Christmas cracker
My recent post on Christmas killjoy Clive Hamilton triggered a memory of something similar, and it took a few hours for the penny to drop. It turned out to be one of the marvellous columns that George Orwell wrote for Tribune under the title 'As I Please' - this one, from December 1946, being about Christmas as a time of over-indulgence. Orwell takes the view that, even in a time of austerity and near-starvation across Europe, it's important to occasionally allow yourself to overdo things:
One may decide, with full knowledge of what one is doing, that an occasional good time is worth the damage it inflicts on one's liver. For health is not the only thing that matters: friendship, hospitality, and the heightened spirits and change of outlook that one gets by eating and drinking in good company are also valuable.
Orwell recognised that 'teetotallers and vegetarians are always scandalized by this attitude', and he might well have added, left-wing, sorry, I mean 'independent' think tanks. Hamilton was talking about gift-giving rather than feasting, but one imagines that his attitude to the latter would correspond to his feelings about the former.
Orwell in fact wrote a few Christmas columns in this vein, including a real cracker, published pseudonymously in December 1943, entitled 'Can Socialists be happy?' Perhaps I should put a copy in Clive's Christmas stocking.
My recent post on Christmas killjoy Clive Hamilton triggered a memory of something similar, and it took a few hours for the penny to drop. It turned out to be one of the marvellous columns that George Orwell wrote for Tribune under the title 'As I Please' - this one, from December 1946, being about Christmas as a time of over-indulgence. Orwell takes the view that, even in a time of austerity and near-starvation across Europe, it's important to occasionally allow yourself to overdo things:
One may decide, with full knowledge of what one is doing, that an occasional good time is worth the damage it inflicts on one's liver. For health is not the only thing that matters: friendship, hospitality, and the heightened spirits and change of outlook that one gets by eating and drinking in good company are also valuable.
Orwell recognised that 'teetotallers and vegetarians are always scandalized by this attitude', and he might well have added, left-wing, sorry, I mean 'independent' think tanks. Hamilton was talking about gift-giving rather than feasting, but one imagines that his attitude to the latter would correspond to his feelings about the former.
Orwell in fact wrote a few Christmas columns in this vein, including a real cracker, published pseudonymously in December 1943, entitled 'Can Socialists be happy?' Perhaps I should put a copy in Clive's Christmas stocking.
posted by cuckoo at
12:16 PM
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