It was Samuel Pepys’s birthday this week and for the latest competition you were invited to imagine him let loose on the streets of 21st-century London and to provide a diary entry chronicling his impressions.
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.
D.A. Prince 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.
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