…Paid Mr Porter in cash £20 in full for the draft received of him the 2nd instant, and took up my note of hand that I then gave him. Mr Merrick, a grocer in Southwark, called on me today and dined with me on the remains of yesterday’s dinner with some cucumbers, and stayed and smoked a pipe or two with me after dinner.
At home all day and pretty busy. A great deal of rain fell in the afternoon. In the evening wrote my London letters, and afterwards went down to Joseph Fuller’s, where I stayed and spent the evening till near 1 o’clock in company with their family, Mr Bannister and Thomas Durrant. But I cannot say I came home sober. How do I lament my present irregular and to me very unpleasant way of life, for what I used to lead in my dear Peggy’s time — then was home of all places the most agreeable, but now the most unpleasant and irksome; then did I not know the want of a virtuous and pleasant companion, whose good sense was always pleasing and made life in that respect agreeable: but now, alas! I know not the comfort of an agreeable friend and virtuous fair — No, I have not spent hardly one agreeable hour in the company of a woman since I lost my wife, for really there seem very few whose education and way of thinking is agreeable and suitable with my own.