy we expended. By my certainties, insecurities and arrogance. And by my friends and their generosity.

I’ve left out some of the boring bits, and only recorded it once, wanting to keep my response to it as fresh as possible — amused, condescending, affectionate. Admiring at times, embarrassed at others.

It’s about 3/4s of an hour in total.

I left out most of my teenage philosophising, but still get to say at one point that my father is “what Zorba would call a grocer”. Good grief. At another, that for most people “adulthood is just retreat into safety”. Well, wrong-headed as the young are, that’s the challenge they throw back at us: those aspirations we had back then — how did we do?

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One thing’s certain, my Daimler Puch scooter was perhaps the worst purchase I ever made. Scooters were popular back in the day, two brands in particular: Triumphs and Vespas. But I bought a Puch…

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The audio starts with me leaving Wellington with a kitten I’d acquired — “five weeks old, black with white boots, blue eyes, exquisitely tiny” — in a box I’d set up on my scooter. The idea was to head for Hikurangi non-stop on this thing, a trip of something over 500 miles, or 800km. The box I’d made for the kitten was very cosy, but I felt every bump on the way into Kevin and Ruth’s, where I stayed the night before heading up north. The plan was to leave at 1.00 in the morning, so I said goodbye to them the night before.

Track 1 (11:20)