8th June – Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.

There seems something appropriate about being back in England as summer starts. These country lanes, bounded by hedgerows, feel like a place I’ve always known. And the thick air, and the heavy smells. It feels like mine, like home. I wonder how many of us feel this way? Did I get it all from Enid Blyton, like everyone else, or do I know actually know these places? It seems like remembering; like recall; as if I’m back with Dolly, doing it again from the very beginning. Friend John allows me my silence, like that way you never wake a sleep-walker, allowing me my saudade, as if he knows where it is, I am.

It’s appropriate, I suppose, as we walk from the coast, through the Suffolk countryside, that I am in the process of teaching Friend, English history. I’m doing it as we were taught it ourselves, by which I mean, I’m starting at the Tudors, leaving everything that happened before 1500 to the English department, since the version we all believe was made up by Shakespeare.

As for actual history, he mastered the first lesson, divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived, quickly enough, but he struggled with the challenge to work it into a mnemonic to include the surnames of his wives. It’s easy enough; they were all married in alphabetical order, with the sole exception of his favourite, Jane Seymour, and she is inserted, because of her preferred status, at the start of the C’s – the phonetic Sey of Seymour, trumping Cleeves actual C.

After a while he got something going on the general theme of A divorcee; BE-headed; See you later; C 3/4 P.O.; be-How-eaded; I Parrt before you.  But he hasn’t been able to make a good rhyme out of it. What is more, he’s yet to work into all of that, the distribution of children, which go: girl, Mary; girl, Elizabeth; boy Edward; for each of the first three wives, respectively. And once that’s done, of course, he needs to add a religion for each of them, and then one for each of the last three wives.

I think there’s an obvious solution, using the lyrics Abacus Chappie to the tune of Whitney Houston’s The Greatest Love of All, working in prod for protestants – a useful verb in the context of knocking heads off; and cat for Catholics, which is just as valuable in demonising women that are no longer valued. But I am going to let him work that out for himself. It seems to me to be the best chance he has of bringing the project together in time for the tests on Monday.

But then again, I’ve had a lifetime to think about it. He’s only just begun.

‘Test?’ he asks.

And I reply, ‘Testsss.’

Всем хороших выходных, I hope it will be better than Friend John’s.