Anyone who has kept a Garden Diary, or perhaps any kind of diary at all, knows how essential it is to have a series of acronyms or other abbreviations that can be used to refer not to people but to places. I cannot imagine why anyone would wish to transcribe my scrawls, written typically at the end of the day as I am about to crawl into bed and hence even more shaky and spidery than usual, but were they to want to do so, they would have to make their way not only through that near illegibility but also across a jumble of strange initials. It would be helpful for any reader to have a list to hand, the kind that one needs when reading Dostoevsky or Chekhov or Elena Ferrante where every character appears to have at least three names, a kind of dramatis personae, except that in the case of my diary it would be a dramatis loci.