Bigger Than Fascism

I always tended to take from the weekend before Christmas up 'til the 2nd off anyway, so it's only since the day after Bankside Twelfth Night didn't bring a rude awakening that it really started to sink in; yes, I am now a gentleman of leisure. When I was lounging around before, watching Caligula and Bagpuss** - that I would have been doing anyway, redundancy or no. But yesterday, watching a spot of Carnivale, reading a book about giant monsters, and heading down to Sir John Soane's before meeting a friend for drinks at half four...that was liberty. And it helped that Sir John Soane's was even more eccentric and crepuscular than usual, with the heating on the blink and candles providing most of the light, such that when you catch sight of yourself in the mirrors, surrounded by the past, there's a real flash of Crooked House possibility that you might be back there, or they might be here. Anyone comes to me with their "consensus that work is good for people", they're going to get laughed out of town.

*Never having seen the full-length version before...blimey. It's not that I've never seen such things before, just not normally in films which also feature Sir John Gielgud and Dame Helen Mirren. Untrue, though, as is sometimes said, that the extra filth is plot-irrelevant stuff; that's just our culture's latent prudishness showing its ugly face again. There is some gratuitous material, it's true, but other bits make much more sense of Caligula's relationships with his betrothed, his sister and his wife.
**And never mind that juxtaposition - the vagaries of the alphabet have landed that dear saggy old cloth cat next to Baise-moi on the shelf.