In Competition No. 2886 you were invited to submit a Pepys’-eye view of modern life.
Pepys’s candid and minutely observed diary entries hum with a seemingly inexhaustible lust for life and your attempts to capture this spirit were impressive. His perpetual randiness, in particular, loomed large in the entry (as one of Pepys’s biographers Richard Ollard notes, ‘an irresistible air of bedroom farce clings to him’).
Commendations go to Barry Baldwin, Roger Rengold and Peter Sain ley Berry. The winners take £25; D.A. Prince nabs £30.
To coffee-house for conversation, minded to discuss strange appearance of amphibious shipping on the Thames, such as can deliver foreigners straight from the water deep into our city streets. All strangely silent. Drinkers contemplate mirrors in various shape, vainly, and stroking them as a mistress. Ye women sport blue finger-nails, which I take a signal of availableness, but none approaches and I could be mistook. Doth their mannish garb betoken yea or nay? I ask coffee and the wench utters in her own tongue Larty, yamerikarnow, then makes a noise like sneezing. She doth not comprehend my nodding so I depart, falling over a young man asleep on the street. Many others suffering from the ear-ache, these orifices plugged against noise and weather. Some mutter their thoughts aloud, careless of passers-by. Have the mad been loosed upon us? Truly we are in dreadful times.
D.A. Prince
Returning to London from my cousin’s in the country I find things much changed. Our neighbours seem now to be persons from Muscovy or from the realms of the Grand Turk. After breakfast, to the Law Courts in the hope of seeing some lord or politician condemned, but all indictments were of ancient musicians for historick perversions, or else of scribblers and hacks, properly arraigned for hacking.
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