I see it is an advantage to a man to carry little in his pocket

Where do the days go? It’s already Shrove Tuesday, for heaven’s sake, which makes it almost Easter, which makes it nearly 2011! I can still taste last years’ pancakes! They tasted like flip flops! And as if that wasn’t bad enough, it literally has not stopped raining today! How incredibly depressing! Talking of which, I saw A Single Man last night; which "stars" Colin Firth as a recently bereaved gay man. Perhaps it was something in the Maltesers, but I found the whole experience a tad disappointing, primarily because I just didn’t really care about any one I was watching on the screen. It could and probably should have been a great deal more moving. An Oscar winning performance it was not.


Moving swiftly back to the safety of 1660, we discover it was a musical day for Pepys today, which started with the lute and ended with the flute! In the meantime our hero did rather a lot of drinking, mostly with his fellow clerks and for a great deal of time at the Sun Tavern. The lads were in a merry mood, dreaming of bright futures, and making bets with one another. Pepys won a quart of sack, a sort of sherry, for spotting that the meat he was eating was lamb, and not veal. As a vegetarian I wouldn’t know if this remark was made by a man with a sophisticated palate, or just someone who’d been fed a lot of really cruddy meat! In any case, Pepys ended the evening claiming to have learnt a valuable lesson in life. He’d gone out with just 3d in his pocket, and as a result, hadn’t spent as much as his friends. There’s a surprise.

"I see it is an advantage to a man to carry little in his pocket"

...Only, of course, if you’re not trying to impress someone, and what he doesn’t say is if his lack of money meant his poor friends ended up paying for everything instead.