What ho, what ho, what ho!

It's been a while but I'm back. So where have I been and what have I been doing? Well, reading, of course, and then Fallout 3 took hold and I lost 100+ hours of my free time to this game on the Xbox; I even stopped playing Warcraft, so that is serious. It was a get-no-sleep-shaky-hands-obsession, which nicely coincided with a media moral panic about gaming addiction. But the difference, as several gamers tried to point out, is that it doesn't wreck your life. I am out the otherside of the obsession and am still married, have no long term medical effects, as I would with drugs or alcohol and, unlike a gambling addiction, the loan sharks won't be knocking down the front door. And, you know, I really enjoyed my time in the post-apocolyptic Fallout world.

Gaming suited my frame of mind which for some reason has been extremely frivolous lately. The main symptom was another addiction which I let run its course, Jeeves and Wooster. I mentioned previously that I was reading a book or two - it ended up being six books in close succession, while simultaneously watching the tv series with Fry and Laurie in the title roles. It was wonderful, Wodehouse was a genius. After the sixth book, though, I stopped and thought about this question - which would you rather be, Bertie or Jeeves?

Because, as is always the case in the best comedy, Bertie is not just a buffoon. You may smile as he says he is considered one of the shining intellectual lights of the Drones Club and that before Jeeves was on the scene he was the one his pals came to with their problems, but as you move through the stories and meet his pals, Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps for instance, you realise that Bertie is speaking no more than the truth.

Bertie is an extremely likeable character. He has no pretensions to be anything other than he is, he knows he is lucky and wants to enjoy his life without aspiring to things like a grand intellect. He likes lunch at the Drones Club, his snifter at 6pm, out for dinner and a thriller to read before bed. He knows his limitations and tries, when circumstances allow it (which is not often), to stay within them. You can't read these stories without becoming very fond of him.

And for a while I fell into the Wooster way of doing things (without the Drones, of course). Amongst the six volumes of Bertie and Jeeves I threw in a couple of good old fashioned thrillers, Edgar Wallace's Feathered Serpent and Bulldog Drummond by Sapper. Stories where men are men and women need to be rescued by the chisel-jawed hero from the evil clutches of the villain. Both great fun, but at the end of this junkett I started to wonder, am I cut out to follow Bertie's intellectual life? Or would I rather be Jeeves?

Because, really, Jeeves isn't so different from Bertie; he's created his little life which he protects fiercely, often at the cost of his master's engagements with unsuitably domineering women. The main difference (other than the employer/employee thing, of course) is that while Bertie likes to stay on a comfortable intellectual level, Jeeves likes to expand his mind, reading Spinoza for instance. I decided that Bertie's mind is alright for a visit but it is Jeeves' that I want to live in.

And so I left the frivolity behind and picked up volume five of Proust, to carry on my long term project of reading a volume every year or so. But that's another blogpost...