Sous les Feuilles

The art of lying on the grass, of dispensing with knife and fork, of making yourself generally useful – with the air of one accustomed to be generally useless, – is not to be mastered in an afternoon. As it is held a special compliment to a man’s manners and intellectual gifts, to ask him to breakfast, so it should be high flattery to bid him be merry in good company under the greenwood tree. Let the candid reader admit, however, that there is vast room for improvement in the art of dining with nothing between you and the pendent caterpillar. (The Epicure’s Year Book for 1869).

No larger feast than under plane or pine,

With neighbours laid along the grass, to take

Only such cups as left us friendly-warm,

Affirming each his own philosophy –

Nothing to  mar the sober majesties

Of settled, sweet, Epicurean life.

(Tennyson, Lucretius, 1868).

Somewhere in between the ideal and the awkward lies the picnic reality. But let not the peripatetic formicidae put you off. Inspired by Lily Lemontree a little while ago, Mrs. VB and I sprawled ourselves out on the lawn in front of Schloss Schönhausen – a quiet little seventeenth-century palace that has recently been restored – and partook of brie, grapes, black German bread, Leberwurst, and Riesling.

I had planned to read aloud for the afternoon, but the book remained unopened. Not long into the affair we spotted a jogging philosopher friend who I had not seen in several years. Seeing our horizontal civility as eminently preferential to his unseemly Sabbatical activity, he trotted over, caught his breath, and chewed the fat for an hour or more. This is the kind of thing that happens in Berlin. We soon set the world to rights, and made a dinner date for next month, to resume a conversation about my next book, in which he has a keen interest.

A gentle promenade around the grounds followed, before heading home. Ants, wasps and Heidegger were left on the grass to their own devices. For once, the weather forecast was completely accurate. In short, I recommend this oft-forgotten activity. Do it with grace and a little charm. Do it with passing intellectuals, if you can spot them. Do it with a decently chilled bottle of wine. But most of all, do it, won’t you?

Männertag? Just No

Last Thursday it was Männertag here in the non-Catholic bit of Germany. That’s ‘Men’s Day’ to you and me. It is a secular booze up in lieu of a religious holiday, and it actually spills over into the weekend. The form is to wander around getting drunk all day, lugging crates of beer from place to place, and generally being obscene. According to the Federal Statistics Office, so I’m told, there are more than three times as many alcohol related traffic accidents on this day, compared to the daily average. It’s also a good day to get into a fight.

It’s pretty sad to see masculinity reduced to a personified belch, and I really wonder what the men of this land have done to deserve their weekend of over indulgence. I went to the Tiergarten with three ladies and had a civilised evening, trying to avoid the male natives. Looking into the zoo next door, all the animals seemed very well behaved. An American would call that ‘ironic’. On Friday morning I was awakened by a ‘man’ rolling home just before seven o’clock, doing his best tribute to a cat in heat singing Angels by Robbie Williams. Think that’s funny? You had to be there.

I hereby consign Männertag to the cultural dustbin. Men don’t need a special day to be at their worst. We’re capable of that whenever. It might be an idea, on the other hand, to encourage an alternative Männertag next year, at which time we shall be on our best behaviour, and spend the day looking dapper and generally being civil to one and all. It may serve as a reminder that we can do that anytime too.

Mixological Magic

If I had the use of my body, I would throw it out the window.

Jane Brown

There is no sign above the door, and a heavy black curtain lies immediately behind the plate glass. In the middle of the window, a portrait of Samuel Beckett is suspended. The door is ajar, exhaling Cuban tobacco, and affording a glimpse of blood-red leather. The passer-by passes by. There is no contrivance of attraction; no desire for passing trade to cease its passing.

The curious can find out. Behind the door lies a body, fibrous and bloody, moving to the syncopation of a Coltrane beat. There is black bile here, but there is also passion. Cigars circulate in the lungs, and the blood is thinned by the spirits. We sink into muscular arm chairs, feeling inside out.

A server appears and hands us a book of Beckett criticism. Bound at intervals between the leaves is the cocktail menu of a late-modern imagination. Behind the bar, the mixologist cracks eggs, sprays vapours, and tastes his work. He is the engine room of the senses, creating enchantments to dazzle the eye, mystify the nose, numb the finger, and invigorate the palate. The shaking and stirring of his chemistry is a Pavlovian stimulus to the salivary gland. We lean back, go with the flow.

We are in Beckett’s Kopf, Prenzlauer Berg’s most refined cocktail bar. We are reluctant ever to leave. Floating on ten-euro martinis, the room embodies us. We are essential, internal organs. We are the je ne sais quoi of character in a physiological environment. The elegance of strong alcohol strips the paint of our exterior and leaves us – artifice exposed – the men we were supposed to be.

Images: http://www.becketts-kopf.de/

Marathon Memoir, Part II

Back in November I pledged to you that I would take on a couple of new challenges, after my maiden marathon run in Montreal last September. I also promised not to bore you with the details of the process, but to let you know when successes could be chalked up. Yesterday I ran the Berlin Half Marathon, on an unexpectedly hot day, in 1:40:08. This was within 8 seconds of my target time, which I can live with given how crowded the run was (25,500 registered), and about four minutes faster than I’ve covered that distance previously. Given the difficulties of winter training, and an ill-timed ear infection at the peak of the training schedule, I’m really rather pleased with it. I’m inclined to say that I still don’t much like running, but I do respond well to concrete, if self-set, challenges. If one is stubborn minded enough, hating running seems to be more help than hindrance: one wants it to end as quickly as possible. If giving up isn’t an option, running fast is all you’ve got. The next part of the challenge is to run a five-minute mile by November. I have no idea if this is possible, but the endeavour should be interesting.

One has to put these things into perspective. How do these achievements fit into a life? What do they mean? Aside from the fringe benefits of being fit, being able to eat whatever I please, and being on the whole a bit more even tempered, why bother? Some would say, perhaps, that these things are enough, and indeed they might be for some. But it doesn’t quite cut it for me. The real importance has to do with the value one attaches to a life. We are too given to reduce achievement to possession, to salary, to sealing deals that nobody will remember. In short, we are defined by ‘work’ in the narrowest sense of that term. If we are not careful, life will pass us by in the pursuit of green, and when we collapse with heart disease just after our hard-earned retirements, people will gather and say ‘what a waste’. 

Making music, listening to music, reading with all my attention, these activities are part and parcel of my life; to call them hobbies would make a mockery of them… [T]here is no hard and fast opposition between my work itself and what I do apart from it. (Theodore Adorno, Free Time).

I am a firm advocate of work, but I prefer to interpret the term much more broadly. Victorian gentlemen understood that work was necessary, even if money was no object. A vocation is required of a citizen, for to be a drone is to be a drain. These men went about their work with a zeal rarely seen among today’s workforce. But they also went about their recreation with a similar zeal. In essence, there was no difference in spirit between ‘work’ and ‘play’, in the best traditions of the amateur. It was all done with serious intent. Whereas we are wont to have a ‘hobby’, a word that tends to connote frivolousness and idle pleasure, they held their pursuits to be an important reflection of their character and, writ large, of the state of society. Ultimately then, play is also a form of work, and our attitude towards it tells us, and the world around us, something about ourselves. 

How Good A Victorian Are You?

I’m an inveterate museum goer, but I’m discerning about where I spend my time. Museums have to walk a fine line these days for the sake of making money. Such vulgar pursuits ought really to be beyond their purview, but alas, everyone must play the game. The museum – which had its zenith under the Victorians – is now a sort of theme park. And like all theme parks, some are better than others.

There are museums that flaunt their superstar objets d’art, which they claim are objets trouvés, but which (in the West, at least) are usually objets volés. From the Elgin Marbles to Nefertiti, these artefacts pull in the tourists to gawk and throng, without really imparting any obvious benefit to the viewers. They must be seen because travel guides inform travellers that they simply must be seen. And that’s that.

Nefertiti: nicked.

Then there are the museums that make up for their conspicuous lack of Elgin Marbles by being interactive. I hate interactive museums. ‘Lift this’, ‘Pull that’, ‘Open this drawer’, ‘Play this stupid game’: it’s all such a frightful bore, and inevitably so. After all, these museums have been designed for children, with no mind given to the poor parents who have to schlep around after them, looking increasingly beleaguered at the mass display of over-stimulated ADD. Unfortunately, the Natural History Museum in London has gone in this direction, when there was really no need. The statue of Darwin sits atop the main staircase looking for all the world like none of his living headaches was ever this bad. Make it stop, make it stop, please God (?) make it stop…

Darwin: Cheesed off

Next there are the museums that demand you read everything. A wall of text greets you, and you spend the next fourteen hours craning to read small wall-mounted signs that tell you all a good scholar could ever want to know on the subject. You can read about different interpretations of this and that, scholarly debates, where exactly the horde was dug up and its significance and, probably, you can find out precisely what you’re supposed to think about it all. The signs will tell you. These museums are often complemented by a catholic collection of artefacts that fit the description: ‘Everything ever done or ever made. Ever’.

The best museums somehow manage to take the best elements of all these models and balance them out. They are usually small, often specialist, typically focused on singular artistic or historical themes. A couple of my favourites are the Bergruenn Museum in Berlin, the new building of the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, and the Morgan in New York. But no museum as yet had ever managed to convince me about the need for interactive technological contrivances. That is until today, when some friends pointed me in the direction of the McCord Museum in Montreal.

A frivolous interactive doodad at the NHM

Shamefully, I’ve never been to this place, even though I lived for several years about two minutes away on foot. Now I am 4,000 miles away and yet I have been lured in. So much about the Victorian era is encapsulated in the museum, yet most people know precisely nothing about what Victorians were like. Now’s your chance to play a little game, online (shudder), where you can discover just how good a Victorian you would have made. It’s all about dressing, manners and etiquette. It is right up my street, and damn it if it isn’t interactive.

Go and have a play. I discovered I have a tendency to overdress, but otherwise I am a ‘picture of politeness’. Now, when a museum application tells you this, you jolly well shake it by the hand and invite it over for tea. It seems I have been formally welcomed to post-modernity, through the Victorians of all people.

Stirred, Not Shaken

Not long ago Reggie Darling gave up martinis for Lent. He is a better man than I. The other day I was reflecting on the unbridled joy of gin while drinking the hands-down worst martini I ever had. Even with chunks of sharp ice floating on the top, a too-sweet vermouth, and an olive that should have been in a museum, I was still spell-bound by the thing. And the gin was cheap too. Then I remembered all the truly historic martinis I have consumed and felt slightly giddy. There’s the made-at-your-table old-world citrus sprinkled Plymouth genius of the Duke’s Bar in London; the majestic opulence of wonder mixing at Claridge’s in that same fair city; the flavour-enhancing view of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York; and the pure rocket-propelled vertigo of the James Bond (sic) martini of Club 737 in Montreal (not for the faint of heart).

Martini at Dukes, by worldsbestbars.com

My own humble mixes don’t pass muster I’m sure, but I do have preferences. I’ve asked around, and find no consensus. Reggie’s mix is as follows: 

I likes a whisper of vermouth in my martini, but no more than a quarter of a cap full when I’m mixing two of them (one for me, one for Boy). I freeze the glasses, not the gin, and I shake it, not stir it, in the silver shaker... Sometimes I'll dirtify my martini with a teaspoonful from the olive jar, but only rarely and only when bored, which I rarely am.

The Idle Historian, who knows a thing or two about the consumption of alcohol, but never before lunch, advised me that he is ‘firm, of course, on it being stirred and not shaken. One cannot bruise the delicate, healthful molecules of gin... (and, of course, it MUST be gin, not vodka)’.

Churchill famously liked his martinis very dry (i.e., the vermouth was allowed to be in the same room as the gin, but no nearer). The Queen Mother dispensed with the pretence of the cocktail and just drank neat gin. From the bottle.

My own martinis have an accidental nature. I started by shaking the things, but after one evening the top jammed on my cocktail shaker and only came off eight months later. A god-fearing man might have taken this as a sign, but yours truly endeavoured. Taking a leaf out of the Idle Historian’s book, I took to stirring the drink. Like Reggie, I freeze the glass, not the gin. Pour four parts gin to one part vermouth in a very large, ice-filled glass and stir. The process not only seems to preserve the gin, but also to avoid partial crushing of the ice. That little bit of water melt takes the edge off the strong alcohol and allows the palate a chance at the full complexity of the gin. I pour it over three pimento-filled olives that have been thoroughly rinsed.

 It's not called Mother's Ruin for nothing, you know.

Hogarth's Gin Lane, 1751

Do not ever give me vodka. And if I order a martini, don’t do what the purveyor of awful cocktails did to me the other night and offer me Martini^® Bianco. It will take you days to recover from my look of pure contempt. I promise, you will be shaken.

Winter, Get Away: More About Cake

This is likely my last post until Tuesday next week. It’s back down to -11C here in Berlin, and we’ve had enough. De-camping to Barcelona for the long weekend.

There are only so many things one can do to stay cheery when the winter drags on like this. One can dress accordingly, of course:

And one can partake of plenty of this:

Or this.

My part of town is rather rich in cake and coffee. It comes of people being beautiful and unemployed. Is it manly? Doubtless not, but winter comforts sometimes take priority.

Incidentally, outside the café that serves these delights is a clump of old tree trunks, standing about eight feet high, with holes cut in them in various places, big enough to accommodate books. People drop their unwanted books in the tree and others come by for a browse and take what they like. There’s something rather sturdily reassuring about a tangible tree of knowledge, offering such delights as Flaubert, the Spanish language in Italian, and Thomas Mann. Since nobody would find the thing if they weren’t on their way for cake, I hereby upgrade the eating of cake to an intellectual pursuit.

Until next week then. Stay manly.

*Pics all mine save the last, which I stole manfully from foodieinberlin. Coat: Danier; Jacket: Nino Cerruti; Shirt: Hilfiger; Tie: Mila Schön; Cardigan: Iceland; Jeans: Levi's 514 straight; scarf: Liberty of London; cakes: Himbeer Sahne and  Schoko Limette.

In Praise of Cake, Double Wicks, and Bow Ties

You’ll all be pleased to hear that the little party of last night went off in the right spirit. Homemade hummus, tzatziki, and tapenade were duly demolished, along with all the Sekt, and plenty more besides. Yours truly is slowly rehydrating before going for the Saturday long run. Candle, lit at both ends, is burning rapidly I assure you.

But what would a party be without cake? Thankfully, a good friend and former student of mine came up trumps with the most evil chocolate cake I have ever tasted. Comprising 500g of butter, a whole kilo of sugar, and ten eggs, this thing was a heart attack on a stick. And this is just as things should be. Too many people these days attempt to make chocolate cakes full of compromises, but frankly if you need to compromise you simply shouldn’t eat chocolate cake. Why transform the divine into the mundane? Surely that’s just depressing.

It may be of academic interest, but here’s a snippet of last night’s rig – nothing too formal, for we were at home after all. The best thing about a bow tie, by the way, is pulling on one end of it when the night gets long. Nothing says ‘man had a good time’ like the undone knot.

And so to the track, well buttered.

Hosting

Can’t stop, I’m prepping for a party chez nous for Mrs. VB’s birthday. Remember the golden rules:

1. Don’t allow glasses to reach empty.

2. Ask the guests about them, and stop wittering on about oneself.

3. Be charming. Always be charming.

4. Do everyone the honour of looking good, but don’t look like you did everyone the honour of looking good.

5. Stay a few shades under a skin full. No man ever cut La Bella Figura when three sheets to the wind.

Until tomorrow, dear friends.

A Three-Pipe Problem

      ‘What are you going to do, then?’ I asked.

      ‘To smoke,’ he answered. ‘It is quite a three-pipe problem, and I beg that you won’t speak to me for fifty minutes.’ He curled himself up in his chair, with his think knees drawn up to his hawk-like nose, and there he sat with his eyes closed and his black clay pipe thrusting out like the bill of some strange bird. I had come to the conclusion that he had dropped asleep, and indeed was nodding myself, when he suddenly sprang out of his chair with the gesture of a man who has made up his mind, and put his pipe down upon the mantel-piece. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Red-Headed League, 1891).

Mr. Nestor pressed his thumb down on a half-filled pipe, closed his eyes, and thought. Over a long life he had come to recognise the difference between a connoisseur, an addict, and a buffoon. People who smoked common-or-garden cigarettes – foul things – merited none of his attention. They were slaves to nasty tobacco, and he could not laud the wilfully enslaved, however wonderful their character in between puffs. Men who smoked cigars for the look of the thing on special occasions, with no mind to what a cigar was beyond its use as an ever-decreasing phallic symbol, also did not command his attention. They compensated for lack of depth by conspicuous display. It was not for him. The cigar aficionado – not merely the purchaser of the eponymous magazine – was a different matter altogether. He saw the art in the thing, and went about his business as might an expert of wine, or of porcelain. So long as he was not obsessed by the passion that burnt within him, Mr. Nestor was interested to talk to him (knowing, of course, that there was usually fire where there was smoke).

For Nestor, all of these characters faded into the mist when put next to the man of the pipe. The pipe smoker was one of three things: deeply cerebral and intelligent, worldly wise, or a fool. (Nestor disregarded the fourth pipe smoker: the affected man. Any pipe smoker who did not fit his three categories was a charlatan and a disgrace. To smoke a pipe as an affectation was to ape virtue; and virtue, Nestor thought, could not be found in any ape.) He thought back over many decades to his early childhood, sitting on the bony knee of his grandfather, who prepared his pipe with meticulous ease. The sweet blue smoke enveloped them like a shawl, and the child craned his neck to hear what lessons in life might rise up on the plumes of smoke, to be inhaled and passively absorbed. Here was learning, straight from the wisdom of lived years.

Nestor then considered the learning of books and of civilisation, and the teachers thereof. The pipe, for dons and politicians, connected a circuitry of thinking and doing; breathing, cogitating and gesticulating. The pipe, brought to the lips, signified cerebration. As it was withdrawn and directed towards listeners, it presaged words of direction, of decision, and of authority. A man who tells you what to do by allowing his words to follow the length of an arm and rise up out of a pipe is a man whom you obey, thought Nestor. Here was presence. Here was charisma. Here was the embodiment of all that was wise.

And then Nestor remembered the man he knew who liked to smoke his pipe when playing golf. When playing a shot, the man placed his pipe in a trouser pocket. It still surprised Nestor that the man had only once set his trousers alight. If you asked that man about the incident, he would deny it. The scars were an old war wound, he’d claim. But you know what they say: ‘Liar, liar…’

Nestor pinched these reflections into a single confusion of tobacco, pressed it into his pipe, and smoked it.

Sunday

The waiter drew a love heart on his order pad, orienting it towards his customer, and smiled. The customer, who had just ordered the Frühstuck für Verliebte for himself and his wife, winked compulsively at the waiter, acknowledging the gesture. He knew that the symbol signified not only breakfast, but also the self-evident love between the intended consumers of the morning repast. It warmed him to think that he wore his love so manifestly, and as the waiter retreated the couple remarked on his sweetness, which was really a reflection of their own. Saturday night’s cocktails, which had boiled away overnight to the essential headache that comprised them, soon evaporated completely under the influence of fresh caffeine, cured proteins, and an influx of vitamin C. The week’s work had been hard, but good, and now they rested, content.

Love Thy Neighbour?

It is festive season, and we shall all be drawing together our disparate lives and attending parties and obligations-flying-under-the-banner-of-parties for the next few weeks. I say disparate lives because the Christmas party tends to be an Event that has little to do with conviviality, or spirituality, but rather more to do with an official letting-down of the collective hair of people who normally only see each other at work. One’s colleagues usually have precisely one thing in common with oneself, namely, they work at the same place as one. And to get over the awkwardness of it all, enormous amounts of alcohol are consumed and nefarious activities take place in the vicinity of the photocopier. It is altogether not particularly charming.

Anonymous photocopier Christmas art

And there are the parties with friends and family, which are much more congenial, but these days no less representative of our disparateness. In the age of Facebook, who can say anymore that all their friends and family live close by? Mine don’t, and I shall be making the 4,000 mile trip to see some of them, while leaving others behind. Even then, people will be dispersed across the vast metropolis, and will come together only through Planning, Organising, and the tool that works at any distance, Facebook: in short, through Contrivance. One can never escape the feeling on such reunions that water has passed under the bridge. It is not so much a catching up, as a patching up; re-building ties undone by distance.

Isn't everyone's family gathering like this?

Who here knows their neighbours anymore? I’m afraid to say that over the years I have not known mine, and when I have tried I have found them either unresponsive or transitory. People don’t sit still for long enough, and where they do, the hatches are battened down. This is a shame, but I sense a glimmer of hope in my current abode. I always thought it was a matter of politeness to invite one’s neighbours to a party, since the best way to avoid disturbing them is to include them. I am pleased to report that the slightly eccentric man above us included us in his annual gathering – wine, whiskey, spätzle and a lot of cigarette smoke. It wasn’t our scene at all, but these were neighbours, offering a hand of friendship and hospitality, and we were most gracious. And strangely enough, everyone learnt something in the process: I learnt that even the most ‘ordinary’ of Germans – bad knitwear, leather trousers and the mandatory mullet – value politeness and tend to be decently read. We tiptoed around each other for a while, but soon the language barrier began to melt away. I spent a long time talking to a young man, eager to learn but with little worldly experience, about why one cannot claim multiculturalism to be an utter failure if one hasn’t actually tried it. I think I also successfully introduced this youth to the finer points of single-malt whiskey. The scotch-drinking part of the evening involved the removal of those with a robust palate to a separate room, where history and social policy became the topic of the night. I inferred from our host that those with a taste for fine spirits were more likely to have refined minds, and on the evidence of the evening I cannot argue. It finished with two complete strangers offering me the long-term loan of a guitar and amplifier. I was pleased as punch.

We had made a priori plans to stay an hour and politely take our leave. We left at 1 a.m. The sense of community was unlike the standard fare of the Christmas season, and although I am not known for being a literalist, I began to see the most obvious advantage of the phrase, ‘Love thy neighbour’.

Creating and Recreating

Following a train of thought from my last entry, it occurred to me that doing is an imperative not limited to matters sporting. Indeed, purposeful activity runs through every facet of the life of any manly man. One of my historical heroes, George John Romanes, hated the idea of the man who did not work, and averred that being rich was no excuse. Recreation exists to refit us for work, and through work the active man creates. Without work, therefore, what is play? Please pay attention to dear old George:

There is not much to be said on the recreation of men belonging to the upper classes. That most objectionable of creatures, the gentleman at large without occupation, has a free choice before him of every amusement that the world has to give; but one thing he is hopelessly denied – the keen enjoyment of recreation. Living from year to year in a round of varied pastimes, he becomes slowly incapacitated for forming habits of work, while at the same time he is slowly sapping all the enjoyment from play. For although variety of amusement may please for a time, it is notorious that it cannot do so indefinitely. The intellectual changes which are involved in changes of amusement are not sufficiently pronounced to re-create even the faculties on which the sense of amusement depends; the mind, therefore, becomes surfeited with amusement of all kinds, just as it may become surfeited with a tune too constantly played – even though the tune be played in frequently changing keys. For such men, if past middle life, I have no advice to give. They have placed themselves beyond the possibility of finding recreation, and their only use in the world is to show the doom of idleness. They, more even than paupers, are the parasites of the social organism; and we can scarcely regret that their lumpish life, being one of stagnation self-induced, should be one of miserable failure, to the wretchedness of which we can extend no hope.

George John Romanes, ‘Recreation’ (1879).

Winslow Homer, Croquet, 1864

True, for most of us, the pitfalls of idle wealth are – and shall remain – an unknown sin. But GJR can scarcely have imagined a time when leisure would have become so thoroughly democratised as it is for us. To all intents and purposes, the average man now lives like the aristocrat of yore, and therein lies a danger. For if work is simply a place to which you travel on a daily basis, a chore to endure for the requisite period while planning your next binge, then you are – it grieves me to say – already incapacitated for forming habits of work, real work, and are in fact in a state of self-induced stagnation. If you do not work, so much as merely turn up; if your occupation is utterly meaningless and valueless for you; if you have ceased to ‘save it up’ for Friday night, but rather spend it on a daily basis; if you contribute nothing to the common good, i.e. you fail to create – then how can you hope to recreate? Your leisure is reduced to consumption; fun equates to a superficial routine, much like your idle day job.

Unlike Romanes, I do not abandon all hope. For, unlike the idle aristocrat whose birth came replete with the indelible imprint of status, the leisured classes of the twenty-first century can change course. Most of us must work; but all of us should desire it. This probably entails a reorientation of life goals: Who am I? What do I want? Of what am I capable? What can I give? The answers aren’t prescribed, but it is striking that most people do jobs they don’t like while fantasising about jobs they would like. The people who actually do those jobs don’t like them, and so on. A thorough reshuffling is in order. Whether you choose to work with your back or your brain, your gut or your graces, at least make sure you actively choose. The purpose with which you will thusly endow your life will give greater meaning to the pleasures you seek, which in turn will fit you better to fulfil your purpose. If, my dear readers, any of you have recognised yourselves in these descriptions, I exhort you: take your life in your hands, before the wretchedness of indolence consumes you!

Simple Pleasures

I do not much care for anything contrived. A parsimonious approach to life is my preference. People really do make such an effort to have fun that it becomes difficult to distinguish it from work. The crescendo of anticipation rarely gives way to the expected climax, but rather its opposite. Leisure, in short, is generally not.

This is not to say that I advocate mindless wastes of time. Computer games are typically benumbing of brain and character, and in some cases are akin to large amounts of narcotics, alcohol or gambling. Best avoided. The television is fine in moderation, where the choice of programme is truly an act of volition. I fear, however, that the television is more of an hypnotic device, situated so as to absorb our attention, to anaesthetise us. It is also the West’s answer to feng shui. Imagine your television removed: your furniture placement will suddenly seem quite odd.

So, pleasures fall between these two poles: the overwrought and the mindless. The possibilities are endless, but I shall name one or two (not prescriptively, of course). A good, solid, print newspaper, with a challenging cryptic crossword and decent review section: spend half an hour a day with this and I find I think better; my mood improves; I feel refreshed. I listen to jazz in the mornings as I write: nothing like the sound of other people blowing hard when I am, well, not. I listen to BBC Radio 3 in the evening: one of the advantages to being expatriated across the Pond is that I get the all-night classical marathons five hours in advance. In addtion, a ready supply of Cabernet; a happy mix of good home cooking (yes, it is manly to cook) and edifying (not fast) restaurant fare; and a regular run to keep the heart pumping. All provide the necessary ease – the requisite balance – in an otherwise consuming life of work. They are simple pleasures, but they are all the more pleasant for their simplicity.