A posh android

I’ve just returned from a run in glorious, glorious early evening sunshine. I ran around the circumference of Hampstead Heath again, and I’ve seldom seen it look so beautiful. I’ve had a nice, hot bubbly bath, and am sitting at the kitchen table with the window open. A cool breeze is making my skin tingle.


Our trip to Brighton yesterday has very much put a spring in my step, as did a nice, long catch-up on the phone with Fiona in Texas, where it’s apparently too hot to leave the house beyond 9am at the moment!

Philippa has been at the dentists today having surgery on her gums, and tells me she can’t eat solids for two weeks as a result. I pity her, and can’t think of anything more miserable than eating baby food, jelly, soup and porridge for a fortnight. Good way to lose weight though, thinking on...

I did a full day’s work today on my brass band reduction of the last movement of the Symphony for Yorkshire. I’m very much enjoying the process, and forcing myself to write in extraordinary detail, which is very good for me. Less good for me was the mother and baby group who met on the sofas at Costa this morning. The babies were all a little hot and tired and one of the Mum’s kept talking to her child in a voice which sounded like Michael Jackson, and was was going through me ever more than the constant wails and shrieks that her little monster was making. “What’s the matter, Bubba?” she said repeatedly, as though her one year-old was going to answer, “well actually, Mummy, I’m bored out of my tiny mind by the excessively dull conversations you’re having with your friends. You’re not giving me enough attention, I don't like the top you're wearing, which is why I keep throwing up on it - and please don’t call me Bubba!” Instead the mother said laughingly, “you really hate it here don’t you, Bubba?” And I wondered at that point why she continued to drag the poor little fella to the cafe...

Personally, I think he was freaked out by one of the other mummies who sounded like a posh android sucking a lemon sherbet whilst singing into a vocoder. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a woman with such a peculiar voice. Her child will grow up ashamed.

Thursday 4th July, 1661, and Pepys went to the King’s Theatre to see Killigrew’s Claracilla being performed. He described it as “well acted” but wrote how sad it was that the theatre was no longer “thronged.” The opening of the all-singing, all-dancing “Opera” in Lincoln’s Inn, had done for it. In fact, it would close within two years. "That's entertainment!" (As Simon Cowell has taken to saying in the most irritating voice every time someone accuses him of being a power-crazy tw*t.)

Pepys heard more news from his father in Huntingdonshire; his Uncle Robert was still ill and still having fits of “stupefaction” which is a word I adore and may well start to use.

In the evening, Pepys went to the Exchange, and then out drinking with his Uncle Wright to the Mitre pub. They were very merry, but Wight was annoyed that Pepys’ father had gone to Huntingdon without telling him..

Pepys also met Mr Batersby, the apothecary at the pub, and the two men got into a chat about “emerods” – or haemorrhoids – Batersby claiming that the best cure for the condition was allowing leeches to suck blood where the sun tends not to shine. Gross.