that way because the people are very happy. Then he gave us a white smock and white hat. We went through and watched the ladies make the sausages. It was really fun. You could smell the sauerkraut cooking, but they didn’t give us any hot dogs there. He had the whole portfolio of Picasso that I did the Picasso print of Paloma in. We looked at that, then we had to look at more pigs and more salamis and more hams and more ham art.
Then we took Polaroids for the portrait and had some tea. And his wife came by. They didn’t offer us lunch. Then all of a sudden he asked us if we’d like to try one of his hot dogs. They cooked some up and we had two apiece. They were really good. He said he had to go have lunch back at the lunch room. We had to go off without lunch which we thought was really strange. We got in the car and drove to a restaurant in a place called Bottrop.
As soon as we came in they told us it was this crazy day where all the women chase the men. They cut off your ties. But since we knew that was happening – we saw these drunken ladies running round – we took our ties off and hid them in our pockets. But then they got my shirt tail and they cut it off and it was my good shirt and I was so mad. These women were really bullies. We got back in the car and drove back to Hans’s gallery. I was so tired, and I was really upset about my shirt.
Andy Warhol
1983
ST VALENTINE’S DAY
Got four cards: one from Pandora [his girlfriend], one from Grandma, one from my mother and one from Rosie [his baby sister].
Big, big deal!
I got Pandora a Cupid card and a mini pack of ‘After Eights’. My parents didn’t bother this year, they are saving their money to pay for the solicitor’s letter.
Adrian Mole
15 February
1869
I was in London. Saw Siamese twins. Born in Siam – visited England 1829. They are farmers in North Carolina, and are here to repair their loss of fortune by American war. All the surgeons concur in advising them not to attempt an operation. Chang has 6 girls and 3 boys. Hang has 6 boys and 3 girls. They have a melancholy cast of countenance but brighten up when spoken to. They walk with arms folded in what looks a painful position but is described as being ‘perfectly comfortable’.
Dearman Birchall
1913
Tried to kiss her in a taxi-cab on the way home from the Savoy – the taxicab danger is very present with us – but she rejected me quietly, sombrely. I apologised on the steps of the Flats and said I feared I had greatly annoyed her. ‘I’m not annoyed,’ she said, ‘only surprised’ – in a thoughtful, chilly voice.
We had had supper in Soho, and I took some wine, and she looked so bewitching it sent me in a fever, thrumming my fingers on the seat of the cab while she sat beside me impassive. Her shoulders are exquisitely modelled and a beautiful head is carried poised on a tiny neck.
W. N. P. Barbellion
1915
We both went up to London this afternoon; L[eonard, her husband] to the Library, and I to ramble about the West End, picking up clothes. I am really in rags. It is very amusing. With age too one’s less afraid of the superb shop women. These great shops are like fairies’ palaces now. I swept about in Debenham’s and Marshall’s and so on, buying, as I thought, with great discretion. The shop women are often very charming, in spite of their serpentine coils of black hair. Then I had tea, and rambled down to Charing Cross in the dark, making up phrases and incidents to write about. Which is, I expect, the way one gets killed. I bought a ten and elevenpenny blue dress, in which I sit at this moment.
Virginia Woolf
1943
Hester the cook has a daughter, Elsie, who is the wife of a colored letter-carrier and the mother of two children. Some time ago I endorsed her application for a job at the Edgwood Arsenal, and she got it. She was graded as an unskilled laborer, and paid $3.60 a day. This morning Hester told me that she had been promoted to the rank of spray painter, and her pay lifted to $5.76 a day. It is amazing, with such opportunities open to colored women, that any of them go on working as domestic servants. Hester herself is probably too old for a government job; moreover she is lame. But Emma Ball, the maid, could get one easily, and be sure of rapid promotion, for she writes a good hand and is pretty intelligent. I am paying her $17 a week, which is considerably above the scale for housemaids in Baltimore. In addition, I give her a bonus of $150 a year, a present of $20 at Christmas and another of $20 when she begins her annual vacation of two weeks. Hester is paid $22 a week, with the same bonus and presents. Thus Emma receives $1,074 a year, besides her meals, and Hester $1, 334. They have Thursday and Sunday afternoons and evenings off, and do not come to work until noon on Saturday. When I am out of town in August I often let them off all day. They eat precisely what I eat.
H. L. Mencken
16 February
1798
Went for eggs into the Coombe, and to the bakers; a hail shower; brought home large burthens of sticks, a starlight evening, the sky closed in, and the ground white with snow before we went to bed.
Dorothy Wordsworth
1912
12.5m. Lunch Temp. +6.1º; Supper Temp. +7º. A rather trying position. Evans has nearly broken down in the brain, we think. He is absolutely changed from his normal self-reliant self. This morning and this afternoon he stopped the march on some trivial excuse. We are on short rations, but not very short, food spins out till tomorrow night. We cannot be more than 10 or 12 miles from the depôt, but the weather is all against us. After lunch we were enveloped in a snow sheet, land just looming. Memory should hold the events of a very troublesome march with more troubles ahead. Perhaps all will be well if we can get to our depôt tomorrow fairly early, but it is anxious work with the sick man. But it’s no use meeting troubles halfway, and our sleep is all too short to write more.
Captain Robert Falcon Scott
1932 [after the death of her partner, Lytton Strachey]
At last I am alone. At last there is nothing between us. I have been reading my letters to you in the library this evening. You are so engraved on my brain that I think of nothing else. Everything I look at is part of you. And there seems no point in life now you are gone. I used to say: ‘I must eat my meals properly as Lytton wouldn’t like me to behave badly when he was away.’ But now there is no coming back. No point in ‘improvements’. Nobody to write letters to. Only the interminable long days which never seem to end and the nights which end all too soon and turn to dawns. All gaiety has gone out of my life and I feel old and melancholy. All I can do is to plant snow drops and daffodils in my graveyard! Now there is nothing left. All your papers have been taken away. Your clothes have gone. Your room is bare. In a few months no traces will be left. Just a few book plates in some books and never again, however long I look out of the window, will I see your tall thin figure walking across the path past the dwarf pine past the stumps, and then climb the haha and come across the lawn. Our jokes have gone for ever. There is nobody now to make ‘disçerattas’ with, to laugh over our particular words. To discuss the difficulties of love, to read Ibsen in the evening. And to play cards when we were too ‘dim’ for reading. These mouring sentinels that we arranged so carefully. The shiftings
