Samuel Pepys:
Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain, but upon taking of cold.1 I lived in Axe Yard having my wife, and servant Jane, and no more in family than us three.
It's 350 years since he wrote that first entry in his famous diary, the start of what would turn out to be a key primary source for historians of Restoration London. Though written between 1660 and 1669, Pepys's work wasn't published until the nineteenth century. Things move more quickly for contemporary London diarists, and today's keepers of metropolitan journals might be interested to known that they can even win a prize for their efforts.
