Samuel Pepys

I've been following Samuel Pepys' twitter account (currently tweeting 1669 though the description still says 1668), taken from Pepys' Diary, and occasionally reading the more salacious tweets to my husband so that we may together boggle over his womanising ways. Remembering the scandal resulting from Elizabeth catching her husband in a compromising position with her companion, Deborah Willet - and the dizzying back and forth of would he give her up or wouldn't he - my husband purchased an annotated copy of the journal* for me for Christmas**.

I am most of the way through the 150-odd pages of introductions and commentaries and today read the first entries*** and have already been chastised for reading them privately in the bath (I like to start the year in the manner I intend to continue) rather than reading aloud of it at bedtime. I cautioned my husband that it wouldn't all be scandalous affairs and household strife to which he replied that he expects it will be a lot of "'tonight we had mutton. I did not care for it.'"**** "Actually tonight they're having turkey."

A spoiler, I know, but I kept both the fact that it's leftover turkey and that Elizabeth burnt her hand in its fixing a surprise for later.*****

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* as Pepys himself most often referred to his diary

** or rather Volume 1, being the year of the lord 1660.

*** being the editors' one-page summary of the political situation (Cromwell's government has crumbled but the monarchy has not yet been restored), Pepys' proto-entry summarizing his health (physical and financial) and that of the country, and the entry for 1 January, 1660.

**** I'm an American. I may pick up British vocabulary but I will never abandon my American punctuation and nested quotes.

***** Until he reads this. Honey, don't read this.