Vox Meditantis

What was the last thing you did for play or fun?

Sunday, 20th December, 1801

You’ll think me strange, I dare say, to speak to you thus on a Sunday evening – and stranger still that I should choose this hour, when honest folk have lit their candles and settled by the fire after sermon, to confess what troubles me. But there it is. I am weary, and I have nowhere else to turn my thoughts, so you must bear with me.

My name is of no consequence. I am one-and-twenty, a clerk’s apprentice in the precincts of Fleet Street, where the printers’ ink never quite dries and the air is thick with broadsheets, pamphlets, and the ceaseless hum of men’s opinions. It is a marketplace, if you will – not of cloth or corn, but of ideas, rumours, libels, truths half-told and quarter-believed. I sort type, I carry proofs, I run errands between the coffee-houses and the printing offices. And I listen. God forgive me, I listen, and I repeat what I ought not.

That is my sin, you see. I am a gossip. I do not steal, nor blaspheme in public, nor neglect my prayers entirely – though I confess I drowsed through much of this morning’s sermon at St Bride’s – but I cannot hold my tongue. A whisper reaches me in the coffee-room at noon, and by evening I have passed it along to half a dozen others, each time adding a little flourish, a little colour, until the thing has grown beyond all recognition. I know it is wrong. I have known it since I was a boy, when my mother would box my ears for carrying tales from one neighbour to another. Yet I cannot seem to stop.

It is not that I mean harm. I swear to you, I do not. But there is something in the very air of this place – this district of news and argument – that makes a man want to be part of the conversation, to have something worth saying when the others gather by the fire. You understand, don’t you? To belong, to be noticed, to be the one who knows before anyone else? That is what draws me. That is what keeps me whispering, even when I know I should hold my peace.

This past week has been particularly wretched. There was talk – foolish, dangerous talk – about a certain gentleman’s debts, and I, like a fool, repeated it in the wrong company. By Friday it had reached the gentleman himself, and though I cannot prove it, I am certain he knows it was I who set the rumour loose. Now I go about the streets with my collar turned up and my head down, half-expecting a constable’s hand on my shoulder, or worse. The other clerks avoid me. Even the pot-boy at the Three Bells will scarce meet my eye.

And yet, what is the use of regret? The thing is done. The seed is scattered, and there is no gathering it back once it has taken root. That is what gossip is, is it not? A kind of spore, carried on the wind, settling where it will, sprouting in the dark. You cannot see it grow, but you know it is there, feeding on the soil of men’s fears and suspicions. I have sown plenty of such seeds, and now I must reckon with the harvest.

You ask me – or perhaps I ask myself – what was the last thing I did for play or fun? I had to think on that. It has been a long while since I did anything that might be called pure recreation. Last Sunday fortnight, I suppose, I walked out to Vauxhall with two other lads from the printing office. We paid a penny each to see a conjuror perform tricks with cards and coloured scarves, and afterwards we bought hot chestnuts from a barrow and stood about laughing at nothing in particular. It was foolish, simple stuff – the sort of thing boys do – but I remember it gave me a kind of lightness I have not felt since. I was not thinking of rumours or reputations or the consequences of my loose tongue. I was simply there, in the cold air, with my fellows, and it was enough.

But that was before. Now it is winter in earnest, and the days are short, and I have made myself unwelcome in the very community I most wished to belong to. The other apprentices, the clerks, the men who gather at the coffee-houses – they are my world, you see. Without them, I am nothing. I have no family in London, no patron, no estate to fall back upon. I am dependent entirely on the good opinion of those around me, and I have squandered it for the sake of a moment’s attention, a fleeting sense of importance.

What am I to do? I cannot undo what I have said. I cannot call back the words that have already done their work. I can only resolve – as I have resolved a hundred times before – to keep silent in future, to guard my tongue, to resist the temptation to repeat what I hear. But even as I make that resolution, I feel it weakening, like a rope that has been pulled too often and is beginning to fray.

Perhaps that is my lot. Perhaps I am doomed to repeat this pattern endlessly – to gossip, to regret, to resolve, to gossip again – until I am old and grey and no one will listen to me any longer. It is a bleak thought, but tonight, on this cold Sunday evening, with the darkness pressing close and the candle burning low, it feels like the truth.

I tell you this not because I expect absolution, nor even sympathy. I tell you because I am weary of carrying it alone, and because – God help me – even in my shame, I cannot quite resist the urge to speak, to confess, to make someone else a party to my burden. That, too, is a kind of gossip, I suppose. The only difference is that now I am the subject of my own tale, and the telling brings me no pleasure at all.

So there it is. You have heard me. Do with it what you will. I am too tired to care.

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.