It was one of those arguments about nothing that ended in someone none too politely telling me to "get a life". Before I could lunge at his jugular shouting: "OK, I'll have yours!" I was overcome by a feeling of despondency. There was, after all, some truth in the advice.

I remember once being told that you knew when you were getting old when the best part of the day came to a close as the alarm went off in the morning.

That's not strictly true - age has nothing to do with it. I felt that way when I was 15. In those days my time, when not in school, was spent squeezing my spots and staying in bed for prolonged periods, confined to a horizontal position by growing pains and boredom.

It was during this classical angst-ridden adolescence that I first decided to keep a diary, to record for posterity the fascinating minutiae of my day-to-day existence.

Unfortunately, I ran out of enthusiasm for the task within a few weeks.

Soon entries were appearing regularly with the words: "Didn't do much today", "Nothing happened" or, in a feeble attempt to add some spice into my life "Went to doctor's about my acne/sweaty hands/growing pains".

Ialso tried keeping a diary for therapeutic purposes after I got divorced. I was advised it would help me understand myself better. And so I did. I read it six months later and found it incredibly boring. "Must get a life," I wrote as a footnote.

So here we are, 20 years later, and I'm still a non-active participant in the game of life. I have friends who sail boats, ride horses, go off to Paris for the weekend while I, metaphorically speaking, remain at home watching the paint dry.

But I do have one friend whose life-style is remarkably similar to mine. He never frets about the monotony of living in an experience-deprived backwater, or at least he didn't until just before Christmas last year.

Then, inside the usual robins and reindeer greetings card, he found a long non-personal, printed "news" letter, from a distant relative - distant in both relationship and geographical terms. It was a month by month round-up, or diary, of what she and her immediate family had been up to during 1998.

Now, it must have explained that my friend is what used to be described in non-egalitarian pre-Blair Britain as a "poor relation".

It also has to be said that his long-distance family are considerably richer than any other family I know of, and are not adverse to sharing this knowledge, if nothing else (no, they don't send presents), with their poorer kinfolk.

Consequently he was assailed by boastful tales of the family's continuing financial prosperity and new acquisitions, and of wonderful, and frequent, holidays - long weekends in the South of France, golfing breaks in Scotland, shopping trips to New York and several weeks in New Zealand. All of which told of a family that had not only got itself a life but the lion's share of several other people's as well.

Reading the "letter" left my friend somewhat sullen and resentful. But not for long. He soon found solace in a new CD - a compilation of recordings made of revving racing car engines an the Thirties, Forties and Fifties.

Sad, but as Star Trek's Mr Spock was fond of saying: "It's life, Jim but not as we know it...."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.