In Bed With Roy

Well, my three days of freedom are nearing completion and I have to tell you, gentle reader, that the champagne corks did not pop, as I had hoped. Instead, I have been industrious and diligent in my approach to my chores (never-ending), and have refrained from indulging in the usual Bank Holiday mayhem that has so often ensnared me in the past – the usual effect in other years has been that the extended weekend becomes telescoped into something seemingly much shorter, simply by looking through the bottom of a whisky bottle.

So there isn't an awful lot to report to you really, and I suppose it's somewhat selfish of me to expect you to spend some of your own valuable time reading about something which is, in effect, a non-event. The most delicious pleasure I have enjoyed this weekend is the sheer joy of getting out of my bed at around 7:00 a.m. (nearly two hours later than I habitually arise during the working week), making a cup of scalding hot tea and taking it back to bed to sit, propped on my pillows, reading a book. At the moment I'm wading through yet another biography of Churchill, this time it's Roy Jenkins's reasonably compact 2001 offering. I say 'reasonably compact' because I have before tackled Randolph Churchill & Martin Gilbert's ridiculously over-detailed ten-volume effort and so Roy's contribution, which is only a single volume and comes in at a mere 912 pages, is almost pamplet-like in its comparison. Nevertheless, the biography could still have benefited from some far stricter editing than it appears to have received in its preparation. Despite the book containing some quite sparkling and lively prose, there are some passages where Roy Jenkins rambles through some fairly pointless anecdotes and frequently engages in 'whispered asides' that seem to have less to do with pushing the narrative along, and more to do with exhibiting Roy's own flamboyant knowledge of the political nuances of the twentieth century.

That notwithstanding, I'm enormously enjoying the book – not least because I can rattle through a chapter each morning, ensconced in my lovely duck-down duvet, nestled into my plump and scrunchy pillows, sipping on my deliciously hot tea. This has to be a far, far greater pleasure than the normal holiday horror of waking up too late, head thumping and wth a mouth feeling disappointingly like a scraped hedgehog. So, even though my Easter break has been largely uneventful (and I'm not including here the encounter with the estranged Mrs Pilgrim who for some reason off-loaded onto me dozens of vegetarian burritos and fajitas, and endless trays of somewhat tasteless soya yoghurts), I feel that I have enjoyed a fulfilling break from the Salt Mines.

Those of you who know me will probably be scoffing at this right now. You will probably be thinking that my peaceful sojourn was not enjoyed through choice, but was somehow enforced upon me – and in a way, you'd be right. I did have plans for weekend - plans that had promised to provide more excitement than I have in reality enjoyed (and which also caused me to decline an invitation to go to Cornwall to celebrate a friend's birthday – something that I would have dearly loved to have done), but those plans collapsed at the eleventh hour. However, I have a new view of life these days: Not to let the negative feelings of disappointment keep me away from my desires. No, I now resolve to turn any disappointment into a positive belief and I know that soon, very very soon, my time will come.

In the meantime, I suppose that time spent in bed with Roy Jenkins will have to suffice.

Happy Easter, dearest reader.