Available now in considerable quantity are varieties of Swiss roll. The chocolate kind are filled with thick mock cream - margarine I guess. Have just eaten two slices of this muck, some coconuts and cherry cakes and almond biscuits for my tea and feel heavy with indigestion. 14th February, 1951

Serves her right, don't you think? I'm now 500 pages into A Notable Woman, and we're still only at the start of the 1950s. But oh dear, Miss Jean Lucey Pratt ... could we ever have been friends? Was there ever such a desperate, man-hungry spinster, loneliness spilling over the page - and sometimes I want to pick you up and shake you. There you are, well into your 30s and desperate to lose your blasted virginity which is such a millstone around your neck ... come on girl, it's wartime, a schooner of cheap British sherry for courage and surely you could find a Yank to oblige! I do feel that your chances would have been greatly improved by the invention of contact lenses as this unfortunately is one of your more flattering photographs. But couldn't you at least take your specs off when you go to a dance ...
Actually, I would love to read the diaries of the men you persuade yourself you're in love with.  You must have been terrifying ... you're Bridget Jones with Superglue. If anything in trousers passes you in the corridor at work, you're 0 to Altar in 60 seconds in your fevered imagination. You know those married men who turn up unannounced on your doorstep once or twice a year? You're not his mistress, dear - it's what the 21st century would call a booty call. I know it's cruel to point this out - but, honestly, when a man puts in an appearance so rarely that you don't even realise that he's been dead for a whole twelve months ...
As a reader, you do feel as if you're drowning in someone else's loneliness, and timidity (the tradesmen might find out if a man stayed the night at her cottage and then her name would be mud in the village) and lack of self-esteem buoyed up by pep talks. But there couldn't be a more vivid account of how it felt to be one of 3 million surplus women. Always a looker-on, she was just slightly too old to be called up and so she spent WW2 in a dreary office job in a metals company.
What a waste it all seems. Jean hoped that her diaries would one day be read by posterity and now they are. But if only she had ripped off her camiknickers - thrown her Liberty bodice to the winds - got rid of the damn cats ... and lived her life instead of writing all those millions of words.