Up, and to the office, where all the morning. At noon home to dinner, and there dined with me, besides my own people, W. Batelier and Mercer, and we very merry. After dinner, they gone, only Mercer and I to sing a while, and then parted, and I out and took a coach, and called Mercer at their back–door, and she brought with her Mrs. Knightly, a little pretty sober girl, and I carried them to Old Ford, a town by Bow, where I never was before, and there walked in the fields very pleasant, and sang: and so back again, and stopped and drank at the Gun, at Mile End, and so to the Old Exchange door, and did buy them a pound of cherries, cost me 2s., and so set them down again; and I to my little mercer’s Finch, that lives now in the Minories, where I have left my cloak, and did here baiser su moher, a belle femme, and there took my cloak which I had left there, and so by water, it being now about nine o’clock, down to Deptford, where I have not been many a day, and there it being dark I did by agreement aller a la house de Bagwell, and there after a little playing and baisando we did go up in the dark a su camera and there fasero la grand cosa upon the bed; and that being hecho, did go away and to my boat again, and against the tide home. Got there by twelve o’clock, taking into my boat, for company, a man that desired a passage — a certain western bargeman, with whom I had good sport, talking of the old woman of Woolwich, and telling him the whole story.
out the back door
a nightly walk in the fields
a mile or two that lives
now in my camera
taking as old wool
the whole story
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Tuesday 2 June 1668