MANY of us, myself included, have tried and failed to keep a diary.

For Monty Python star Michael Palin the desire to note down what he did each day dates back to his school days.

“The spur I suppose was in my childhood. I loved keeping lists. All the films I went to see, I kept a list of them all and I would write at the end what I thought of them, which was usually ‘great!!!!’, ‘fantastic!!!!’ four exclamation marks,” he says.

“I loved sport so I would keep a note of cricketers and Sheffield United results and that sort of thing. I liked to write things down and remember them. That was really the root of the desire to keep a diary.

“I have got 1955 school diaries from when I was 11. An exciting day would be ‘got hit on nose in playground’ or ‘Jenkinson was sick’. Those would be the little highlights, otherwise it was just ‘school’ - little moments which bring back what it was like at school at the time, even though they were fairly crude entries.”

Palin starting keeping a diary religiously from April 1969, following the birth of the first of his three children.

The Northern Echo: Michael Palin credit John Swannell

“We had our first child and he was six months old and I was quite a heavy smoker,” he recalls. “I realised it wasn’t very nice for him. He would climb on my lap and throw his arms around me and I would have to get the cigarette out the way and stub it out. “So I gave up smoking and I felt a great surge of willpower. I thought ‘what can I do with this newfound willpower?’ I said ‘I have always wanted to keep a diary and now I will really try and do it’ and I did.”

Those diaries have now been read by millions worldwide following the publication of The Python Years: Diaries 1969-1979 and Halfway to Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 and the latest instalment, Travelling to Work: Diaries 1988 to 1998.

As a celebrity Palin’s life is full and varied, ripe for diary writing, but he believes that everyone’s lives are interested and varied enough to warrant recording.

“It doesn’t really matter what you are doing. It’s a kind of frame of mind. There are diaries written by people who had really everyday lives and would write down if they were an engineer that they inspected a bridge, measured this and had done that. That’s because they wanted to do like I did – keep a record of their lives,” he said.

“I have become very interested in something called the Great Diary Project which is an archive in London where they are gathering together ordinary people’s diaries. If someone, for instance, finds in their grandfather’s papers up in an attic that he kept a diary you can get in touch with these people and they will look after it. They have got about 8,000 diaries now of ordinary people.

“I have seen some of them and these are people whose lives were not extraordinary in any particular shape. It’s just they were extraordinary because they were lived by that one person at that time. Their work may just be something they hate, salaried work sitting at a desk, but it means they notice other things whilst they are there which makes the diary very valuable.”

Even high profile stars have boring days, so would Palin ever consider embellishing an entry?

“Oh no absolutely not, that would be cheating,” he says. “What I value about the diaries is looking back and seeing how complex one’s life was. There was no smooth progress. There were days when things just seemed disastrous and you thought ‘how can you just go on doing this stuff?’ and then the next day the sun would shine and something would happen and someone would ring up and there’s a totally different mood.

“I always thought I was a fairly consistent person, with a very regular outlook on life, but the diary proves otherwise. It shows you are taking incredible risks at certain points and missing things at other points. To change it would be like airbrushing history and I don’t want to do that.”

For Palin there is nothing better than pen and ink when it comes to collating one’s activities.

“I write by hand. I always write longhand and I usually write in the morning rather than in the evening,” he says. “If I am travelling a lot I just take a notebook and jot things down. If I am at home at my desk I would try to take a bit more care over the day before, but not get too obsessed by it.

“I took some advice from (playwright) Alan Bennett because he keeps wonderful diaries. He said he had to give up because he was living for the diary rather than the other way round. You have got to get the balance right.

“You have got to be living and the diary has to be, as best you can within 15 to 20 minutes the next day, the best sort of record you can keep. Not perfect, ever.”

Surely, though, in this day and age with the likes of Facebook the need for a diary is on the wane? Palin disagrees.

“I am old fashioned. I value the privacy of a diary. What we have now is a sort of pressure to communicate with the world instantly. The great thing about a diary is you can put your thoughts down for that day and put them away in a drawer and you may not read them for another 20 years,” he says.

“Somehow that gives you slightly more freedom and means you are not constantly aware of an audience out there. You are writing really for yourself. It’s a private thing.

“There was a remark by the head of Google or something like that that this was the end of the age of privacy. I thought that was absolutely chilling stuff, but I know what they mean.

“But a written diary is a bastion of privacy.”

Michael Palin: The Thirty Years Tour comes to the Sage Gateshead on September 24 at 7.30pm. For more details visit www.sagegateshead.com/event/michael-palin/