JENNY'S RUINED RECORDS

W E D N E S D A Y,  8  M A R C H

At 10.15am I gave up Maths for ever. It was rather sad in a way. But now I have seven prep periods, which is marvellous.

English was interesting. We've begun Silas Marner and Mrs Huggett was saying about the villagers being suspicious of Silas Marner because he was different to everybody else. She says she feels this is coming back, that people despise, and fear, anyone who's different, especially in America. I agree. All these narrow-minded little people there are in the world - they can't bear to be different from all the other dull, half-dead people around them. There is so much conformity everywhere.

I took Jenny’s Polnareff LP home. Being French it has the wide hole in the middle and no plastic thing to go in it but I put it on the gramophone and it fitted onto this funny metal thing. Or so I thought. I played it again and it’s utterly ruined. There are scratches in 20 places on ‘Love Me, Please Love Me’ and in 16 places on ‘L’Amour Avec Toi’. I promised Jenny I’d look after it and now I’ve wrecked it - I was so miserable I cried. The only thing to do is to get another copy - but where on earth from? 

And on top of that, I've lost my gym shorts as well as my shirt, and there's all that Virgil to do. 

The gramophone on which Jenny's record was wrecked.