Buried in parchmentwork

I'm sure Molly must be beyond vexed with me. Bill was expected for dinner tonight, and I believe one of the chickens is being sacrificed for the occasion, but I have not stirred from my desk for hours, and I must finish going through these personnel reports and tabulating these columns before I can begin to think of escaping. It's my own fault, really: I was the one to suggest we do a full write up of the cluster of diphtheria cases at Epping Forest, as a case study of how to contain an outbreak of contagious disease. I suppose the painstaking boredom of epidemiological summaries is my fitting punishment for being an over-eager bureaucrat. I do hope, however, that the final assessment will offer some conclusions that will prove useful to the appropriate public health committees at St Mungo's.

Well, back to it.