TWTWTW

This hasn’t been the best week of my life. But then, when would it ever be appropriate to say that a particular week had been ‘the best’ of one’s life? What would it take to make any week better than any other? I suppose if I’d won 2.4 million pounds on the lottery then I might be justified in saying yes, that was a good week. Or if I’d landed the perfect job perhaps, or (and this is impossible) succeeded in conquering the heart of someone I’d been in love with for ages. But none of those things have happened to me this week, so it’s hardly been the best. And now, to top it all, I have a horrible hangover and a nagging awareness that I may have behaved badly last night. Damn that alcohol stuff – it’s a menace; a public enemy, that’s what it is.

I see that Hazel Court, who apparently 'brought an impressive cleavage and a penetrating scream' to a number of popular horror films, has died. She was 82 (picture above). What makes this fact so remarkable is that I’ve never even heard of her. This might have more to do with my pathetic paucity of knowledge in respect of film (something I even bought a DVD player to rectify, which now gathers dust of course), rather than Miss Court’s position in the Hollywood Hall of Fame, but there we are. I think I wrote here a short time ago that Horace said ‘He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world’ and so, in so far as I am concerned (and I accept that I do not represent the world), Miss Court would not appear to have lived badly.

It’s now confession time: I sometimes listen to Radio 2. I shouldn’t be ashamed of this, I know, but there’s a vague whiff of embarrassment about admitting such a thing, even at my age. It’s a harmless enough pastime, and one that hardly tests one’s tolerance – or even nerve – until, that is, the producer decides to play The Animals singing ‘She’s Not There’ for the second time in a week. There are forty years of nostalgia they can dip into if they wish, so why would they find it necessary to play the same (rather irritating) piece of music twice in the same week? Maybe that’s what I mean when I say that this hasn’t been the best week of my life.

I need a holiday. If I had someone I could take with me, I’d go away for a dirty weekend to the seaside. Dirty weekends are certainly the tonic that could fix anyone’s malaise I reckon, but they’re not that much fun on one's own. It’s a good job there isn’t a gun under my pillow, that’s all I can say.

Instead of a quote from my mate Horace, here’s something that Cicero once said: 'If you have a library and a garden, you have everything you need'. Well, I have neither, so where does that leave me, eh?