Pepys and me

I've had an idea for a while that I might do write an occasional series of '.... and me' posts. About people with whom I've had a one-sided, ongoing relationship through my life, without ever meeting or knowing for real.  I had been thinking along the lines of 'Madonna and me' or 'Kate Moss and me', but the it turns out the first I am to write is 'Samuel Pepys and me' and it's all down to last night's dream.

(I know listening to people witter on about their dreams can be dreadfully dull - I'll keep it short. I've tried to strip out the haziness and irrelevancies and stuck to the main points)

I was waiting to take an exam and had been handed the exam paper in advance. Unlike the other people waiting who had a choice of questions to answer, I was told it was imperative that I write an essay to "demonstrate, with examples, what Samuel Pepys would have made of today's current issues".    After strikenly searching for get outs (could I make it up? not take the exam altogether?), I resigned myself to having to read all of the diaries as the clock ticked down - leaving just the small problem of getting my hands on them...

So it's a version of my standard exam-based anxiety dream (time is running out and I haven't revised or even studied the subject in the first place).  But usually these revolve around maths, having more basis in the reality of my A-level experience than I like to admit. It has also been triggered by thinking about thinking, thanks to John Grant and Juliana Xavier's current thought-process project.  And then there's Pepys.

By some random process I was assigned to Pepys House at school, which meant my gym kit had a blue stripe.  Like the other houses (Cromwell, Vesey and Montagu) it was named after a noteworthy previous inhabitant of Hinchingbrooke House - the building which housed our 6th form.  That's not to say that back then old Sam had much impact on my psyche - who cared about some dead guy that once wrote diaries?  But having studied (and dossed) in the rooms he once inhabited, while carrying his name as part of my identity, my ears instinctively prick up whenever he is mentioned.

These days Pepys is increasingly of interest.  The granddaddy of diary writing; the great eyewitness who chronicled history and mixed it up with the mundane. As a blogger and a Londoner I can't help feeling a sort of affinity with him (groping servant girls aside), and really I do wonder what he would make of it all. Kate's lending me Claire Tomalin's biography, so I should be getting to know him a bit better soon.

In the meantime, here is the specific prompt for last night's dream. A quote from Julie & Julia, the  book of the blog The Julie/Julia Project and a lustily tasty and indulgent read:

"Some bloggers might say that Samuel Pepys was a sort of proto-blogger, but we're not a terribly measured lot, so I don't know if I'd listen to us if I were you.  Sure, Pepys obsessively chronicled his interior-decorating ups and downs and the time he masturbated in the water taxi.  Sure, he wrote in his pyjamas. But although he carefully saved his diary, volumes and volumes of it, for the rest of his life, he never showed it to a single soul."

UPDATE:  Pepys has a blog! How brilliant is that? Massive thanks to Mark McGuinness,  who I met today at Coffee Morning, for pointing it out.