The New York Symphony

It’s about 2am, and I need to leave the hotel in 3 hours. We’ve just spent a very exhausting day trekking across Manhattan and my feet feel like blocks of concrete. We had lunch in the village with Sharon and Ailsa, tea on the Upper East Side with Matt and Kieran and in the middle took a trip to the Rockafella Center to watch Matt and Mike Myers talking on the Jimmy Fallon show. Very entertaining.


This evening we’ve been trawling around the bars. Nathan remains somewhere on 28th Street, but I had to come back here to pack and write this blog, fearing the loss of time as I wing my way back to England, could well mean I don’t have another opportunity to post something.

Lower Manhattan is buzzing outside my window. I can smell toffee apples and someone is playing Lady Gaga at an incredibly loud volume. People seem to be dancing and singing on the pavement in a sort of The Kids From Fame meets Nightmare on Elm Street mash up! Car horns and sirens are cutting into the music, almost as though they’ve been scored that way. This really is a New York symphony.

March 6th 1660 was Shrove Tuesday and became a hugely important day for Pepys. Montagu took him aside, told him he had his back, that he trusted him implicitly, that he believed it was a certainty the King would return (if he could behave himself with appropriate sobriety) and finally asked Pepys to work as his secretary and accompany him to sea. Very exciting!

Later in the day, Pepys went to an annual Shrove Tuesday dinner, where he played a great deal of music and was generally very merry, particularly after a special dinner of "a leg of veal and bacon, two capons and sausages and fritters, with abundance of wine.” He dusted off those hollow legs again then.

It seems London was partying left, right and centre, for on his way home, Pepys called in on Mrs Jem “at whose chamber door I found a couple of ladies, but she not being there, we hunted her out, and found that she and another had hid themselves behind a door. Well, they all went down into the dining-room, where it was full of tag, rag, and bobtail, dancing, singing, and drinking, of which I was ashamed, and after I had staid a dance or two I went away”

It’s not clear why Mrs Jem was found hiding behind a door. Maybe it was something to do with her unsightly neck. Perhaps the girl she was discovered with was equally disfigured. Maybe they were quietly weeping and wondering why the world should be so cruel. We also fail to learn why Pepys felt ashamed at the party in the drawing room. Could it be that the ladies were behaving themselves inappropriately? Spilling out onto the streets and dancing to Lady Ca-Castelmayne? Or maybe Pepys was simply being overly protective of the young Mrs Jem. Perhaps all the guests were dancing in a circle around her and chanting the word "cripple". That's what they'd have been doing in Northamptonshire when I was Mrs Jem's age.

Whatever the case, Pepys rushed home but was too excited to sleep and sat up for some time with his wife in bed talking about his Lord’s "great expressions of kindness this day." He was going places. And he knew it!