Conceivable

Office all the morning. My wife and I by water; I landed her at Whitefriars, she went to my father’s to dinner, it being my father’s wedding day, there being a very great dinner, and only the Fenners and Joyces there. This morning Mr. Carew was hanged and quartered at Charing Cross; but his quarters, by a great favour, are not to be hanged up.
I was forced to go to my Lord’s to get him to meet the officers of the Navy this afternoon, and so could not go along with her, but I missed my Lord, who was this day upon the bench at the Sessions house. So I dined there, and went to White Hall, where I met with Sir W. Batten and Pen, who with the Comptroller, Treasurer, and Mr. Coventry (at his chamber) made up a list of such ships as are fit to be kept out for the winter guard, and the rest to be paid off by the Parliament when they can get money, which I doubt will not be a great while.
That done, I took coach, and called my wife at my father’s, and so homewards, calling at Thos. Pepys the turner’s for some things that we wanted. And so home, where I fell to read “The Fruitless Precaution” (a book formerly recommended by Dr. Clerke at sea to me), which I read in bed till I had made an end of it, and do find it the best writ tale that ever I read in my life. After that done to sleep, which I did not very well do, because that my wife having a stopping in her nose she snored much, which I never did hear her do before.

I went to my father’s wedding
as a long white winter, a doubt,
a fruitless precaution.
Life did not stop.


Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 15 October 1660.

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