Jodie's secret diary scoops top prize

Jodie Hargreaves from Prospect Mount, Fell Lane, has been chosen as the winner of our Millennium Diary competition.

Her Diary 2000 was chosen as the clear winner by our judges, who were impressed by the comprehensive and entertaining entry.

The ten-year-old, who attends Nessfield Primary School, will receive a new state of the art computer as her prize.

However, Jodie says the last thing she will be doing on it is writing another diary.

She says: "I was going to stop halfway through but my mum encouraged me to carry on. It was hard work, but it is all worth it in the end. The hardest thing was keeping up and sometimes when I got behind I had to look at my mum's diary to fill in the spaces."

Proud mum Val adds: "It's quite amazing when you read it back and see what happened throughout the year.

"She got on with it really well and put in some quite comical things, some of which upset her sister!"

It was certainly an incredible start to the year for Jodie's father, Ken, and the rest of the Hargreaves family.

In her first entry on New Year's Day Jodie writes: "Today I went to see my Auntie Sheila and Auntie Sue as my dad had just discovered he has a half sister in Australia. Her name is Carol and I think she looks nice."

On May 22, Jodie writes about the first meeting with her auntie Carol and uncle Jim, who travelled from Queensland to stay with the family. The diary also chronicles her day to day life at school, shopping in town with her friends, taking part in swimming galas and lots of sleep in between for the busy youngster.

The family's trip to Tobago, in May, is another high point of the year, although the travel jabs in April are less of a treat according to the young scribe.

In her millennium year, Jodie has grown five centimetres, moved up a year in school, found a new auntie on the other side of the world and recorded it all for posterity.

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