Sloth

There are worse deadly sins to commit, I suppose, but sloth is the one I'm most prone to. Having nothing to do at work induces a sort of lethargy in me that carries over to my non-working hours and leaves me sitting around eating sweets and watching cartoons and doing nothing else with my time.

And if that sounds like exactly what I've done for the 28 years and 11 months of my life to date, I assure you that there is a difference. Probably only a psychological one, but I'm very aware that I'm not getting round to doing things much more than I usually do. I suspect that I'll be fine again when I either start the new job, or spend a bit of time before starting it off work completely. If memory serves, when I left my job at Adams back in November 2002 I spent a couple of months doing absolutely nothing, but then got my act together and started my brain working again. That was when I dreamed up my memory system which has served me well since then.

So if for the moment I'm being all slothful, it's just because I'm biding my time until I stop doing it. If I'm still in this kind of mood in a month or so's time, anybody who notices is free to kick me in the backside and tell me to give it a rest.

Also, 12 Angry Men is on telly in the middle of the night tonight. This might be one of my very favourite films of all time, and a perfect illustration of why films don't need big budgets and sensational special effects to be great. It's twelve men sitting in a single room and talking for an hour and a half. And it's brilliant. Sidney Lumet's amazing direction is a big part of it (did you know it was filmed 'one wall at a time', all the shots from one camera angle, then all the shots from the next, and so on? And there's not a single continuity error in who's standing where, who's taken their jacket off, and so on!), but the script is so compelling you can't help but be enthralled.

With John Fiedler (Juror Number 2 and also the voice of Disney's Piglet) having died recently, only two of the angry men are still alive, which is a bit sad. But then, it was nearly fifty years ago now.