12/25 September 1916
Tsarskoe Selo

No matter how many promises I make to myself, I keep forgetting to write in this diary. Maybe forgetting is not the right word. It seems that everything I have to put down is either discouraging (Romania has declared war on Germany, and Papa is very worried) or boring (lessons) or just silly. Maybe today I’ll write about something silly, such as the new game we’ve made up: riding our bicycles at breakneck speed through the palace halls. By “we”, I mean Mashka and me. Tatiana is too sensible to indulge in such foolishness, and Olga is always too busy reading some book or other. So far we’ve had several spectacular crashes but amazingly have not yet broken a single thing.