From The Diary of Samuel Pepys:
Up, and being mightily pleased with my night’s lodging, drank a cup of beer, and went out to my office, and there did some business, and so took boat and down to Woolwich (having first made a visit to Madam Williams, who is going down to my Lord Bruncker) and there dined, and then fitted my papers and money and every thing else for a journey to Nonsuch to-morrow.
That being done I walked to Greenwich, and there to the office pretty late expecting Captain Cocke’s coming, which he did, and so with me to my new lodging (and there I chose rather to lie because of my interest in the goods that we have brought there to lie), but the people were abed, so we knocked them up, and so I to bed, and in the night was mightily troubled with a looseness (I suppose from some fresh damp linen that I put on this night), and feeling for a chamber-pott, there was none, I having called the mayde up out of her bed, she had forgot I suppose to put one there; so I was forced in this strange house to rise and shit in the chimney twice; and so to bed and was very well again, and [Continued tomorrow. P.G.]
HT: Bill Bailey, in one of his performances started talking about Pepys and read the diary entry but I've forgotten which show, probably one of the Royal Variety performances so instead of Mr. Bailey reading about Pepys pooping in the fireplace here he is playing with a very interesting orchestra and an astounding sitar player.
Even tech guy Siva, a street-wise Hindu boy (CalTech postdoc) who initially thought I was subjecting him to some sort of sitar blasphemy came around and said "They are very, very good."
Regarding Pepys, this is from April 2020 as the covid was gathering steam:
"Lessons in Death and Life from the Diaries of Samuel Pepys"
We don't have a lot on Pepys. There was the time he forgot the crustaceans in the carriage:
350 Years Ago Today: Samuel Pepys Forgot His Lobsters
And the time he was a placeholder for Ms Kaminska:
While Waiting for Izabella to Tell Us About Roman Brothel Tokens: The Trade Tokens of Samuel Pepys’ London
And a few more but all-in-all and especially considering the times in which he lived, not a lot.....
*****
.....He also dropped in on us in "Resiliance, Brittleness and Catastrophic Failure: Everything Is Fine, Until It Isn't":
"Perhaps the most irrational fashion act of all was the male habit for 150 years of wearing wigs. Samuel Pepys, as with so many things, was in the vanguard, noting with some apprehension the purchase of a wig in 1663 when wigs were not yet common. It was such a novelty that he feared people would laugh at him in church; he was greatly relieved, and a little proud, to find that they did not. He also worried, not unreasonably, that the hair of wigs might come from plague victims. Perhaps nothing says more about the power of fashion than that Pepys continued wearing wigs even while wondering if they might kill him."And some of his correspondence was in "Oxford's Bodleian and the University of Michigan Libraries Release 25,000 Early English (1473-1700) Books to the Internet"
– Bill Bryson, “At Home: A Short History of Private Life”
And some stuff from his time as President of the Royal Society, a couple years after Wren and a couple decades before Newton:
Digitized Minutes of the Royal Society 1686 - 1711
But not nearly as much as I would have thought.
