A notted caudle

It’s Easter Monday and I’ve sat in front of my computer for so long now that my eyes have lost the ability to focus. We’re going to go out to dinner to celebrate the fact that I’ve sat in the same spot on the same sofa for 8 hours flat. Now I know how Pepys felt cooped up on board the Nazeby!

Today would appear to be the end of the tax year, which means until I can get my act together, I’m going to have an enormous pile of unsorted receipts tapping me on the shoulder, reminding me I ought to be more organised in the future. It’s the time of the year that all freelancers dread. The moment we’re forced to stop playing the “I’m a fluffy, lovely creative person, who shouldn’t be expected to understand evil money things” card. I appreciate that I have a very limited grasp of all things financial, but surely taxes should be greater for bankers, politicians and those who have borrowed large sums of money over the past year? After all, it was them that got us into this mess. Or perhaps, as my (banker) brother jokingly suggested, we should be taxing people on the “profit” they make on their houses, or better still only taxing the people who go on and on about the profit they’ve made on their houses, particularly at dinner parties...

Speaking of which, my interest in British politics is now officially over. I used to be hugely political. I was the partner of an MP. I spent all my weekends canvassing in North London, or trekking across the country to Labour party fundraising events in the rural Tory heartlands, where the ladies made the teas and vegetarianism caused apoplexy. They often carefully manufactured things so that I’d win the raffle, which was often embarrassing and always a poisoned chalice. On one occasion, I had to travel home carrying a wooden wheelbarrow tied up with an enormous big pink bow. They thought it was something the partner of the gay MP would appreciate. How wrong they were! Anyway, I’m bored to death with the lot of them. I can’t think how my life is going to get any better under a change of political regime. There’s no money for the Arts. There’ll be even less when we start the process of paying off all those debts. We no longer have politicians with consciences. We just have rows and rows of airbrushed Ken and Barbie dolls who do whatever they can to do to keep in power, which generally means doing nothing except looking pretty. Obviously I will vote. We must continue to vote, even if we go into the voting station intent on destroying our ballot papers.

Nathan has bought an i-phone, which troubles me. He’s currently pretending to drink a pint of Carlsberg whilst demonstrating the fart machine application. I think it must be possible to disappear into one’s I-phone; to become lost in that tiny virtual world to the extent that you cease to exist when it runs out of battery. One day we’ll be able to feed ourselves via the I-phone or shrink down to a size where we can run around fighting the virtual snakes, or hopping over the coloured cubes that we spend so many hours stacking pointlessly into neat little rows.

I'm very much enjoying Glee on the television at the moment. It takes me back to the days of the Kids From Fame. They days when I started to play the ‘cello because I wanted to run down a corridor with my case like Julie used to do in the credits. I’m loving the fact that Glee dares to be so politically incorrect. One of the characters genuinely seems to go by the name of “other Asian” and any show that allows a wheelchair-bound character to perform “Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat” is very much on my wavelength. I was also thrilled to discover that the smug-addict baddie in the show is called Sue Sylvester, which happens to be the name of one of my parents' oldest friends. I relayed this information to my mother, who seemed very relieved; “Oh that explains it” she said; “I sent Sue some flowers the other day and the florist laughed hysterically when I said who they were going to”

350 years ago, Pepys' troublesome assistant, John Burr, vanished somewhere in coastal Essex without taking leave and wasn’t back on the boat by the time she was ready to set sail. That said, the boat was travelling so ridiculously slowly that he would no doubt be able to join the fleet the next time it dropped anchor. Frankly, they’d have got on better by walking along the cliff tops, pulling the ships with long ropes... or swimming to Holland might have got them there more quickly.

Later in the evening, Captain Clarke brought Pepys a “noted caudle” which has caused much debate amongst Pepys scholars. A caudle seems to be a sort of malty drink, which was often dished out to invalids and women after childbirth. But why would the caudle be noted? There’s a school of thought that suggests a caudle is a type of walking cane and that a noted caudle is actually a knotted cane. So Pepys was either feeling poorly, or he was being offered a lovely gift, which thoroughly established him as an important person on board the ship.