Outrage journalism, what fun. She appends the venues and the times of performances and emails it off to the editor.

It’s after midnight as she starts her first blog:

Yesterday, I read a passage from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals, and I wondered if she and her brother were incestuous.

Dorothy wrote these words just after her brother William married Mary Hutchinson:

William had parted from me up stairs. I gave him the wedding ring – with how deep a blessing! I took it from my forefinger where I had worn it the whole of the night before – he slipped it again on to my finger and blessed me fervently. I kept myself as quiet as I could but when I saw the two men running up the walk coming to tell us it [the wedding] was over I could stand it no longer and threw myself on the bed where I lay in stillness neither hearing nor seeing anything till Sara came up stairs to me & said, ‘They are coming!’ This forced me from the bed where I lay & I moved I know not how straight forward, faster than my strength could carry me till I met my beloved William & fell on his bosom.

Funny, don’t you think, that William rushed ahead of his wife to embrace his sister? Weird stuff with the ring. Strange that she should have thrown herself on the bed. Stuck out there in the fells, nobody to speak to except, occasionally, Keats, Dorothy utterly devoted: it all adds up to incest. I will come back to this topic. By the way, Dorothy suffered from migraines, at least two a week. Migraines are a modern plague.

I don’t know what it means, but yesterday I met a man who believes a story can have many beginnings and many endings. And next week I will be asking, do children have natural integrity? What do you think? And finally, I have just discovered cupcakes. Utterly divine and recipes galore. I am trying them out as many as possible before reporting back to you. Yes, it’s all out there somewhere.

This sounds lively, she thinks. She has never made a cupcake, but she has seen some recipes in full colour in the Times Magazine section. It can’t be difficult: children were making them in the pictures. Admittedly, they were thin, overcoached children, expensively dressed. Probably in Notting Hill. While their parents were bankrupting the country, they were making cupcakes. She thinks this slightly ironic polemical style could work.

Chapter 7

Chapter 7