(Tuesday).
So paying the reckoning, 14s. 4d.
and servants, 2s.
poor 1s.
set out; and overtook one coach and kept a while company with it, till one of our horses losing a shoe,
we stopped and drank and spent 1s.
So on, and passing through a good part of this county of Wiltshire, saw a good house of Alexander Popham’s, and another of my Lord Craven’s, I think in Barkeshire. Come to Newbery, and there dined, which cost me, and musick, which a song of the old courtier of Queen Elizabeth’s, and how he was changed upon the coming in of the King, did please me mightily,
and I did cause W. Hewer to write it out, 3s. 6d.
Then comes the reckoning, forced to change gold, 8s. 7d.
servants and poor, 1s. 6d.
So out, and lost our way, which made me vexed, but come into it again; and in the evening betimes come to Reading, and there heard my wife read more of “Mustapha,” and then to supper, and then I to walk about the town, which is a very great one, I think bigger than Salsbury: a river runs through it, in seven branches, and unite in one, in one part of the town, and runs into the Thames half-a-mile off one odd sign of the Broad Face. W. Hewer troubled with the headake we had none of his company last night, nor all this day nor night to talk. Then to my inn, and so to bed.
losing count of the ravens
I think of how I write
the way branches run
into one broad ache
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Tuesday 16 June 1668 (Pepys’ notes for an unfinished entry)