Pepys 1660 (7)

So into London by water, and in Fish Street my wife and I bought a bit of salmon for 8d. and went to the Sun Tavern and ate it, where I did promise to give her all that I have in the world but my books, in case I should die at sea.

(Thursday, March 15, 1660)

En caso que me truene...

I warm to this idea of being able to buy fresh fish and then take it along to the local gastro-pub for preparation and consumption.

Pepys 1660 (6)

In the morning went to my father's, whom I took in his cutting house, and there I told him my resolution to go to sea with my Lord, and consulted with him how to dispose of my wife.

(Friday, March 10, 1660)

Some of the idiomatic differences between contemporary English and Pepys's English just spring off the page!

Pepys 1660 (5)

We went to the Sun Tavern in expectation of a dinner, where we had sent us only two trenchers-full of meat, at which we were very merry, while in came Mr. Wade and his friend Capt. Moyse (who told us of his hopes to get an estate merely for his name’s sake), and here we staid till seven at night, I winning a quart of sack of Shaw that one trencherfull that was sent us was all lamb and he that it was veal. I by having but 3d. in my pocket made shift to spend no more, whereas if I had had more I had spent more as the rest did, so that I see it is an advantage to a man to carry little in his pocket.

(Thursday February 16, 1660)

This little piece of wisdom occurred to Sam before he started conducting himself in ways which require a gentelman to carry a certain amount of efectivo around with him in the evenings.

Pepys 1660 (4)

"This morning I lay long abed, and then to my office, where I read all the morning my Spanish book of Rome."

(Saturday, February 11, 1660)

Ok, it was a Saturday, but life never seemed to be all that stressful in the London office of the 1660s. If that was how his weekend started, this was how it was to conclude:

"So to bed, where my wife and I had some high words upon my telling her that I would fling the dog which her brother gave her out of window if he [dirtied] the house any more."

(Sunday, February 12, 1660)

Perhaps we need to bear in mind here that Elizabeth's brother was a sponger and a wastrel.

Pepys 1660 (3)

"And about 9 o’clock I went away homewards, and in Fleet Street, received a great jostle from a man that had a mind to take the wall, which I could not help?"

(Wednesday February 8, 1660)

In Britain we may drive on the left, but we stand on the right. On escalators it has become such a habit of mine that I was bemused by the trouble it caused me on my round-the-world trip this year.

Chaotic encounters on London's streets, such as the one Sam relates above (with that delightful self-examining addition of a question mark) were soon to be a thing of the past, as the convention was established that rather than asserting the wall if one could, one should always endeavour to pass on the right.

Here in Antigua Guatemala taking the wall often results in a face full of wrought iron balcony. The one piece of unstated local etiquette for pedestrian traffic that I am aware of, is that the male member of a couple should always walk on the street side of the banqueta, presumably so that he might assume the risk posed by Guatemala's drivers and wet season puddles...though it also probably spares him a few bumps on the forehead.

Pepys 1660 (2)

"So we met with an acquaintance of his in the walks, and went and drank, where I ate some bread and butter, having ate nothing all day, while they were by chance discoursing of Marriot, the great eater, so that I was, I remember, ashamed to eat what I would have done."

(February 4, 1660)

Pepys 1660 (1)

The year kicks off for Sam with an atmosphere of desperate political uncertainty and re-heated turkey. (Except that the year didn't begin legally in England until March 25th — a procedure which was not to be adjusted until 1752 — which means for adminstrative purposes at least, it's still 1659.)

"My own private condition very handsome, and esteemed rich, but indeed very poor, besides my goods of my house [in Axe Yard], and my office, which at present is somewhat uncertain," he writes on January 1st.

Perhaps a sense of the potential significance of his own personal uncertainty within the universal uncertainty across the land, prompted Sam to commence his secret shorthand diary that wintry January.

He is what we'd call a white collar worker, but tied by lines of patronage to an older social system, which was very much in flux at that time, there being neither a King nor a Parliament, and all the big players in this post-Cromwellian instant jostling noisily for position.

Whenever he has a spare moment (seemingly quite often) Sam heads across to Westminster Hall or checks out the posts on Fleet Street, where the twitterers of the day serve up the latest rumours about the movements of Monk, Fairfax, Lambert et al. Mass personal publishing is not entirely a novelty of the Internet age.

"Great talk that many places have declared for a free Parliament," he wrote on January 2nd, an indication that many were yet willing to persevere with England's brief experiment in republican government. (Two days later Sam is reporting how MPs have locked themselves away in a state of fasting and prayer.)

Sam works as a clerk for George Downing, one of the four tellers of the Receipt of the Exchequer, and his principal responsibility in that office is to deliver pay to the soldiers of the standing army which may yet play a crucial role.

The rest of the time he wanders around town rather like I used to in Cambridge, looking for acquaintances to interact with. Once tacked onto suitable company, Sam likes to participate in the pastimes of the era, such as cribbage and playing the viol, as well as the consumption of turkey-pie, 'brave cake' and sack (vino).

Breakfast for a Londoner in 1659/60 consisted of a swift pint at a local tavern, it being ill-advisable to drink the local water and just a couple of years before the big coffee shop craze gets going.

Although at this moment Sam apparently considers himself to be in good health, he informs us on the 4th of January that "It snowed hard all this morning, and was very cold, and my nose was much swelled with cold." The next day he consults with a certain Mr Page about his nasal discomfort, who tells him it's just a case of the common sniffles. And so they move on to discuss current affairs.

We know that, especially for a member of the Pepys family, Sam will live to a comparatively ripe old age, but a close attention to every niggling ache and pain will be an abiding characteristic of his night-time notes, until the end of the decade when an unspecified eye problem will put him out of the diary-writing business altogether.

TBC