Sleepwalker

(Lord’s day). Lay in bed with my wife till 10 or 11 o’clock, having been very sleepy all night. So up, and my brother Tom being come to see me, we to dinner, he telling me how Mrs. Turner found herself discontented with her late bad journey, and not well taken by them in the country, they not desiring her coming down, nor the burials of Mr. Edward Pepys’s corpse there. After dinner I to the office, where all the afternoon, and at night my wife and I to my uncle Wight’s, and there eat some of their swan pie, which was good, and I invited them to my house to eat a roasted swan on Tuesday next, which after I was come home did make a quarrels between my wife and I, because she had appointed a wash to-morrow. But, however, we were friends again quickly. So to bed. All our discourse to-night was Mr. Tryan’s late being robbed; and that Collonell Turner (a mad, swearing, confident fellow, well known by all, and by me), one much indebted to this man for his very livelihood, was the man that either did or plotted it; and the money and things are found in his hand, and he and his wife now in Newgate for it; of which we are all glad, so very a known rogue he was.

sleep to me
is a bad journey taken
in the country of a corpse

where night and day
quarrel and point
and turn in at one gate


Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday 10 January 1663/64.

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