Monday 10 July

Did not go to school today. Mum phoned the Secretary and told her I was unwell. In any case Exams are over and it is practically end-of-term: even Mr Grudge has a smile twitching on his face as holidays approach.

Mum will not say when I am supposed to resume my duties at the organ – she says only that it all depends, but does not say upon what. No doubt she is concerned about my health, for it has indeed been a stressful few weeks, and my immune system is surely in tatters.

It is proving very difficult to find a rhyme for Rachel, apart from Satchel, which is both an imperfect rhyme as well as a word lacking in Romantic associations. Seychelles comes to mind, and that is indeed Romantic, but as my poem would be intended for English readers they would insist on pronouncing the final S and blame me for lack of craftsmanship. The lot of a poet is, I find, a cruel one. Brenda would have been a lot easier –

“No Borrower of Love’s bloom, I, but Lender”

would have gone down particularly well, with its modest but knowledgeable allusion to Polonius’s speech to his son Laertes in Act I* of William Shakespeare’s masterly play Hamlet, which 4A did in Eng Lit last term. It is a line of which I am sure Shakespeare himself would have been proud if he had thought of it, and rather than waste it I will attempt to work it into a sonnet for Rachel, which I have provisionally entitled “A Sonnet for Rachel.”

* Scene 3, I think, but I will have to check when I next visit the library.