esrosedotblog

PEPYS

One thing I love about the Pepys' Diary is how all life's experience unfolds as a near stream of consciousness. In today's Journal:

....home to supper and then to bed, having eat no dinner to-day. It is strange what weather we have had all this winter; no cold at all; but the ways are dusty, and the flyes fly up and down, and the rose-bushes are full of leaves, such a time of the year as was never known in this world before here. This day many more of the Fifth Monarchy men were hanged.

This is the time of the restoration of the monarchy after Cromwell and the five are part of a remaining guerrilla action; a little like is happening in Iraq. Well; not really, but you get the drift.

The meal, the weather, and the hangings; all in one breath.

The other day he was shocked when real women appeared in women's roles in a new theater production. He is writing this in a time of great change and he is right in the middle of it. The right man at the 'write' time.