The days marked ordinary

An original literary non-fiction-style account of rereading a diary kept during a summer away from home.

I found the diary while looking for an address. It had a red elastic band that no longer held the cover shut. I had kept it during the summer I worked in another town, and I expected the pages to tell me what I had been like before I became someone with so many regular arrangements.

The first entries were full of ambitions. I intended to learn the names of the streets, cook properly and see every exhibition that opened. Three weeks later, an entire Tuesday was described as ordinary. The next day was the same. I felt disappointed in the younger version of myself for leaving so little evidence.

Then I noticed a small detail beside one of those ordinary days. The woman at the corner shop had remembered which newspaper I bought. I had put an exclamation mark after this, then crossed it out. Another page recorded that I had found a route to work which avoided the steepest hill. I remembered that hill more clearly than the exhibition I had described over two careful pages.

In the back of the diary, I found a list of people to telephone. Some numbers were crossed out and rewritten. Beside one name, I had drawn a little square and shaded it in. I no longer knew what the sign meant. For a while, I tried to invent an explanation, then left it unexplained.

I copied the address I needed onto another piece of paper. Before putting the diary away, I read the ordinary entries once more. They had not given me a complete portrait, and the missing meanings remained missing. But I could now recognise the slow work of becoming familiar with a place, which I had apparently thought too uneventful to describe.

Explain why the narrator comes to value the diary's ordinary entries.