Paternal advice

25 February, in the year of our Lord 2021

Up, the weather back to be fine, which it hath not been since a great storm on Tuesday, when I thought a tree would topple, and Mr. M. Jones was without æther all the afternoon, so all his candles did not work, and nor did any in the areas of three postcodes where he lives. Rain all day yesterday, though the wind gone, for which we should be contented. After breakfast I to visit my mother and father, with the sun lighting up bare branches of trees from the side, as it does at this time of the year, against a bright blue sky, and the last of snow drops in the gardens, which cheer’d me. In the afternoon with my father by coach to the Hospitalle to put him again through the Contryvance where they use magick rays to see inside his chest, and will make another etching from them, to compare it with the previose. He I find to be in excellent good cheer, onlie his mind a little heavy for his worrying for my mother (though I think he doth it too much), and I doubt not also for what the new image may show, or not, but in three days, which is the twenty-eighth, will be his birth day, with him seeing ninety-one years, which he did not think would ever come to pass. He hath put on the wall a great heavy clocke from his shedde, where it was, though the roof of the shedde leaks, which is why he moved it, and it hath a solid tick, and keeps to a very good time, though it seems as heavy as he and I know not how he moved it. But his mind is as sharp as ever, and I am still subject to the style of paternal instrucktion I remember from my school days: that I must put the handle of the front door a certain way when I put an item in his recicling bins lest it close behind me and lock me out, which I think is a commonsense (though it is easier to keep one foot inside the door); could I please cut a straw berry in four Quadrants before sugar is added, for it makes a better syroppe with the juce of it; that one container of soupe will serve three if each dish is filled only to a certain line in the pattern thereof, which is blue and white and a pastoral picture of China, and the soup should come onlie to the top of the willow; also that I must lock the outside doors at the front of the house on to the street and at the back into the kitchen, and all the doors inside the house, at night, to safe guard from burglery and that he he must take his jacket each night up the stairs lest money be stolen from it by a vagabond while he sleeps — which may be a right discretion, but when ask I of him, ‘When did you last open the patio door to go into the garden, for today I found it closed but unlocked, which means anyone could have waltzed in and took your wallit?’, he says, ‘Oh, a couple of years ago.’ But I would not have it another way, and at supper today notes he for my benefitte that it is best to use the salt grinder at an angle, or it clogs the mechanicks.
  In the gazette read of a little legal newes: viz. — of the case in Chancery of Sturgeon v. Salmon, which is to be likened to Jarndyce v. Jarndyce; that in the Plymouth Colony a magistrate hath demanded to see the ledgers of the man who led them; on the Health page that we must all mind the wine and ale we drink in Lock Up, and that in Holland they are to outlaw who may smoke in their coffee houses. Also that a man says he hath taken a coach and put it on the service of Mars, the body celestialle that Mr. Smethwick shewed me with his glasses at the Royal Society, which I think is the most ridiculous thing I did ever read in my entire life.
  After supper, I find that it was one year ago on the last Thursday in February, which is the same as today, when I was with Mr. M. Jones in a hall where we listened to some music being played there, which was with a great band of viols and some sackbutts, and some who sung, perhaps twenty-five or thirty in the total of them, all on a stage, which was a sinfonia wrote by Mr. Gust. Mahler, all the way from the Emperour’s lands, and we found very good matter in it, and come from it much contented, onlie it a little long.