This morning I got up, cooked myself breakfast, then sat in the sun with a pot of tea and read the first two chapters of Tom Hodgkinson's How to be Idle, popping leaving present chocolates (Thornton's premim collection, very nice) as I savoured the text. "Be fearless, quit your job! You have nothing to lose but your anxieties, debts and misery, he says.

He does construct the argument for idleness a little more elegantly, and I'm curious to see how he solves the problem of putting a roof over your head while living idly. But that will have to wait for another day - I'm off to day one of my job in the arts.