11 January 1932 – 17 January 1932

Oh but this is, as I always say, making an apology myself to myself, not the first day of the year. It is the thirteenth, and I am in one of those lassitudes and ebbs of life when I cannot heave another word on to the wall. My word, what a heaving The Waves was, that I still feel the strain I Can we count on another 20 years? I shall be fifty on 25th, Monday week that is: and sometimes feel that I have lived 250 years already, and sometimes that I am still the youngest person in the omnibus. (Nessa said that she still always thinks this, as she sits down.) And I want to write another four novels: Waves, I mean; and the Tap on the Door; and to go through English literature, like a string through cheese, or rather like some industrious insect, eating its way from book to book, from Chaucer to Lawrence. This is a programme, considering my slowness, and how I get slower, thicker, more intolerant of the fling and the rush, to last out my 20 years, if I have them.