Do people still keep hand-written diaries? At one time, all girls had a diary, usually sealed with a lock and key, and goodness knows what secrets they contained.

The great, good, bad and indifferent have kept diaries in the past, but are they still used in this age of Facebook, blogs and instant messaging? It’s so much easier these days to use a keyboard and computer and spell check.

Karren Brady, the Government’s Small Business Ambassador, told a conference that she knew of one company that sent its staff on a letter writing course to help boost their communication skills.

This makes sense and has to be an unusual but laudable innovation. Actually composing your thoughts with pen and paper and without the luxury of a delete button to change or start again, certainly concentrates the mind.

I was born in another age and kept diaries throughout my teenage years.

My daughters have read them and think they’re hilarious. Not that they were meant to be. But that’s the honesty of a diary – they are your thoughts, written for yourself, that capture a certain period of your life.

Sadly, I became a lapsed diarist.

Thank goodness others did not.

Consider the rich heritage that has been left by Samuel Pepys and James Boswell, hero Captain Scott, politician Alan Clark, the monster Joseph Goebbels, the tragic Ann Frank, the highly erotic Anais Nin and the outrageous Kenneth Williams.

They, and many more, have given insights into history, detailed social trivia and human behaviour.

A handwritten diary can bare the soul in a way you might not wish to commit to a computer with the risk that it might, somehow, end up going viral. It can be therapy, at the end of good days and bad, your own couch for self-analysis. Sir Walter Scott said: “What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.”

Oscar Wilde said: “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”

Few can hope to compete with Wilde, but any diary is a piece of intimate history, even if it recounts the life and thoughts of an ordinary person.

And it need not necessarily be dull. I’ve known some pretty wild and extraordinary, “ordinary” people.

I was talking language of a different sort with Mike Shaw of Linthwaite, former Examiner journalist and the last editor of the Colne Valley Guardian .

Among his many talents he used to write a Yorkshire dialect column called Bill o Ben’s and recalls that, 60 years ago, he received letters from a chap called George Brown who lived in America who said that Yorkshire dialect words were used in the Bronx in New York. Which is as it should be: God’s Own County of the mother country teaching Americans how to talk proper.

Mike also told me about a 64 page booklet of dialect poems called Rhymes In the North Country Humour by William Beaumont, a story teller and poet, who also wrote for the Colne Valley Guardian and Examiner. He was best known for his series Yar Joe Willie and Throng as Thropp’s Wife.

William Beaumont was born in Milnsbridge and, after war service, worked as a teacher. He also collected local stories. He died in 1976 aged 58.

One poem in the collection is about Jane O’Bonnie’s, a real character who lived in Causeway Side, Linthwaite, in the 1920s. It tells the true story of the time Jane stayed up all night, sitting at the bottom of the stairs, all dressed and ready so she wouldn’t miss the next day’s trip by train to Blackpool. Sadly, she fell asleep at the crucial moment.

Others include Dick and Liddy (another real couple from the 19th century), Slawit Sam and Anna Gleddle: “Anna pounded her piana, in a reet determined manner.”

And not forgetting Charlie Chuffer.

They said there weren’t a bigger fool for miles, nor Charlie Chuffer.

He never learnt a thing at school but how to sit and suffer.

His father said “Tha’rt cabbage green, I’ve bred a real duffer.

What other lad who’s turned 15, still calls a train a puffer?”

This is language that can travel – and it has done. The booklet is still available on Amazon from 1p plus postage, with one copy on offer from Bulgaria, of all places.