Twelfth Night and about time too. At last we can take down the Christmas Tree, now needleless and looking like a nuclear blast survivor and stash the tinsel away for another year. Nolan and the Count (son and cat, in that order for those of you unfamiliar with the Maxwell menage) are already counting the weeks until next Christmas but let them count; as long as I don't run another pine needle into my foot for around another forty nine weeks, that is enough for me. The sole point of this day is that it gave Will Shaxper of Stratford a title for one of his hilariously funny comedies. How we laughed.
In other news ... Sigmund Freud, dream analyst and inventor of the slip, grandfather of the late Lucien and Clement, wrote in 1938, 'What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.'
'They' of course were the Nazis who had just taken over Freud's native Austria in the Anschluss (Union). He was wrong of course - within five years the Nazis would be burning people as well.
Incidentally, they'd all got Freud's number. He was in the Black Book, a list of undesirables living in Britain drawn up by the SS in 1940. Had Operation Sealion worked and Hitler actually invaded Britain, Freud would have got his after all. Actually, though, he wouldn't. Although the compilers of the Black Book seemed unaware, he died in his bed in September 1939.
