When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping...

OH HAPPY day of sloth spent in masticating excess.

Bib on (tucked inside the collar of course) and gently tapping the keyboard at a pace that keeps time with the steady sucking of Quality Street sweets. Excess is sadly unfashionable now. It is condemned as the preserve of the unfeeling and the uncaring. But it’s a change of fashion that has never been sincerely adapted and cannot last.

Quality Street — despite repeated purchases, I have no interest in Nestlé, which makes the sweets — is, in terms of pleasures, at the petite end of petit bourgeois.