In my experience – after forty years of hard labour as a servant to the rich – most of us gleefully acquaint the weekend with a trickle of one week and a glide into another. It is a stubborn custom. Though the measure of activity on the weekend and during the week is often no more than the slightest difference, that apophthegm about a change and a rest freely pertains. Otherwise we’re about as changeable as a retired greyhound; namely, from the moment we’re out of the cage it’s off to the races! However before that stimulus overtakes us there is the incomparably soothing Saturday slide – the truncation of effort and the collapse into everything good about life.
Unquestionably what is good about life – apart from its agreeableness – is a matter of highly personal assessment especially when devoted to weekend activity. I stand firmly upon my identity of Saturday in particular as the eye of the tornado, the low barometric pressure at the epicentre so to speak. It’s manifestation is routinely the ephemeral slot for unrepentant hedonism. Certainly there was a time when the acme of perfection in this regard was a leather chair in front of the Vermont Casting, Jane Austen on the side table, perhaps some smoked oysters there as well and naturally a frozen vodka martini. It matters not that the details have altered over the years. I persist at the end of the day (or should I say, at the end of the fray) in my devotion to the pleasures of my drawing room. Some perhaps have gilded their hearths with trophies and silver picture frames; others thrill to the hues of the melting yellow lamps upon the Oriental rugs; the pleasure of one’s favourite music ornaments the all; and an incremental decline into momentary motionlessness completes the modification.